Apple has lost its fourth AI researcher in a month to Meta, highlighting growing challenges in its AI push. Bowen Zhang, a key member of Apple’s foundation models group (AFM), has joined Meta’s new superintelligence team. Earlier, AFM leader Ruoming Pang and researchers Tom Gunter and Mark Lee also moved to Meta, which offered Pang a package worth over $200 million.

The AFM team, central to Apple’s AI platform Apple Intelligence, is now facing uncertainty. Pang’s exit disrupted its roadmap, and more engineers are reportedly exploring jobs elsewhere. Another member, Floris Weers, recently left for a startup.

Despite small pay hikes aimed at retaining talent, Apple’s compensation lags behind that of its rivals. Meta, meanwhile, is aggressively hiring AI talent with huge offers, poaching from Apple, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

Apple is also debating whether to continue building its in-house AFM models or utilise third-party AI, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, for future Siri updates. This internal debate has hurt morale within AFM.

Apple’s privacy-first approach, which favours on-device AI over cloud-based models, has limited its capabilities. Its on-device model has 3 billion parameters, far behind competitors’ trillion-parameter cloud systems.

The AFM group is now led by Zhifeng Chen, under the direction of AI head Daphne Luong, who reports to Apple’s AI chief, John Giannandrea. Despite reassurances of continued focus on in-house AI, the departures raise concerns about Apple’s ability to keep pace with rivals.

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