Meta Snags Another Senior Apple AI Exec for Superintelligence Labs as it Mulls Hiring Freeze

Meta Platforms Inc. has hired another senior Apple Inc. executive from its artificial intelligence division, even as the social networking giant prepares to slow down recruitment at its AI lab.

Frank Chu, who led Apple teams working on cloud infrastructure, training and search, will join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL), according to people familiar with the matter. At Apple, Chu managed the running of large language models on the company’s cloud servers, oversaw some model training, and contributed to the development of search features for Siri and Apple’s entertainment services.

Chu is the sixth known member of Apple’s AI models team to defect to Meta. The string of departures began in July, when team founder Ruoming Pang left Apple for a reported $200 million package at Meta. He was soon followed by engineers Tom Gunter, Mark Lee, Bowen Zhang, and Yun Zhu.

Given his wide-ranging responsibilities, Chu is seen as the most significant departure after Pang. He worked closely with Benoit Dupin, Apple’s head of AI infrastructure, who reports directly to John Giannandrea, the company’s AI strategy chief.

Frank Chu’s Job Role

At Meta, Chu will take on a role in a new team called MSL Infra, which focuses on AI infrastructure. The unit is part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s push to assemble a “superteam” of AI talent under the leadership of Alexandr Wang, the former Scale AI CEO who now oversees Meta’s AI operations. Zuckerberg has also personally recruited from rivals including OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.

However, despite the wave of hiring, Meta has begun slowing recruitment after heavy spending on its Superintelligence group. In an internal memo to hiring managers seen by Bloomberg, the company said it would pause hiring across all MSL teams, except for business-critical roles, to allow leadership to plan 2026 headcount growth more carefully. Wang, meanwhile, emphasized in a social media post that Meta is “investing more and more into Meta Superintelligence Labs.”

For Apple, the departures deepen existing challenges. The company has already faced delays in its ambitious Siri overhaul and is weighing the use of third-party AI models to power the assistant after years of developing its own. Pang’s exit and Apple’s uncertain strategy have rattled its AI division, sparking the broader talent drain.