Apple’s lead AI researcher for robotics Jian Zhang has departed from the company to join Meta. This departure is the latest in a string of exits from the tech giant. Zhang joined the Meta Robotics Studio, where he will be developing products.
A Bloomberg report states that three more AI researchers are separately leaving Apple’s in-house team focusing on large language model (LLM). The Apple Foundation Models team lost roughly ten members, including its chief last week. The company is now discussing internally whether to rely on more outside technology, instead of just using homegrown models.
READ: Meta taps OpenAI talent: 3 OpenAI researchers join the rivaling tech giant (June 26, 2025)
Zhang led a small team of academics focused on automation technology and the role of AI in such products. That team has already suffered some turnover, with one of Zhang’s reports, Mario Srouji, leaving to run AI products at Archer Aviation Inc. in April. The robotics research group is part of Apple’s artificial and machine learning department. It is separate from the company’s robotics product development organization, which was moved to Apple’s hardware engineering department earlier this year.
Other AI researchers who left Apple include John Peebles, Nan Du and Zhao Meng. While Peebles and Du are joining OpenAI, Zhao is headed to Anthropic. Previously, Ruoming Pang, a key figure in Apple’s AI team had also left the company to join Meta.
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. 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 was seen as a major blow to Apple’s efforts to compete with key players like OpenAI and Meta in the AI race. Meta had conducted a hiring spree, often poaching employees from rivals like OpenAI in its efforts to develop superintelligence.
However, things aren’t going that well for Meta either. A number of new hires have already left the company, citing various reasons. Rishabh Agarwal, who joined the company at a $1 million salary a month ago announced his departure saying, “It was a tough decision not to continue with the new Superintelligence TBD lab, especially given the talent and compute density. But after 7.5 years across Google Brain, DeepMind, and Meta, I felt the pull to take on a different kind of risk.”
Three other researchers left the lab in recent weeks, with two of them returning to OpenAI. Among them are Avi Verma, and Ethan Knight, who have both previously worked for OpenAI.