Apple's AI performance has been questioned recently. Although the company has opened up self-developed models for use by third-party developers, the market has been indifferent to Apple Intelligence, and the new version of Siri has long been delayed for many key functions.

The senior management therefore considered introducing third-party models such as OpenAI, which caused the morale of the internal team to be frustrated.

It is reported that Peng Ruoming's resignation may be just the beginning, and several AFM team engineers have expressed their willingness to change jobs. Peng's deputy Tom Gunter also left last month. After that, the team will be changed from one person to multiple supervisors to layered management.

According to Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, Meta offers generous salaries of tens of millions of dollars per year to poach Peng Ruoming, far exceeding the salary Apple provides for similar positions.

Apple's top executive in charge of artificial intelligence (AI) models will jump to Meta to join the latter's newly established "superintelligence" team. This is another major blow to Apple's already struggling AI strategy.

In contrast, Meta regards AI development as the company's primary strategy and has announced that it will invest tens of billions of dollars in the AI ​​field this year. It is reported that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally recruited leaders in the field of AI. Recently, he has invited several founders of AI startup companies with high salaries, and has previously offered signing bonuses of up to US$100 million (about S$129 million) to OpenAI employees.

Apple has not yet responded to Peng Ruoming's resignation. The analysis points out that as the competition for generative AI is intensifying, the flow of core technical talents will directly affect the development rhythm and layout results of science and technology giants.

The resigned is Ruoming Pang, an engineer and director of Apple Foundation Models (AFM). He worked at Google's parent company Alphabet and joined Apple in 2021, leading a team of about 100 people.