Apple has lost ‘around a dozen’ AI staff to rivals, FT reports

Apple (AAPL) has lost around a dozen of its AI staff, including top researchers, to rivals in recent months, The Financial Times’ Michael Acton reports. Apple has lost AI staff members to Meta (META), OpenAI, xAI, and Cohere, according to the report. OpenAI has poached Brandon McKinzie and Dian Ang Yap, two Apple foundation models research engineers, while Cohere hired machine learning scientist Liutong Zhou in June, and Ruoming Pang, head of Apple’s foundational models team, departed for Meta last month. Several of the individuals who have left had previously contributed to research papers on AI models that Apple released last year, according to the report.