Bloomberg: "Meta Hires Apple's Head of AI"
"Offers Compensation Package Worth About $200 Million"
Massive Investment in 'Superintelligence Research Lab'
There have been reports that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, is spending astronomical amounts of money to recruit artificial intelligence (AI) talent. On July 10 (local time), Yonhap News, citing Bloomberg, reported that "Meta recruited Luo Ming Pang, who previously led the development of Apple's AI models, with a compensation package exceeding $200 million (about 270 billion won)."
This amount far exceeds Apple's internal compensation standards for anyone other than CEO Tim Cook. Last year, Cook received a total of $74.61 million (about 102 billion won) in salary, stock awards, and bonuses. It is reported that Apple did not attempt to match the compensation offered by Meta. However, neither Meta nor Apple has released an official statement on the matter.
According to Yonhap News, Pang is not the only one to whom Meta has made such an exceptional offer. Previously, Meta agreed to invest $14.3 billion (about 19.6 trillion won) in the AI startup ScaleAI and made headlines by recruiting its founder and CEO, Alexander Wang. He is expected to lead the 'Meta Superintelligence Research Lab' established by CEO Zuckerberg.
Last month, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, criticized Meta by saying, "Meta offered our researchers compensation packages of up to $100 million (about 137 billion won) if they switched jobs," calling it "insane." Recently, at least 10 AI talents from OpenAI are known to have joined Meta. Most of them appear to have been recruited into the Meta Superintelligence Research Lab. As a result, there are evaluations that compensation at the Meta Superintelligence Research Lab is now at the highest level among all corporate positions worldwide, including CEOs of major global banks. However, Bloomberg pointed out that "since most of the compensation is tied to performance targets, early resignation or poor stock performance could mean recipients do not receive the full amount."
On June 30, Zuckerberg announced via an internal notice that he would establish the research lab. This lab will oversee the open-source model 'Llama,' product development, and the AI research lab 'FAIR.' Zuckerberg stated, "As the pace of AI advancement accelerates, the development of superintelligence is now within reach," and added, "I believe this will mark the beginning of a new era for humanity, and Meta will do everything necessary to take the lead."
Alexander Wang, formerly of ScaleAI, will serve as the head of the lab and as Meta's Chief AI Officer (CAIO). Nat Friedman, who previously served as CEO of GitHub, will also join to lead AI product and application research. Meta plans to invest more than $70 billion (about 95 trillion won) in the research lab.
Meta has been evaluated as not having gained an advantage in the AI industry, as its large language model (LLM) Llama 4, released in April, failed to meet market expectations. As a result, there is analysis that Meta is seeking a breakthrough in the global AI competition by shifting its strategy to a large-scale project focused on building superintelligence. Bloomberg stated, "Zuckerberg has been aggressively pursuing top talent to gain an edge in the AI race against competitors such as OpenAI and Google," adding, "He has personally led recruitment efforts, even hosting potential hires at his home."
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