Meta Snatches another Apple AI leader as Zuckerberg Builds Superteam While Slowing Hiring
According to reports, Apple has lost another senior executive to Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of building an AI super team. The action follows one that Meta is signaling more generally on its hiring plans.
Frank Chu, a long time Apple senior executive in charge of the company AI-driven cloud infrastructure, will join the Super intelligence Labs, the newly created AI unit at Meta headed by Mark Zuckerberg and former scale AI head Alexandr Wang.
Chu worked with the large language models on Apple cloud servers and aided in their training. He was also instrumental in improving search capabilities of Siri and entertainment services of Apple.
The wave of departures to Meta began in July, when Zuckerberg ramped up his recruitment drive, even personally reaching out to potential hires. That month, Apple’s model team lead, Ruoming Pang, departed for a package reportedly exceeding $200 million, followed soon after by four engineers — Tom Gunter, Mark Lee, Bowen Zhang, and Yun Zhu.
Given the scale of his responsibilities, Chu is the second most high-profile departure from Apple after Pang. He worked as a lieutenant to Benoit Dupin, Apple’s executive in charge of AI infrastructure, who reports directly to John Giannandrea, Apple’s AI strategy chief. Chu will now reportedly work on a new team at Meta called MSL Infra, which will be responsible for AI infrastructure.
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Zuckerberg’s recent hiring spree has also seen Meta poach executives from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. However, the company has reportedly confirmed in an internal memo that it is slowing down recruitment across all MSL teams.
“In order to responsibly manage our headcount and ensure our open and future roles are aligned with our top priorities, we’re temporarily pausing hiring across all MSL teams, with the exception of business-critical roles,” Meta wrote in a memo to hiring managers.
Meanwhile, Wang recently clarified in a social media post that the company is “investing more and more into Meta Superintelligence Labs.”
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These high-profile exits come at a time when Apple is struggling to catch up with rivals in the AI race, amid delays in its much-anticipated Siri revamp. The departure of Pang, along with reports that Apple may rely on third-party models, has sent shockwaves across its AI models team and is said to be the biggest reason behind the ongoing talent drain.