Apple has lost around a dozen of its artificial intelligence staff, including top researchers, to rivals as the iPhone maker struggles to stay relevant in Silicon Valley’s ferocious AI talent war. Meta, OpenAI, xAI and Cohere have scooped up staff from Apple’s AI team since the start of the year as they rush to gain a competitive edge in the nascent technology, fuelling concerns the US tech giant is falling further behind in the global AI arms race. OpenAI has poached Brandon McKinzie and Dian Ang Yap, two Apple foundation models research engineers, in recent months, while Canadian AI start-up Cohere hired machine learning scientist Liutong Zhou in June. Other recent high profile departures from the iPhone maker include Ruoming Pang, head of Apple’s foundational models team, to Meta last month, as part of chief Mark Zuckerberg’s push to lure big names with the promise of $100mn-plus sign-on bonuses. “Ruoming Pang leaving is huge: it sends a signal of a crisis of confidence around what is to come,” said Aaron Sines, director of AI recruiting at Razoroo. “A lot of the companies we have as clients are saying ‘hey, look at Apple: it’s open season’.” Other senior members of Apple’s foundational models team have also defected to Meta, including Mark Lee, Tom Gunter, Bowen Zhang, and Shuang Ma. Floris Weers, a UK-based researcher in Pang’s team, left in July to join a stealth start-up. Several of the individuals who have left had previously contributed to research papers on AI models that Apple released last year, as the iPhone maker started to showcase its work in the field.

Full report : Apple has lost around a dozen of its AI staff, including top researchers, to rivals in recent months; its core foundation models team has ~50-60 people.