Featured Image Credit: Facebook/Ruoming
Topics: Meta, Artificial Intelligence, Apple, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook
Liv Bridge
Topics: Meta, Artificial Intelligence, Apple, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook
Meta has reportedly offered a renowned rival AI engineer more than $200 million for a brand new role.
As artificial intelligence continues on its path of total domination, Mark Zuckerberg's firm Meta is the last to miss a beat.
Meta, which owns social media platforms Facebook, Instagram and messaging service, WhatsApp, has reportedly coaxed a highly paid AI engineer from its rivals, Apple, with a tantalising offer to take over a mysterious new hub.
According to The Daily Mail, Ruoming Pang, from China, has been tipped to earn more than $200 million in the new position.
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A Bloomberg report seen by the news outlet reveals he will be become a high-ranking member of Meta's so-called 'superintelligence lab,' believed to be in California and led by Alexandr Wang, former CEO of Scale AI.
Mr Pang's 'unusually high' salary sits among the highest of most corporate jobs, including CEO titles at the world's top banks, the report continues.
The top secret department is set to develop AI that will be smarter than humans in a bid to get ahead of the AI competition, and comes already jam-packed with former employees from OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT.
Mr Pang's $200m wage is scheduled to stagger across a 'several-year period' and exceeds the amount awarded to all Apple employees, other than the boss, CEO Tim Cook.
Apparently, Apple didn't attempt to match Meta's offer to keep Mr Pang under its wing, despite his expertise working with Apple's AI models where he was the head of the team.
The report further referenced 'people with knowledge on the matter' who chose not to be named when negotiating compensation amounts, which includes salary and other forms of financial benefits.
Still, his take home pay relies on his performance over the next several years.
It will be 'unlocked during years of loyalty' and meeting 'performance targets', the report adds, meaning he might not get the full amount if he fails to hit targets or if he leaves early.
Mr Pang, who has a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Southern California and a PhD from Princetown University has been dubbed a 'distinguished engineer' and 'the best kind of machine-learning expert' with 'amazing software skills,' the news outlet adds.
He also possesses a bachelor's degree in computer science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.
After graduating from Princeton in 2006, Mr Pang spent more than a decade working at Google as a principal software engineer before departing for Apple in 2021.
Now at Meta, he joins a list of high-profile new recruits which includes former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and OpenAI researcher Shuchao Bi, whom worked on creating YouTube shorts for Google.