Meta Platforms has shaken up Silicon Valley by offering over $200 million in total pay to Ruoming Pang, a leading AI engineer who recently left Apple.
Pang led Apple’s AI models team and is now joining Meta’s new “superintelligence” division, which aims to build AI systems that can think and work like humans.
According to reports, Meta’s offer includes a mix of base salary, stock incentives, and large signing bonuses. Most of the money will be paid out over several years and depends on performance. The deal is so big that it rivals what top global bank CEOs earn.
Meta’s new AI team, called the Meta Superintelligence Lab (MSL), has already attracted big names. These include former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, AI entrepreneur Daniel Gross, and Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang. Wang joined Meta after a $14.3 billion deal that gave Meta a 49% stake in his company.
The company is using high pay and stock grants to keep its new hires for the long term. Some stock deals go beyond the usual four-year window, making sure top talent stays and grows with Meta.
OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, said Meta has offered signing bonuses as high as $100 million to tempt his staff. While some chose to stay, Meta has already hired more than 10 researchers from OpenAI and others from Google DeepMind, including Jack Rae.
The next big moment could come this week, when Altman and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg meet at the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley.
