Meta has agreed a compensation package of more than $200 million to poach a former Apple engineer for its “superintelligence” team, according to a media report.
The owner of Facebook and WhatsApp has been luring top artificial intelligence talent from rival companies with huge salaries as it attempts to get ahead in the AI race.
Ruoming Pang, who ran Apple’s AI models team, was hired with a pay package in the hundreds of millions over a multi-year period, Bloomberg reported.
Compensation packages for Meta’s Superintelligence Labs include a base salary, a signing bonus and Meta shares, according to the report. Meta is growing that part of its business to better compete with rivals including OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.
The company wants to get ahead of competitors in the race to advance AI technology, after its initial set of Llama 4 large language models, released in April, fell short of performance expectations. It has also delayed the rollout of Behemoth, its main AI model.
Meta purchased 49 per cent of Scale AI in June and brought its co-founder, Alexandr Wang, on board to lead its AI efforts.
In the same month Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, said Meta had offered his employees bonuses of $100 million to recruit them. “At least, so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that,” Altman told the Uncapped podcast.
Since then more than ten former OpenAI engineers have been appointed to Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, including Trapit Bansal, an AI researcher who played a key role in developing OpenAI’s “o-series” reasoning models, and Huiwen Chang, co-creator of GPT-4o, OpenAI’s multimodal model.
The AI talent war has seen some tech companies paying premiums of up to $200,000 for some roles with machine learning skills, according to a report by J Thelander Consulting, a compensation data and consulting firm.
The firm analysed pay across 153 companies and found that data scientists and analysts with machine learning skills typically receive a higher premium than software engineers with the same skills.
Altman told reporters at the Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, on Tuesday that he hasn’t spoken to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s co-founder and chief executive, since he began to poach his staff. However, he said he expected to meet him this week and is “looking forward to it”.
Meta and Apple were contacted for comment.
