Mirror Review
July 8, 2025
Summary:
- Ruoming Pang, the distinguished engineer who managed Apple’s foundational AI models team, is leaving the company to join Meta Platforms Inc.
- The move was prompted by an irresistible offer from Meta worth tens of millions of dollars per year, part of a broader, aggressive hiring strategy led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
- Pang’s exit is considered a significant setback for Apple’s AI division, which has reportedly been dealing with internal leadership changes and low morale.
What happens when the expert in charge of building the engine for “Apple Intelligence” suddenly switches teams?
That’s the question buzzing in Silicon Valley as Ruoming Pang, a top AI executive at Apple, departs for a new role at Meta.
Why Meta Snatched Ruoming Pang
For Meta, this is a power play. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made it clear that artificial intelligence is the company’s absolute top priority as it races to catch up with rivals like OpenAI and Google.
Zuckerberg isn’t just writing checks; he’s personally involved in recruitment, hosting potential hires, and reaching out directly to top AI minds.
Pang is the latest high-profile addition to Meta’s recently formed “superintelligence” group, a team focused on creating AI that can perform tasks as well as or even better than humans.
To secure him, Meta made an offer valued in the tens of millions of dollars annually.
This aggressive spending is part of a larger trend for the company, which has also recently hired researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic for its new superintelligence lab.
Who is Ruoming Pang?
1. A Leader in AI Foundation Models:
Ruoming Pang was at the helm of Apple’s roughly 100-person foundation models team.
This team is crucial as they are responsible for developing the large language models that power Apple Intelligence and various other AI features across Apple devices, including email and web article summaries, Genmoji, and Priority Notifications.
His work also involved the research and development of the AXLearn training framework, pretraining, post-training, and inference optimization of LLMs, and multi-modal understanding and generation capabilities.
2. Ruoming Pang’s Experience at Apple:
Ruoming Pang joined Apple in August 2021 as a Distinguished Software Engineer and worked there for four years. He was specifically focused on foundation models within the Apple AI/ML team.
3. Ruoming Pang’s Experience at Google:
Before his tenure at Apple, Pang spent over 15 years at Alphabet Inc. (Google), from July 2006 to August 2021, holding the title of Principal Software Engineer.
At Google, he played a pivotal role in leading Google Brain’s speech recognition research and product engagement. He also co-led the development of the Babelfish/Lingvo framework, which was the most heavily used deep learning framework by TPU usage at Google.
Additionally, he was a key contributor to Tacotron 2. Notably, Pang co-founded Zanzibar, Google’s global consistent authorization system, in 2012, and served as its sole TL from 2014-2017, achieving 5 nines reliability.
Earlier in his Google career, he co-founded and co-led Structured Search on Bigtable Index and ZipIt, which was used by over 1000 projects at Google.
4. Strong Academic Background:
Ruoming Pang holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University, which he completed between 2000 and 2006.
He also earned a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, attending from 1998 to 2000.
His foundational education includes a BS in Computer Science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, completed between 1995 and 1998.
Trouble Brewing in Apple’s AI Division?
While Meta celebrates its new hire, the departure of Ruoming Pang signals potential instability within Apple’s AI efforts.
His exit is described as the most significant in Apple’s AI ranks since the company began developing Apple Intelligence. It also follows the departure of his top deputy, Tom Gunter, just last month.
Sources suggest that morale on Apple’s foundation models team (AFM) has been shaky. A key point of contention has been internal discussions about using third-party AI models from competitors like OpenAI or Anthropic to power a new version of Siri.
This exploration has reportedly soured morale among the very engineers tasked with building Apple’s own in-house models.
The turmoil isn’t limited to the engineering teams.
Earlier this year, Apple’s AI Senior Vice President, John Giannandrea, was effectively sidelined, with key consumer-facing teams like Siri and Core ML being moved from his command.
This restructuring followed a lukewarm public response to Apple Intelligence and ongoing delays for new Siri features.
What’s Next for Apple’s AI?
Apple has moved quickly to manage the transition. The foundation models team will now be led by Zhifeng Chen, who previously worked with Pang at Google. The team is also being reorganized with a new management structure.
However, losing the primary architect of your core AI technology to a chief competitor is a serious blow.
Ruoming Pang’s move to Meta shows the cutthroat competition for elite AI talent, where companies are willing to spend tens of billions on salaries and infrastructure to gain an edge. For Apple, it’s a critical moment that will test the resilience and direction of its entire AI strategy.
