Bloomberg reports that Apple has lost a fourth person from their foundation models group to Meta. Apple is giving raises to the existing team members but they likely pale in comparison to Zuck’s poaching offers (some reportedly in the hundred million range).

Apple is not in the frontier model race, but they still need to be developing their own models for a lot of reasons. To me this feels like just further evidence that Apple needs to make some sort of deal to partner with a frontier model (as Microsoft did with ChatGPT) or start making some acquisitions if, for nothing else, the talent.

I think Apple should be willing to license somebody else’s model if that’s what it takes to fix Siri, even temporarily. In light of all of this poaching, I expect that is only more the case now.