Ruoming Pang, Meta’s $200M Superintelligence Hire, Jumps to OpenAI After Just 7 Months |
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Ruoming Pang, Meta’s $200M Superintelligence Hire, Jumps to OpenAI After Just 7 Months
Ruoming Pang’s move from Meta to OpenAI underscores Big Tech's intensifying fight for top A.I. talent.
Ruoming Pang, a prominent A.I. researcher recruited by Meta last year with a pay package reportedly worth more than $200 million, has left the company to join OpenAI, The Information reported yesterday (Feb. 25). His departure marks another setback for Mark Zuckerberg’s elite A.I. team and underscores the escalating A.I. talent war. Pang joined Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) in July after being poached from Apple. He remained at Meta for only seven months.
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Zuckerberg unveiled MSL in July 2025 as the centerpiece of Meta’s push to develop advanced A.I. systems. The lab quickly became the focus of an aggressive—and costly—hiring spree. Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale AI, now leads the group as Meta’s A.I. chief after Meta acquired 40 percent of his startup. Within MSL, a smaller, more secretive unit known as TBD Lab is tasked with building next-generation foundation models.
Pang was originally from Shanghai and earned his undergraduate degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He holds a master’s in computer science from the University of Southern California and earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2006. Over the course of his career, Pang has worked on some of the most consequential A.I. systems in the industry, making him one of the more sought-after engineers in the field.
At Apple, he spent nearly four years as a “senior distinguished engineer,” leading development of the foundation models behind Apple Intelligence. Before Apple, Pang spent roughly 15 years at Google DeepMind as a principal software engineer, where he worked on large-scale machine learning systems, including privacy-preserving technologies and speech recognition.
OpenAI has not disclosed Pang’s title, scope of responsibilities or the terms of his compensation. The Sam Altman-led company reportedly courted him for months, so the package is likely substantial. OpenAI employees earn roughly $1.5 million in annual salary and equity, according to the Wall Street Journal. Pang is widely expected to continue working on foundation models and superintelligence research.
For Meta, Pang’s exit complicates Zuckerberg’s ambition to dominate the superintelligence race. The company has successfully recruited high-profile researchers from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. However, MSL has also seen a steady stream of departures in recent months.
Among the most prominent was Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief A.I. scientist, who exited at the end of last year after more than a decade at the company. LeCun publicly criticized MSL chief Wang’s lack of experience with A.I. research.
Other departures have been quieter but telling. Ethan Knight joined MSL for only a few weeks before moving to OpenAI last August—a stint so brief it never appeared on his LinkedIn profile. Bert Maher, a software engineer, left after 12 years at Meta to join Anthropic. Avi Verma, who had been expected to join Meta from OpenAI, ultimately backed out.
Pang’s move is the latest signal that Silicon Valley’s A.I. talent war is intensifying. Even as talk of an A.I. bubble grows louder and tech companies rely on increasingly complex financial structures to sustain lofty valuations, leaders like Zuckerberg, Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei show little sign of restraint. Instead, they are offering compensation packages worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to persuade top researchers that their vision for superintelligence will prevail.
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