Ruoming Pang’s AI Experience Earns $200 Million Payday

Ruoming Pang led Apple’s core LLM initiatives until being lured to Meta by Zuckerberg’s $200 million offer.

Ruoming Pang may be the biggest AI talent to be caught in the big net cast by Mark Zuckerberg to feed Meta’s Superintelligence quest.

Pang’s reported compensation package exceeds $200 million – a figure that puts him alongside NBA superstars like MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander who just signed a 4-year $285 million contract.  Of course Meta’s package consists largely of stock options that can be cashed on some future date when Superintelligence will have created billions in shareholder value.

As Apple’s Head of Foundation Models since 2021 Pang led a team of about 100 engineers to achieve LLM-backed initiatives for functionalities like email and web article summaries, Genmojis, and priority notifications.

Before Apple Pang spent 15-year on Google’s large-scale deep learning systems.  He led Google Brain’s speech recognition research and co-created Zanzibar, a fundamental system that controlled who could access data across all of Google’s services.  Pang’s foundational AI models also refined Google’s search ranking recommendation systems and natural language processing.

Pang’s writings have been cited over 45,000 on Google Scholar.  His most notable publication is on MobileNetV3, a new generation of mobile-optimized deep learning models developed using automated search and unique architecture design. Pang earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University in 2006 following a master’s degree in computer science from USC in 2000.   The China native graduated from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 1998 with a bachelor’s in computer science.