Meta’s hiring spree in Cupertino continues, as Bloomberg reports that the company has just hired away yet another researcher from Apple’s AI team. Here are the details.
A new hire amid a hiring freeze
When news broke that Meta had hired Ruoming Pang, Apple’s lead at the foundation models team, many assumed he’d start taking a few of his closest colleagues with him.
That quickly proved true, as Mark Zuckerberg’s company kept on poaching Pang’s teammates amid a multibillion-dollar hiring spree across Silicon Valley.
Interestingly, just this week, news broke that Meta had frozen its hiring efforts. But it appears that the company is willing to make a few exceptions, as tonight, Bloomberg reported that it has hired Frank Chu, “who has led Apple AI teams focused on cloud infrastructure, training and search.’
Chu, Meta’s sixth AI hire from Apple in the last seven weeks, will join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, Zuckerberg’s newly created star-packed AI division.
Coincidentally, Meta’s own AI structure is in the middle of its fourth reshaping in six months, to better accommodate its new stellar hirings and its broader vision for the future of AI.
Its recent hiring freeze followed a Forbes report that claimed that Meta’s culture and internal chaos were leading to deflections from its own AI teams.
And while, it has almost stopped being news that Meta has poached yet another AI researcher from Apple, this latest latest defection adds to Apple’s mounting challenges in this area, both internally and in the public perception that it is falling further behind.
Just a few weeks ago, after fielding AI-related questions during Apple’s Q3 2025 conference call, CEO Tim Cook called a company-wide meeting to address Apple’s AI woes. At the time, he promised that Apple would “make the investment” to catch up on AI.
Whether the company will actually manage to pull this off, remains to be seen. But the task certainly isn’t getting any easier, with its brain drain showing no signs of slowing down.
What’s your take on Apple’s predicament? Let us know in the comments.
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