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Meta hires two key Apple AI experts

MacDailyNews

Jul 18

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Apple CEO Tim Cook first attended the Sun Valley Conference in 2012 and has been a consistent attendee ever since, save for a few years during the COVID-19 pandemic. DAVID PAUL MORRIS—BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES — Apple CEO Tim Cook (photo: David Paul Morris — Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Meta Platforms recruited Mark Lee and Tom Gunter, two prominent AI researchers from Apple Inc., to join its Superintelligence Labs team. The hires reflect Meta’s aggressive push to attract top AI talent amid intense industry competition, Bloomberg News‘ sources say.

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Lee has started at Meta after leaving Apple in recent days, while Gunter will begin work in the near future, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the hires haven’t been announced.
The moves are part of a scramble for AI talent across the tech industry. Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has been especially aggressive in its recruiting. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has made artificial intelligence the company’s top priority, spending heavily on workers and data centers to try and keep pace with rivals like OpenAI and Google.
Gunter left Apple last month, Bloomberg News reported at the time, and both he and Lee worked closely with Ruoming Pang, the chief of Apple’s large language models team who Meta poached earlier this month. To secure Pang, Meta offered a multiyear compensation package worth well over $200 million, Bloomberg reported.
Lee was known as Pang’s first hire at Apple, while Gunter, who was a distinguished engineer at Apple, was regarded as one of the group’s most senior employees. Gunter started at a different AI company after leaving Apple and departed in recent days.
The latest hires reflect the continuing turmoil at the Apple Foundation Models team, or AFM, which develops the technology underpinning generative AI. The company’s top AI executives have been considering using outside models to power the Siri voice assistant and other Apple Intelligence features, clouding the team’s future.
The group reports to research head Daphne Luong, a top deputy to AI Senior Vice President John Giannandrea. They’re evaluating strategy changes alongside Mike Rockwell and Craig Federighi, the software executives now in charge of Siri. The idea would be to rely on OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic PBC’s Claude as the foundation for Apple Intelligence beginning next year.

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MacDailyNews Take: Shocking.

Apple pays and has been paying John Giannandrea, Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Strategy, millions upon millions of dollars for years. WTF of any import does he really do? WTF of any import has he really delivered? Have you used Siri lately? Yup, it’s still a steaming pile of dogshit.

Where’s Apple’s generative AI, John? “Too hard; too late; look for partners; gimme my paycheck and stock options.”

AAPL shareholders need to start asking real questions of these executives, especially those who are supposedly in charge of Apple’s “AI Strategy,” when the company clearly has none. How about some accountability for once? – MacDailyNews, March 18, 2024

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