Apple Loses Fourth AI Researcher in a Month To Meta
- Reference: 0178506108
- News link: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/25/07/29/196228/apple-loses-fourth-ai-researcher-in-a-month-to-meta
- Source link:
[2]non-paywalled source
, marking the latest setback to the iPhone maker's AI efforts. From a report:> Bowen Zhang, a key multimodal AI researcher at Apple, left the company on Friday and is set to join Meta's recently formed superintelligence team, according to people familiar with the matter. Zhang was part of the Apple foundation models group, or AFM, which built the core technology behind the company's AI platform.
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> Meta previously lured away the leader of the team, Ruoming Pang, with a compensation package valued at more than $200 million, Bloomberg News has reported. Two other researchers from that group -- Tom Gunter and Mark Lee -- also recently joined Meta. AFM is made up of several dozen engineers and researchers across Cupertino, California, and New York. In response to the job offers from Meta and others, Apple has been marginally increasing the pay of its AFM staffers, whether or not they've threatened to leave, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the moves are private. Still, the pay levels pale in comparison with those of rivals.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-29/apple-loses-ai-models-engineer-bowen-zhang-to-meta-superintelligence-team
[2] https://9to5mac.com/2025/07/29/apple-just-lost-another-ai-researcher-as-it-weighs-shift-to-third-party-models/
Maybe a hot take to the tech bros... (Score:2)
I don't want AI slop in every facet of my life. Siri absolutely needs improvement but I'd rather is not be able to answer a question than confidently give the wrong answer.
Re: (Score:3)
> I don't want AI slop in every facet of my life. Siri absolutely needs improvement but I'd rather is not be able to answer a question than confidently give the wrong answer.
This is an interesting question. There are very few (maybe zero) systems that return confidence levels with answers, mainly because in most cases the combination muddles the results, making the results less useful. Aside from systems that essentially return the output of a function, e.g., like a calculator, pretty much all systems have less than 100% accuracy. So, anyone that requires 100% accuracy will be unable to use anything other than the calculator-type of system.
I'm guessing most people have an ac
Re: (Score:2)
How I feel about wrong answers from AI is that they are like getting a search result from google that is irrelevant, or that is not credible and contains incorrect information.
Neither search nor AI is perfect so you've definitely got to remain vigilant.
I use search less and less as time goes by. ChatGPT gives you links to click on if you need to make sure (one could argue that if you're clicking the links it is indeed "search" after all). But I tend to use Google only if I need to. The AI they put i
Re: (Score:2)
It seems like that would be a better response to an announcement of a premature rollout, rather than to the hiring of researchers whose job it is to fix the problems you're talking about.
AI Bubble reaches its zenith (Score:2)
Because what better way to tell when something's gotten overblown than when Suckerberg starts spending tens of billions on it.
No wonder Meta[stasize] had so many layoffs (Score:2)
With $200M packages, they had to find the funds somewhere - no wonder they had all these layoffs recently.
It's going to be garbage (Score:2)
Here's how this is going to go.
"Hey, Meta, I need you to research applications for this compound I've come up with to fight cancer."
"Sure, but first, let me show you a bunch of shit you don't give a rat's ass about. Then, I'll show you one result that might be relevant but I'll bury it quickly and show you more crap you don't care about."
"Ugh, please sort this chronologically."
"F*ck you. I'll decide what you get to see."
"Dammit, I'm installing a third-party browser plugin to filter out your garbage."
"F*ck
why would you want to work at Meta (Score:2)
200 million dollars compensation?
He was a student researcher at google from 2020-2022 before becoming a director at Apple.
41 research papers in ML, computer vision, signal processing.
[1]https://www.researchgate.net/p... [researchgate.net]
Meta figures he can help them crack the AGI barrier so they can replace meat humans with virtual analogs.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bowen-Zhang-89
Compensation is outrageous (Score:2)
But if you can get it...
Pretty soon Apple won't have an AI team. They don't pay enough to have one, so they won't.
JFC (Score:1)
$200M? That's insane. Good for him I guess.
Re: JFC (Score:1)
Well he is a member of the superintelligence team so that part checks out.