14 billion yuan can't keep him! Pang Ruoming leaves Meta to join OpenAI
Pang Ruoming, former head of Apple's foundational model team, has left Meta just six months after joining with a high salary and has joined OpenAI. OpenAI has confirmed this news. Pang Ruoming's compensation package at Meta was valued at over $200 million and was tied to specific targets. His departure comes amid a wave of resignations from Meta's artificial intelligence team, with several other executives also leaving. Pang Ruoming has extensive experience in AI and infrastructure, having worked at Google for 15 years
The former head of Apple's foundational model team and Shanghai Jiao Tong University alumnus Pang Ruoming has been poached by Zuckerberg to Meta for a hefty price, and just six months later, he has jumped ship again!
The latest news is that he left last week and joined OpenAI. This news has been confirmed by an OpenAI spokesperson.
OpenAI has long coveted him and has been actively poaching him for the past few months.
It is reported that when Pang Ruoming initially joined Meta, the total value of his compensation package exceeded $200 million (approximately 1.4 billion RMB), to be paid out over several years, with specific amounts directly tied to achieving certain milestone goals.
His departure comes at a time when the exodus from Meta's artificial intelligence team is continuing to escalate.
In addition to Pang Ruoming, Mat Velloso, the head of the developer platform at Meta's Superintelligence Lab, also announced his departure after a brief tenure. He joined Meta from Google's DeepMind last July and recently announced his departure on LinkedIn.
Geoffrey Hinton's core disciple, Meta's Vice President of Generative AI Research, Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Professor, and Apple's first AI Director Russ Salakhutdinov has also officially announced his departure yesterday after two years at Meta.
Additionally, former Chief AI Scientist at Meta Yann LeCun made headlines when he left last year.
About Pang Ruoming
Public information shows that Pang Ruoming graduated with a bachelor's degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and obtained his master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Southern California and Princeton, respectively.
Upon graduation, he directly joined Google, where he worked as an engineer for 15 years.
In the last few years at Google, he led the speech recognition and product development for Google Brain. He also co-led the development of the Babelfish/Lingvo framework with AI luminary Wu Yonghui, which is currently the most widely used deep learning framework on Google TPU.
From the evaluations of his colleagues at Google, Pang Ruoming is not only proficient in machine learning but also understands infrastructure.
And this may be one of the reasons why Apple sought to recruit Pang Ruoming
In 2021, Apple poached Pang Ruoming from Google to lead the foundational model team of Apple's AI/ML department.
This team is primarily responsible for developing the core foundational models that support "Apple Intelligence" and other AI features on Apple devices.
This includes the main conversational capabilities of Apple Intelligence, which were showcased at the WWDC conference and are supported by models developed by this team.
More specifically, it involves researching and developing the AXLearn training framework, pre-training, post-training, and inference optimization of large language models, as well as multimodal understanding and generation capabilities.
It can be said that as a Chinese engineer, the team he leads almost underpins Apple's core AI strategy.
Looking solely at his academic credentials, Pang Ruoming's achievements are also quite impressive. Google Scholar shows that his total citation count exceeds 50,000.
After being poached by Meta, Pang Ruoming leads the cutting-edge research and development of the next generation of superintelligence at Meta's Super Intelligence Lab, focusing on building natural language processing systems with hundreds of billions of parameters and distributed training frameworks.
Of course, while Meta is continuously losing talent, they have also recruited many from OpenAI and other competitors. After all, Mark Zuckerberg's high-priced offers are no joke.
In July last year, Silicon Valley VC mogul Deedy obtained a list of personnel from Meta's super team from an anonymous Meta employee. Among the 44 people, nearly 40% came from OpenAI. OpenAI has been hit the hardest in terms of talent poaching.
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