Meta Pays $200 Million To Get One AI Programmer From Apple

Meta (NASDAQ: META) wants to be the global leader in AI systems that can complete tasks at the level of humans. Its AI development may even create products more powerful than that. Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls his effort the Superintelligence Lab. To accelerate the process, Zuckerberg offered a package to the Apple AI division leader which totaled $200 million. The engineer is Ruoming Pang, who ran Apple’s AI models team, according to Bloomberg. The deal covers several years.

It is not Zuckerberg’s first foray in his attempt to build the world’s best AI development team. He bought 49% of AI start-up Scale AI. In the process, the CEO of Scale AI, Alexandr Wang, became the leader of Meta’s AI operations. Meta’s paid about $14 billion for its Scale Ai ownership position.

The business world may never have seen this level of talent war before. Seven figure pay packages for top AI engineers are not unusual. For the industry’s superstars, those packages can be worth eight figures.

Many experts believe Meta’s AI efforts have fallen behind those of OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. The clear loser in the industry is Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL). It was supposed to release an advanced AI product at about the same time as the iPhone 16. The release date has been pushed back until next year. The loss of Pang  is particularly painful.

Meta has released its flagship AI product which was called Llama 4. The open source product received poor reviews, and some of Meta’s AI engineers departed, according to Reuters.

Meta’s move is a risk. It is still not clear how powerful AI software will be. It is also not clear what adoption levels will occur. OpenAI leads the field based on chat downloads. Its ChatGPT product has been downloaded 400 million times. FirstPageSage claims OpenAI is the global leader based on a market share of 61%. Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Copilot’s is second at 14%. Meta does not even make the top eight based on the same measure.

On paper, Meta has an important path to pick up a large number of AI users. Facebook had 2.1 billion active daily users as of the first quarter of this year. It can use that platform as a means to market its AI product. However, today, the product is not considered good enough to be competitive. That is why Meta has paid an engineer $200 million.