Meta Snatches Top Apple AI Talent for Superintelligence Labs

Meta is pushing even harder into the AI arms race, hiring two prominent artificial intelligence researchers from Apple—Mark Lee and Tom Gunter—to bolster its elite Superintelligence Labs team. The move, first reported by Bloomberg, reflects CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s aggressive strategy to build the most powerful AI research division in tech, with hundreds of billions of dollars earmarked for infrastructure and talent.

Lee has already joined Meta’s growing AI team, while Gunter is expected to follow soon. Both had worked closely with Ruoming Pang, the former head of Apple’s Foundation Models team, who also recently defected to Meta for a reported multi-million-dollar compensation package. Their departures mark another major loss for Apple’s AI development and reinforce the growing rivalry between the two tech giants.

Zuckerberg has made no secret of his ambitions. Earlier this week, he announced the construction of multiple superclusters, including one dubbed Prometheus, designed to support next-generation AI workloads. With top-tier researchers now onboard and large-scale computing power in the pipeline, Meta is positioning itself as a central player in the race to develop artificial general intelligence.