Bowen Zhang, a multimodal AI expert and a key member of Apple’s foundation models group (AFM), reportedly left the company on Friday (25.07.25) to join Meta’s recently formed superintelligence team, according to Bloomberg.

Zhang’s departure follows those of Ruoming Pang — the former AFM leader at Apple — and researchers Tom Gunter and Mark Lee, all of whom have joined Meta in recent weeks.

Pang was reportedly offered a compensation package worth more than $200 million, and Meta is said to be aggressively hiring top AI talent across Silicon Valley.

Apple’s AFM group is responsible for developing the core AI models that power Apple Intelligence, the company’s platform launched last year.

However, the wave of departures has thrown the team’s future into uncertainty, with several engineers reportedly interviewing for roles elsewhere.

The loss of Pang - who played a central role in shaping the group’s research roadmap - has particularly shaken morale, Bloomberg claims.

In response, Apple has reportedly begun increasing pay for its AI engineers, even for those not actively threatening to leave.

Still, its compensation packages is said to pale in comparison to those offered by rivals like Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

The situation is compounded by Apple’s ongoing internal debate over whether to rely more on third-party AI models.

Reports suggest the company is considering integrating OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude into future iterations of Siri, while simultaneously developing a new in-house model.

Apple’s focus on privacy — which favours on-device AI processing rather than cloud-based systems — has also limited the scale of its AI capabilities compared to competitors with trillion-parameter models.

Apple shares dropped 1.5 per cent to $210.82 in New York trading on Monday, extending a 15 per cent decline for the year.