Apple's AI employee pool is continuing to very slightly shrink, but the departure of four non-executive workers is still not a worrying brain drain to the company.
There have been many reports of employees leaving Apple's AI teams in favor of joining rival firms working on machine learning projects. Things didn't improve for the last week of August, as Apple works to bring its major operating system and Apple Intelligence updates to users.
A total of four employees working as part of Apple's AI talent pool have departed within the space of a week, according toBloomberg. The list is headed up by Jian Zhang, a lead AI researcher in robotics, who left Apple for the Meta Robotics Studio.
Three others had also moved on from Apple's Foundational Models, report sources claim, with John Peebles, Nan Du, and Zhao Meng all out of the company. Peebles and Du are headed to ChatGPT maker OpenAI, while Zhao is joining Anthropic.
Apple declined top comment to the publication about the employment changes.
Continued AI turnover
The departures are the latest in a string of moves from Apple to other companies.
Meta has been a big collector of former Apple employees, including senior large language model researcher Tom Gunter in June. Others in Meta's sights include Bowen Zhang, Yun Zhu, and Mark Lee.
The major hiring story of the summer was Meta's poaching of Ruoming Pang, the head of the foundational models team at Apple. That hiring reportedly will cost Meta $200 million as part of a multi-year deal.
However, while it seems that Apple is enduring a draining of talent in a major technological growth area, it is a problem that all companies have. Though people moving from Apple get the headlines, the firms in the AI space are constantly working to secure talent from each other.
Apple, like many other companies, plan for such a situation, and are constantly on the lookout for new employees to bring in with knowledge to share.
On Apple side this time is the status of the four exiting employees. While previous reports have included executives and high-level staff, the group this time doesn't really consist of managerial-tier employees.
Less reported are instances of Apple hiring employees. No-one outside of Apple really knows how many people the company is hiring at any one time, and it's entirely plausible that there are employees focused on finding more AI workers to onboard.
The AI team itself was a fast-growing team in its own right, so it's going to quickly shrink and regrow in a short space of time.
