The Chinese director of Apple's AI department has jumped to Meta, resulting in another departure from the core team. As a result, Cook is forced to turn to Google for help.

Apple's AI has suffered another major setback as core engineer Frank Chu is reported to have joined Meta! Meanwhile, after spending a fortune to recruit over 50 top talents, Meta has announced an emergency freeze on hiring.

Frank Chu, the AI engineering director at Apple, is reported to have joined Meta.

He will work in a new team at MSL Infra, responsible for AI infrastructure - related matters.

This is one of the most significant losses faced by Apple's AI project since Pang Ruoming, the creator of Apple's model team, was poached by Meta with a compensation package worth $200 million.

A Key Figure in Apple's AI, Who Once Led Model Training and Deployment

After Pang Ruoming, the former head of Apple's AI model team, top - notch experts such as Tom Gunter, Mark Lee, Bowen Zhang, and Yun Zhu have successively left Apple to join Meta.

Frank Chu's switch makes him at least the sixth employee in the AI model field to defect from Apple to Meta.

In 2019, Frank Chu joined Apple as a technical director.

During his time at Apple, he was a capable deputy to Benoit Dupin, an AI infrastructure executive, and Dupin reported directly to John Giannandrea, the company's AI strategy director.

Technically, he not only led the inference deployment of Apple's Foundation Model (AFM) and open - source large language models on public clouds but also took the lead in the data pre - training work of Apple's foundation model, providing all the tokens required for model pre - training to the AFM team.

At the same time, he also led the search platform team, providing core search technology support for Apple's products such as Siri, Safari, Apple Music, Apple TV, and the App Store.

Before joining Apple, Frank Chu held key technical positions at several top global technology companies.

He was the technical director at Waymo for nearly four years, where he built and led Waymo's training infrastructure (over 2000 TPUs) from scratch. This platform was used by all teams in the company for large - scale training of perception, path planning, and other models.

He was a software engineer at Google Search for nearly 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 Spending Heavily to Poach Over 50 People, Meta Freezes Hiring Urgently

Although Frank Chu has just started his new job, in fact, after spending several months and billions of dollars to recruit over 50 AI researchers and engineers, Meta has frozen hiring in its artificial intelligence department.

The ban also prohibits cross - team transfers of existing employees within the department. This hiring freeze took effect last week and is synchronized with a broader reorganization of the department. The company has not communicated how long this freeze will last.

People familiar with the matter said that there may be exceptions to the external hiring ban, but they must be specially approved by Meta's Chief AI Officer, Alexandr Wang.

A Meta spokesperson confirmed the freeze and said that this months - long AI talent recruitment will build a solid organizational structure for Meta's new super - intelligence project.

Currently, according to foreign media reports, a memo received by HR reveals the following key information:

Meta has decided to suspend all hiring for MSL teams, except for business - critical positions.

This move will allow leadership to carefully plan the employee growth plan for 2026 as we formulate our strategy.

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

Although hiring has stopped, the investment pace has not slowed down.

Alexandr Wang recently posted on social media that the company is "making more and more investments in the Meta Super - Intelligence Lab."

Currently, Meta AI has four teams, all belonging to the "Meta Super - Intelligence Lab":

The first is the TBD Lab dedicated to super - intelligence;

The second is responsible for AI products;

The third is in charge of infrastructure;

The fourth focuses on longer - term and more exploratory projects. It is called the "Fundamental AI Research" department and remains largely unchanged in this reorganization.

Previously, Meta had a team called the "AGI Foundations," which was responsible for developing the company's latest version of the large language model, Llama.

However, after the latest generation of the Llama model was released this spring, due to its under - performance, the team was criticized by executives and disbanded in this reorganization.

Around Meta's recent stock grant date (August 15th), at least three former members of the AGI Foundations team announced their departure internally.

It was after the release of the Llama model in April that Zuckerberg began to personally recruit AI researchers.

As of mid - August, Meta has successfully poached over 20 researchers and engineers from OpenAI, at least 13 from Google, 3 from Apple, 3 from xAI, and 2 from Anthropic for this project, with the total number of new employees exceeding 50.

Apple in Talks with Google, May Use Gemini to Revamp Siri

For Apple, this wave of talent exodus has brought more turmoil to its already struggling AI project.

This change, combined with Pang Ruoming's departure, has had a huge impact on Apple's AI model team and further exacerbated the talent drain.

It is reported that Apple has recently contacted Google to discuss building a customized AI model as the technical basis for the new version of Siri next year.

People familiar with the matter said that Google has started training a model that can run on Apple's servers.

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

Apple started late in the AI field and has had weak subsequent development. Collaborating with third - party AI models may have been in the works within Apple for some time.

Earlier this year, Apple also explored partnerships with Anthropic and OpenAI, evaluating the possibility of Claude or ChatGPT as the new "brain" for Siri.

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 public account "New Intelligence Yuan", author: Yuanyu Haokun. Republished by 36Kr with permission.