Zuckerberg poached Apple's key AI expert. What are the risks for Meta investors?

Apple's leading AI modeler Ruoming Pan has left to join Meta Platforms. This is a major blow to Apple's artificial intelligence ambitions. Meta was able to poach the engineer with a multi-million dollar offer. While the iPhone maker shows no desire to catch up with competitors, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made AI his priority.

Engineer Ruoming Pan, who until recently led Apple's fundamental models team (Apple Foundation Models), has moved to Meta, sources told Bloomberg. Facebook's holding company confirmed the transition.

At Apple, Pan led a team of about a hundred people that worked on large language models - the basis for Apple Intelligence and other AI features on the company's devices. In June, Apple announced that it would open up access to those models to third-party developers for the first time - to create new iPhone and iPad apps based on them.

Pan's loss is the most significant for Apple's AI division since the start of development of the Apple Intelligence suite of services, Bloomberg notes. According to the agency's sources, to get the specialist, Meta offered him several tens of millions of dollars a year. Pan may be followed by his team. Meta is willing to pay top engineers multimillion-dollar rewards - significantly higher than Apple's for similar positions, says in the article.

Apple's artificial intelligence technology lags far behind its industry rivals - and the company has shown little commitment to closing that gap. Apple's Intelligence platform came late and essentially failed - even though it was the main argument in favor of buying the iPhone 16, noted Bloomberg journalist Mark Gurman.

For his part, Zuckerberg has made AI a priority for Meta in order to keep up with the market leaders - OpenAI and Google. Meta's founder is personally involved in talks with potential employees, meeting with them at his homes in Silicon Valley and Lake Tahoe, and initiating meetings himself. In late June, he conducted a restructuring of AI teams to focus on developing "superintelligence" - technologies that can perform tasks at the human level or better. Meta will invest tens of billions of dollars and сотни миллиардов долларов — в ближайшие годы.

Meta is actively poaching OpenAI employees as well: in June, none of the specialists decided to move to Meta. OpenAI Research Director Mark Chen told employees that it looked like "someone broke into our house and stole something." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman takes a different tone. He stated that he kept the best staff and Meta had to settle for lower-priority candidates. While Altman asserts that "missionaries will beat the mercenaries," OpenAI has had to more than quintuple increase employee stock bonuses. 

Meta's aggressive hunt for talent is already raising questions about whether the strategy is creating short-term financial risks, wrote MarketWatch, citing Rosenblatt Securities analyst Barton Crockett. Meta Superintelligence Labs' "superintelligence" team has 14 new hires - they would cost $1.4 billion a year to maintain if they were paid $100 million each, Crockett writes (but at least one member of the team denied receiving such a sum on social media).

Even if Meta can afford it, spending capital "on an exhausting battle for talent" is not a good idea, Crockett said. According to the forecast for the year, Meta's cost growth will outpace revenue growth, the analyst said. Hiring an expensive team to build "superintelligence" "may partly reflect the company's confidence in sustained revenue growth and cost efficiency," he said. However, "an increasingly visible risk" for Meta is declining margins, the Rosenblatt analyst wrote. If margins start to decline, investors may change their attitude toward Meta shares, he stated.

Meta Platforms shares have grown by 23% since the beginning of 2025. Apple's stock quotes have fallen by 16% over the same period. According to FactSet, analysts on average advise buying shares of both companies: consensus rating Meta is Buy, Apple is Overweight.

OpenAI stock has "much more" room to grow than Meta stock, considers  Altman. In March 2025, the startup was valued at $300 billion. According to private equity trading platform Forge, by July 2025, OpenAI's valuation had risen to $325 billion. Over the past six years, the value of developer ChatGPT has soared 300 times, thanks to the hype around AI. In CB Insights' list of the most valuable startups, OpenAI shares second place with China's ByteDance, owner of TikTok.

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