Apple has hemorrhaged around a dozen artificial intelligence staff to rivals since January, making it one of the prime victims in Silicon Valley's fierce AI talent war, reports the Financial Times.
The exodus of staff from Apple's AI team over the last seven months has seen senior researchers leave variously for Meta, OpenAI, xAI, Cohere, and others. The most notable recent departure was that of Ruoming Pang, head of Apple's Foundational Models team, who joined Meta last month after being lured by CEO Mark Zuckerberg with a $200 million pay package.
Key departures from Apple's AI team this year include:
- Brandon McKinzie (OpenAI)
- Dian Ang Yap (OpenAI)
- Liutong Zhou (Cohere)
- Ruoming Pang (Meta)
- Mark Lee (Meta)
- Tom Gunter (Meta)
- Bowen Zhang (Meta)
- Shuang Ma (Meta)
- Floris Weers (stealth startup)
Several of the individuals who have left were contributors to research papers on AI models that Apple released last year. Apple's core Foundation Models team is made up of just 50 to 60 people, so each departure is particularly damaging for the company.
FT reports that industry recruiters see the departures as "a crisis of confidence" around Apple's AI future. Aaron Sines from recruiting firm Razoroo said companies now view elite AI talent as "strategic assets," on par with intellectual property or even entire business units.
"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 told the newspaper.
The talent drain coincides with Apple's struggle to update Siri by integrating large language models (LLMs). A chatbot-like version of the virtual assistant was one of the key Apple Intelligence features that Apple promoted at last year's WWWDC, but it has yet to arrive.
Apple has reportedly established AI offices in Zurich, where teams are developing a completely new software architecture for Siri. This new approach – called a "monolithic model" – is built entirely on an LLM engine. It's designed to replace Siri's existing "hybrid" system, which has become fragmented over the years as different features were added in layers. The new architecture aims to make Siri more conversational and significantly better at understanding and synthesizing information.
During Apple's recent earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company is "making good progress on a more personalized Siri" that is powered by Apple Intelligence, and he reiterated that the features will be available next year. The new capabilities will include better understanding of a user's personal context, on-screen awareness, and deeper per-app controls.
