By Shubhangi Chowdhury
In the race to advance in the global AI competition and build an AI-powered team, Apple has lost one of its key figures, while Meta has secured yet another victory after recently defeating OpenAI. Apple AI’s key figure, Ruoming Pang is departing the company to join Meta, according to a Bloomberg report.
Pang was reportedly leading Apple’s in-house AI modeling team and played a big part in building features like Genmoji, Priority Notifications, and on-device summarization. He has shaped some of the smartest tools Apple has been working on lately. He has joined Apple in 2021. Previously, he was a Google employee.
According to the reports, Pang’s team was also behind the scenes working on the next version of Siri and some of Apple’s key personalization features. Pang’s exit follows closely after another top Apple executive, Tom Gunter, left the company.
READ: Meta taps OpenAI talent: 3 OpenAI researchers join the rivaling tech giant (June 26, 2025)
His exit now marks a significant loss for Apple in the ongoing global race to lead in artificial intelligence. As tech giants fiercely compete to build cutting-edge AI teams and infrastructure, Meta appears to have scored another strategic win.
Reports suggest that more engineers from Apple’s AI team, Apple Foundational Models (AFM) group might be on their way out too. For now, the team will be led by Zhifeng Chen, and Apple is shifting to a flatter structure, with managers like Chong Wang and Zirui Wang taking on bigger roles.
This move comes shortly after Meta has poached in a few OpenAI talents.
Lately, Meta has been on a hiring spree offering huge package to top talents who have been instrumental in shaping today’s AI. Even Pang’s exit might be worth around multimillion-dollar range package. While OpenAI talents such as Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai are the recently added members to the Meta’s “superintelligence” team. Mark Zuckerberg have been reportedly offering packages worth more than $100 million to grab in top AI talent from rival companies.
READ: OpenAI responds to Meta offers, claims it is like ‘someone has broken into our home’ (June 30, 2025)
Meta’s clearly aiming to put itself back at the front of the AI game by building a dedicated team focused on one of tech’s biggest dreams—artificial general intelligence, or AGI. To back that up, the company’s reportedly planning to spend a massive $65 billion this year alone on boosting its AI infrastructure and powering its long-term vision.
Earlier in June, Apple rolled out its new “Apple Intelligence” features across devices, focusing on useful, privacy-friendly AI tools. At WWDC 2025, one of the standout updates was Live Translation in Messages, FaceTime, and Phone—letting users translate voice and text in real time, right on their device. Apple also opened up its Foundation Models to developers, so apps can use Apple’s on-device AI which has around three billion parameters—without sending your data to the cloud. One thing noticeably missing was the big Siri upgrade. In response to that, Apple says it’s still a work in progress and will be coming later.