Ruoming Pang recently accepted a pay package of more than US$200 million over several years. He’s not an athlete, or a movie star, but a new member of Meta’s “superintelligence” team.
What happened: Per Bloomberg News, in hiring one of Apple’s top AI executives, Meta has intensified a rivalry between tech companies in the growing push to unlock AI systems that can complete tasks as well as or better than humans, otherwise known as artificial general intelligence.
- That pay package is reportedly in line with other major hires for the new team, including former GitHub chief Nat Friedman and AI startup founder Daniel Gross.
- But much of the compensation is in stock options or tied to performance targets and tenure, meaning that pay might be docked if an employee leaves early or if the stock doesn’t perform well.
Why it matters: The superintelligence group has some of the highest compensation of any corporate job, including CEO roles at the world’s major banks. According to a report by the Vector Institute, AI leaders in Canada say high U.S. salaries have created barriers for hiring.
Big picture: Unusually high compensation offers have become more common as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg continues to recruit researchers from OpenAI (10 have left for Meta), as well as top researchers and engineers from Anthropic, Google, and other startups.