Meta poaches Apple's top AI researcher amid growing internal turmoil at Apple
Jul 8, 2025
Key Points
- Meta hires one of Apple's top AI researchers, marking a significant departure that signals internal turmoil at Apple over its AI strategy.
- OpenAI spends $733,000 per employee annually in stock compensation, 119% of revenue, forcing Meta and other tech giants into an unsustainable talent arms race.
- Meta competes directly with OpenAI for consumer attention as ChatGPT users spend hours daily on the platform, threatening Meta's core social business.
Summary
Meta hired one of Apple's top AI researchers, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. He describes the departing researcher as Apple's most respected AI researcher and engineer, suggesting the loss carries real technical and organizational weight. The move signals growing internal turmoil at Apple around its AI strategy and underscores the intense talent war playing out across AI companies competing for scarce senior research talent.
Compensation at scale
OpenAI is spending $4.4 billion on stock-based compensation across 6,000 employees, an average of $733,000 per person annually. That stock spend represents 119% of OpenAI's total revenue, nearly three times the rate at other public companies. Google spent 16% of pre-IPO revenue on stock compensation, and Facebook only 6%.
The gap reflects how expensive it is to compete with entrenched tech giants. OpenAI is the first credible threat to Google's search monopoly, which means it has to spend at levels well beyond a typical startup just to retain talent against companies with trillion-dollar market caps.
OpenAI's total compute costs this year are forecast to reach $6 billion. Add in the stock dilution, and talent retention has become nearly as expensive as the inference costs themselves. Investors now face mounting dilution risks, plus unresolved legal exposure from a potential Elon Musk settlement.
Meta is competing on the same stage. OpenAI is becoming a threat to consumer attention, with users spending many hours daily in ChatGPT, a dynamic that threatens Meta's core social platform business. The hiring of Apple's AI talent is one visible move in a much broader and expensive war for AI supremacy across the Magnificent Seven.