Apple has lost its fourth AI developer in a month - he's gone to Meta

Apple has lost another key specialist in the field of artificial intelligence - the fourth in a month. He moved to Meta, which is actively recruiting a team to work with neural networks, luring developers with high salaries.

Zhang Bowen, one of the top multimodal AI researchers at Apple, left the company on Friday. He will join the newly created Meta Superintelligence division, reported Bloomberg, citing sources. At Apple, the engineer worked on the AFM team responsible for developing the company's core AI technologies. It includes several dozen engineers and researchers.

Before that, Meta poached AFM team leader Pan Jomin, offering him a compensation package worth more than $200 million, followed by his subordinates Tom Gunter and Mark Lee. Apple began to raise salaries little by little for AFM employees - even those who had not expressed a desire to leave, sources said. But compared to what competitors are offering, Apple's compensation is still low, the agency noted.

Apple shares closed down 1.3% at $211.27 on July 29 in New York close. Since the beginning of the year, the iPhone maker's stock has fallen nearly 16%.

According to Bloomberg's sources, other Apple engineers are also being interviewed by other companies. Recently, another member of Apple's AI development team, Floris Veers, left to join a startup. Part of the top managers believe that their own AI solutions prevent Apple from catching up with competitors, said the agency's interlocutors. And uncertainty - whether to develop AI in-house or outsource it - demotivates the team and increases the outflow.

Management tries to reassure engineers by emphasizing the importance of their work to Apple. But the company's internal policies make it difficult to compete. Because of its focus on privacy, the company prefers to process data on iPhones rather than in the cloud. This limits AI's capabilities, as smartphones are known to be inferior to data centers in terms of capacity: the Apple Intelligence platform mostly runs on a local model with 3 billion parameters, while competitors offer cloud solutions with more than a trillion parameters, wrote Bloomberg.

Apple will report its fiscal third quarter earnings on July 31 after the close of trading in New York. Wall Street expects Apple to report a 4.2% year-over-year increase in revenue to $89.34 billion - up from a 4.9% increase in the same fiscal quarter last year. Скорректированная прибыль на акцию, согласно консенсус-прогнозу, составит $1,43, пишет StockStory.

Morgan Stanley analyst Eric Woodring believes the market's positivity on Apple stock won't appear until investors get clarity on several fronts - not just the AI strategy, but also duties and the outcome of the antitrust case over Apple's search agreement with Google. Woodring recommends buying Apple stock - with an Overweight rating and a $235 target price, reports Investor's Business Daily.

Needham analyst Laura Martin last week urged clients to be cautious on Apple stock because of the company's lack of a clear artificial intelligence strategy. Apple is 1-2 years behind its bigtech rivals, she said, so any AI roadmap will be expensive: it will lead to increased costs, higher capital expenditures and possibly even new takeovers, warned Martin.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor