Meta just added two more heavy hitters to its AI team—Mark Lee and Tom Gunter, both senior researchers who were previously at Apple. Bloomberg reports the hires are part of Meta’s ongoing push to bring in top AI talent.
Instead of sticking around at Apple, Lee and Gunter have joined Meta’s Superintelligence Labs. They’re following in the footsteps of Ruoming Pang, Apple’s former lead on large language models, who recently made headlines after joining Meta with a jaw-dropping compensation deal—reportedly over $200 million.
Gunter, who held a top engineering role at Apple, had a short stint at another AI company before accepting Meta’s offer.
These moves hint at some turbulence within Apple’s AI division. Rumor has it that Apple’s leadership is now looking outside the company—possibly toward OpenAI—to help build the next version of Siri, rather than relying entirely on its own teams.
Meanwhile, Meta isn’t pulling any punches. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is betting big on AI, pouring money into hiring talent and boosting computing power to compete with giants like OpenAI and Google.
Apple, for its part, has tried to keep some of its people with counteroffers. But so far, they haven’t been enough to compete with the massive packages Meta’s offering.
Bottom line? Meta’s not slowing down. They’re going full steam ahead in their mission to dominate the AI race—while Apple scrambles to keep its best minds from walking out the door.
