Apple loses another top AI executive to Mark Zuckerberg’s dream team despite Meta’s hiring slowdown

Mark Zuckerberg's ambitions for an AI superteam has seen another casuality at Apple as the iPhone maker lost another top executive, according to a Bloomberg report. The recent hiring by Meta comes at a time when the company is planning to slow down its recruitment. 

A senior Apple exeutive named Frank Chu, who led the company's AI focused efforts on cloud infrastructure, will soon will be joining Meta Sueprintelligence Labs, the AI team recently formed by Zuckerberg and led by former Scale AI Ceo Alexandr Wang. 

Reportedly, Chu helped manage the running of large language models on Apple cloud servers and oversaw sme training of the software. He was also involeved in efforts to develop search features for the Siri voice assistant and entertainment services. 

The depatures from Apple to Meta began in July when Zuckerberg's recruitment drive was in full swing and the billionaire is said to be personally contacting some recruits. Apple's models team lead Ruoming Pang left that month for a reported package of over $200 million at Meta and was later followed by four engineers from the iPhone maker Tom Gunter, Mark Lee, Bowen Zhang and Yun Zhu.

However, given the scale of Chu's responsibilities he is the second most high profile departure from Apple since Pang. he worked as a lieutenant to Benoit Dupin, Apple's executive in charge of AI infrastructure who reports directly to Apple's AI strategy chief John Giannandrea. 

Meanwhile, Chu will reportedly be working on a new team at Meta called MSL Infra which will be responsible for the AI infrastructure work.