Apple Loses Lead AI Robotics Researcher to Meta

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Transcript

00:00The exodus of AI talent from Apple continues.

00:03Yeah, it's quite something.

00:04Over the past couple months, since the beginning of July,

00:07Apple's large language models team and AI engineering teams,

00:11particularly around the research time, has been bleeding talent.

00:13To this point, in just two months or so,

00:16they've lost roughly a dozen AI researchers.

00:19The latest exit goes to Meta.

00:21This person was in charge of AI-related research

00:24for robotics purposes within its AI division.

00:28Three other people have left in the last week or so.

00:31One, John Peebles, is going to open AI.

00:33Another is going to open AI.

00:35And a third person is going to Anthropic.

00:37So the first set of departures over the past couple months,

00:41most of them went to Meta following their boss,

00:43who left Apple for a $200 million-plus payday at Meta.

00:48Not bad.

00:48These ones, not bad, going to Meta, Anthropic, and open AI as well.

00:53So are these departures just about the money,

00:55or is it a culture issue also?

00:57There's a few things going on here.

00:59So one, the money.

01:01The pay packages at Apple pale in comparison

01:03for these top-notch academics and AI researchers

01:06compared to what you're seeing in some cases at open AI and Anthropic.

01:10But the pay packages at Meta are just ridiculous.

01:14The other thing to note is that Apple has been seriously contemplating

01:18moving away from in-house model technology for some of its products

01:23and using more from companies like Google or Anthropic or OpenAI.

01:27And the LLM researchers at Apple,

01:29some of them think they're seeing the writing on the wall,

01:31and maybe it's time to get out of there

01:33before Apple really reduces the use of their technologies.

01:36Of course, internally, Apple has denied the idea

01:39that they're going to move away.

01:40But there is going to be some parts of Siri next year

01:43moving away to a third-party provider.

01:45So they're seeing it happen,

01:47and they don't want to be, in their minds,

01:48the last ones to flick off the lights on the way out.