Der chinesischstämmige Leiter des AI-Bereichs bei Apple wechselt zu Meta, das Kernteam verliert erneut ein Mitglied, und Tim Cook wird gezwungen, sich an Google zu wenden.

Apple's AI project suffers another heavy blow: The leading engineer Frank Chu is said to have joined Meta! At the same time, after recruiting over 50 top talents with high salaries, Meta has urgently frozen its hiring.

It was reported that Frank Chu, the head of AI engineering at Apple, has joined Meta.

He will work in a new team of MSL Infra and deal with matters related to AI infrastructure.

This is one of the most serious losses for Apple's AI project since Pang Ruoming, the founder of Apple's model team, was poached by Meta with a salary contract worth $200 million.

An important employee in Apple's AI who led the model training facility

After Pang Ruoming, the former head of Apple's AI model team, Tom Gunter, Mark Lee, Bowen Zhang, Yun Zhu and other professionals have successively left Apple and joined Meta.

With Frank Chu's move, he will be at least the sixth employee in the field of AI models to have switched from Apple to Meta.

In 2019, Frank Chu joined Apple and took up the position of Technical Director.

During his time at Apple, he was the trusted deputy of Benoit Dupin, the head of AI infrastructure, and Dupin reported directly to John Giannandrea, the head of the company's AI strategy.

Technically speaking, he not only led the inference facility of the Apple Foundation Model (AFM) and of open - source large language models on public cloud platforms, but also took over the pre - training work of the data for the Apple Foundation Model and provided the AFM team with all the necessary tokens for model pre - training.

In addition, he led the search platform team and provided the core search technology for products such as Siri, Safari, Apple Music, Apple TV and App Store.

Before joining Apple, Frank Chu held key technology - related positions in several world - leading technology companies.

Technical leader at Waymo: In almost four years, he built from scratch and led the training infrastructure of Waymo (over 2000 TPU). This platform is used by all teams in the company for the mass training of perception models, path planning models and other models.

Software engineer at Google Search: Almost nine years.

Previously, he obtained a bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of British Columbia and a master's degree in computer science from the University of Toronto.

After the crazy "money - burning" recruitment of over 50 employees, Meta has urgently frozen its hiring

Although Frank Chu has just been hired, Meta has actually frozen hiring in its AI department after spending several billion dollars over several months to recruit over 50 AI researchers and engineers.

The hiring freeze also prohibits the internal transfer of existing employees between teams. The hiring freeze came into effect last week and runs parallel to a more comprehensive restructuring of the department. It was not announced how long the hiring freeze will last.

According to insider sources, there may be exceptions to the external hiring freeze, but these must be expressly approved by Alexandr Wang, the head of Meta's AI department.

A Meta spokesperson confirmed the hiring freeze and explained that the months - long recruitment of AI talents will build a solid organizational structure for Meta's new super - intelligence project.

According to a report from foreign media, a memorandum sent to the human resources department contained the following key information:

Meta decides to stop all hiring in the MSL teams, except for business - critical positions.

This allows management to carefully consider the personnel growth program for the year 2026 during strategy development.

Each hiring for a business - critical position will be evaluated on a case - by - case basis by Alex's team.

While hiring has been stopped, investment continues.

Alexandr Wang recently wrote on social media that the company "is investing more and more in the Meta Super Intelligence Lab".

Currently, there are a total of four teams in Meta AI, all of which are subordinate to the "Meta Super Intelligence Lab":

The first is the TBD Lab, which focuses on super - intelligence;

The second team is responsible for AI products;

The third team deals with infrastructure;

The fourth team focuses on longer - term and more exploratory projects. It is called "Fundamental AI Research" and remains essentially unchanged during the restructuring.

Previously, Meta had a team named "AGI Foundations", which was responsible for the development of the latest version of the large language model Llama.

After the release of the latest generation of the Llama model in the spring of this year, the team was criticized by company management because the performance of the model did not meet expectations and was dissolved during the restructuring.

Around Meta's recent stock - assignment day (August 15), at least three former members of the AGI - Foundations team have announced internally that they will resign.

Right after the release of the Llama model in April, Mark Zuckerberg personally participated in the recruitment of AI researchers.

By mid - August, Meta had successfully recruited over 20 researchers and engineers from OpenAI, at least 13 from Google, 3 from Apple, 3 from xAI, 2 from Anthropic for the project. The total number of new employees is over 50.

Apple has held confidential talks with Google and could redesign Siri with Gemini

For Apple, this wave of personnel loss brings more unrest to its already strenuously advancing AI project.

This change, together with Pang Ruoming's departure, has severely hit Apple's AI model team and further intensified the personnel loss.

It was reported that Apple recently contacted Google to negotiate about creating a customized AI model as the technical basis for the new version of Siri next year.

According to insider sources, Google has started training a model that can run on Apple's servers.

This is part of Apple's efforts to catch up in the field of generative AI.

Apple started late in the AI field and has also lacked sustainability. Cooperation with third - party AI models may have been in the works at Apple for a long time.

Earlier this year, Apple also considered cooperation with Anthropic and OpenAI and evaluated the possibility of using Claude or ChatGPT as the new "brain" for Siri.

Source references:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-22/meta-poaches-apple-ai-executive-frank-chu-even-as-it-plans-hiring-slowdown%20

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/22/apple-loses-another-key-ai-leader-to-meta/%20https://www.linkedin.com/in/frank-chu-348488a/%20

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/08/21/zuckerberg-freezes-ai-hiring-amid-bubble-fears/%20

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-ai-hiring-freeze-fda6b3c4?st=GwQLzL

This article is from the WeChat account "New Intelligence Yuan", author: Yuanyu Haokun, published by 36Kr with permission.