Apple hit by string of departures in AI talent war

Apple has lost around a dozen of its artificial intelligence staff, including top researchers, to rivals as the iPhone maker struggles to stay relevant in Silicon Valley’s ferocious AI talent war.

Meta, OpenAI, xAI and Cohere have scooped up staff from Apple’s AI team since the start of the year as they rush to gain a competitive edge in the nascent technology, fuelling concerns the US tech giant is falling further behind in the global AI arms race.

OpenAI has poached Brandon McKinzie and Dian Ang Yap, two Apple foundation models research engineers, in recent months, while Canadian AI start-up Cohere hired machine learning scientist Liutong Zhou in June.

Other recent high profile departures from the iPhone maker include Ruoming Pang, head of Apple’s foundational models team, to Meta last month, as part of chief Mark Zuckerberg’s push to lure big names with the promise of $100mn-plus sign-on bonuses.

“Ruoming Pang leaving is huge: it sends a signal of a crisis of confidence around what is to come,” said Aaron Sines, director of AI recruiting at Razoroo. “A lot of the companies we have as clients are saying ‘hey, look at Apple: it’s open season’.”

Other senior members of Apple’s foundational models team have also defected to Meta, including Mark Lee, Tom Gunter, Bowen Zhang, and Shuang Ma. Floris Weers, a UK-based researcher in Pang’s team, left in July to join a stealth start-up.

Several of the individuals who have left had previously contributed to research papers on AI models that Apple released last year, as the iPhone maker started to showcase its work in the field.

The moves come as Apple chief Tim Cook last week pledged to invest more money into AI research and held a rare all-hands meeting with staff that discussed the need for Apple to ‘win’ in AI.

“Tim’s doing that because he recognises that the narrative has gotten away from him,” said one former Apple executive.

Apple’s AI push has been hit with a string of challenges over the past year. It is struggling to update its iPhone voice assistant Siri using cutting-edge large language models that can deliver more sophisticated responses to spoken prompts.

The delayed launch of a new smarter Siri has triggered a reshuffle within the company’s top leadership. Responsibility for Siri was removed from John Giannandrea, its AI guru poached from Google in 2018, and given to Mike Rockwell, the executive behind the Vision Pro.

The updates to Siri form a key part of “Apple Intelligence,” a suite of AI features announced at the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference last year and intended to boost hardware sales.

While Apple is known for not rushing features to market until they are ready, “the pace of AI development externally is blistering,” and its slower approach risks leaving it “far behind in user expectations”, according to Wamsi Mohan, analyst at Bank of America.

Apple’s core foundation models team is understood to be relatively small, at around 50 to 60 people, according to people familiar with the team. It forms part of the group’s wider AI and machine learning division.

Razoroo’s Sines said he had seen a massive surge in general interest from AI researchers exploring potential new employment following news of the high pay packet offered to Apple’s Pang.

“There are really only a thousand, maybe two thousand people in the world who have real foundational model experience and what it takes to develop and deploy foundational models,” he added.

The hiring frenzy in AI has stepped up in recent months. The Financial Times revealed last month that Microsoft has recruited more than 20 AI employees from Google’s DeepMind research division.

“Companies now view elite AI talent as strategic assets — on par with intellectual property or even entire business units — and are pursuing individuals with the same intensity and valuation frameworks once reserved for acquisitions,” said Graig Paglieri, chief executive at recruiting group Randstad Digital.

Apple and Meta declined to comment, OpenAI and Cohere did not respond to requests for comment.