Ruoming Pang, a prominent AI researcher employed by Meta last year with a reported salary of more than $200 million, he left the company to join OpenAIInformation reported yesterday (Feb. 25). His departure marks another setback Mark ZuckerbergThe AI elite team also emphasizes the growing AI talent battle. Pang joined Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) in July after the hack an apple. He stayed in Meta for only seven months.
Zuckerberg launched MSL in July 2025 as the centerpiece of Meta’s campaign to develop advanced AI systems. The lab quickly became the focus of aggressive—and expensive—recruitment. Alexander Wangfounder of AI scalehe now leads the team as the head of AI for Meta after Meta acquired 40 percent of his startup. Within MSL, a small, secretive unit known as the TBD Lab is tasked with building next-generation base models.
Pang was originally from Shanghai and received his degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He holds a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Southern California and a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2006. During his career, Pang has worked on some of the industry’s most important AI projects, making him one of the most sought-after engineers in the industry.
In an applehe spent nearly four years as a “principal engineer,” leading the development of the underlying models behind Apple Intelligence. Prior to Apple, Pang spent nearly 15 years at Google DeepMind as a principal software engineer, where he worked on major machine learning applications, including privacy and speech recognition technologies.
OpenAI did not disclose Pang’s title, scope of responsibilities or terms of his compensation. The Sam Altman-led company reportedly courted him for months, so the package could be huge. OpenAI employees receive an estimated $1.5 million in annual salary and equity, according to the Wall Street Journal. Pang is expected to continue working on basic models and superintelligence research.
In the Meta, Pang’s exit is difficult Zuckerberg‘s desire to dominate the superintelligence race. The company has successfully recruited top researchers from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. However, MSL has also seen a steady stream of departures in recent months.
Among the most prominent were Yann LeCunMeta’s chief AI scientist, who left at the end of last year after more than a decade at the company. LeCun publicly criticized the MSL executive Wang’s lack of experience with AI research.
The rest of the walk was quiet but telling. Ethan Knight joined MSL a few weeks before moving to OpenAI last August—a brief stint that doesn’t appear on his LinkedIn profile. Bert Maher, a software engineer, left after 12 years at Meta to join Anthropic. Avi Verma, who was expected to join Meta from OpenAI, eventually withdrew.
Pang’s move is the latest sign that Silicon Valley’s battle for AI talent is intensifying. Even as talk of an AI bubble grows louder and tech companies rely on increasingly complex financial structures to maintain high valuations, leaders like Zuckerberg, Altman and Anthropic Dario Amodei show little sign of restraint. Instead, they offer compensation packages worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to persuade top researchers that their intelligence idea will succeed.
