Meta poaches AI researcher from rival with $200 million pay offer,
In the battle for AI supremacy, Meta has just made a major move.
Mark Zuckerberg’s firm – which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – has lured a renowned AI expert away from rival Apple with an eye-watering pay offer.
And it’s an amount that the majority of us can only dream of.
Over the next ‘several years’, Ruoming Pang, originally from China, will earn more than $200 million (£147 million) in his new role, a report reveals.
The ‘unusually high’ earnings package is among the highest of any corporate job, including CEO roles at the world’s major banks, the report adds.
Mr Pang becomes a high-ranking member of Meta’s mysterious new ‘superintelligence’ lab, thought to be based in California.
The secretive department is developing smarter-than-human AI in an attempt to get ahead in the AI race.
And its already packed with former employees from ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
According to the new report from Bloomberg, Ruoming Pang gets the $200 million compensation package over a ‘several-year period’.
Reportedly, the figure significantly exceeds the compensation of all Apple employees, apart from CEO Tim Cook, who is top dog at the tech giant.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple did not try to match the offer to retain Mr Pang, even though he was head of a team dedicated to Apple’s AI models.
The report cited ‘people with knowledge of the matter’ who declined to be named while discussing unannounced compensation details.
Compensation includes salary but also other forms of monetary benefit – but the sum may depend on his performance over the next several years.
Much of the money is ‘tied up in performance targets’ and ‘unlocked during years of loyalty’, meaning it might not all be received if he leaves early or doesn’t perform well.
Meta and Apple did not immediately respond to MailOnline’s requests for comment.
Ruoming Pang has been described as a ‘distinguished engineer’, the ‘best kind of machine learning expert’ with ‘amazing software skills’.
According to his LinkedIn page, he has a master’s in Computer Science from the University of Southern California and a PhD from Princeton University.
Mr Pang also has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in his native China.
After leaving Princeton University in 2006, he spent 15 years at Google as a principal software engineer before leaving in 2021 for Apple.
He now joins a list of new recruits at Meta, which also includes former GitHub CEO Nat NAT Friedman and OpenAI researcher Shuchao Bi, who previously co-created YouTube Shorts at Google.
Meta is said to be ‘aggressively’ chasing high-profile acquisitions with jaw-dropping multi-million-dollar pay offers to attract top talent in the race to lead the next wave of AI.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reorganized the company’s AI efforts under a new division called Meta Superintelligence Labs, Reuters reported last week.
Superintelligence Labs will help Meta better compete with some of its top rivals in AI, including Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, a San Francisco-based AI safety and research company.
They will be focused on building AI systems that can complete tasks as well as or better than humans – hinting at a future where online chatbots don’t make any mistakes.
The division will reportedly be headed by Alexandr Wang, former CEO of data labeling startup Scale AI.
Meta is already rolling out AI features to its products, including the Meta AI button, which has recently arrived on WhatsApp.
When users tap the Meta AI button, they can start personal chats with the chatbot or ask questions about anything from news to weather and sports.
Meta AI is also available on Facebook, Messenger and Instagram where it can similarly be accessed by tapping the blue-purple ring icon.
WhatsApp users can’t get rid of the Meta AI button – but the company has told users that it’s optional and they don’t have to use it.
WhatsApp will provide AI-powered writing suggestions and message summaries under a new suite of tools called ‘Private Processing’.
