OpenAI has hired Ruoming Pang, a high-profile researcher at Meta, who joined the company from Apple around seven months ago
Pang joined Meta last year on a compensation package valued at more than $200 million over several years, according to a Bloomberg report. This came as part of Meta’s hiring spree for its artificial intelligence efforts. He oversaw artificial intelligence infrastructure for Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, which is developing the company’s next generation of AI models. He left Meta last week after being aggressively pursued by OpenAI for months, according to a report by The Information.
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At Apple, 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 reports, Pang’s team had also been behind the scenes, working on the next version of Siri and some of Apple’s key personalization features.
Meta had been on a “hiring spree” when it hired Pang. OpenAI talents such as Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai were also added as members to Meta’s “superintelligence” team during this time. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had been reportedly offering packages worth more than $100 million to grab in top AI talent from rival companies. Pang’s exit from Apple was seen as a significant loss for the iPhone-maker and a gain for Meta in the AI race. However, it looks like that did not last for Meta either.
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Pang’s hiring comes as tech firms are aggressively competing with each other over talent as they hope to gain a lead in the AI race.
However, OpenAI has seen some losses as well, lately. The company has been seeing a wave of senior-level employees exits, following orders of CEO Sam Altman to funnel resources into ChatGPT at the expense of long-term researchers, according to the Financial Times. OpenAI has been redirecting computing power and staff away from experimental projects towards its flagship chatbot, triggering a wave of high-profile departures.
The departures came after Altman issued an internal “code red” in December 2025, when he told staff the company needed to dramatically improve ChatGPT’s speed, personalization, and reliability. Employees who left the company include Jerry Tworek, vice president of research who spent seven years at OpenAI, and Andrea Vallone, who led model policy research before switching to competitor Anthropic.