Meta's recipe for snatching Apple's AI super engineer: a record-breaking $200 million salary.

MILAN – Big tech companies are waging a paycheck war to secure top AI talent. According to Bloomberg , Meta's latest acquisition, which has hired Ruoming Pang , head of Apple's AI modeling team, is said to have offered him hundreds of millions of dollars over several years to convince him to leave. This staggering sum, however, reportedly prompted Apple to back out because it exceeds the company's compensation for executives, with the exception of CEO Tim Cook.

The new super team

According to Bloomberg, citing sources close to the company, the compensation package is in line with those offered to other key hires on Meta's new superintelligence team, which is focused on building AI systems capable of performing tasks as well as—or better than—humans. The team now also includes former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and AI startup founder Daniel Gross. Meta also named Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang as its chief AI officer, acquiring a 49% stake in his company for $14.3 billion.

Sam Altman's complaint

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently spoke about the desperate hunt for AI talent, accusing Meta of offering astronomical sums of money to drain tech companies of talent. According to Altman, Mark Zuckerberg's company offered $100 million in bonuses to OpenAI employees in a failed attempt to lure them to its generative AI team. "It's crazy. I'm really glad that so far, at least, none of our top people have decided to take it," he said in an interview on his brother Jack Altman's podcast.