Meta Platforms is escalating the race for artificial-intelligence talent, offering former Apple executive Ruoming Pang a compensation package exceeding $200 million to join its newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs, according to multiple reports. Pang led Apple’s foundation-models group, a roughly 100-person team that developed large language models used across Siri and other Apple services. The blockbuster deal is part of a broader hiring blitz directed by Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg. Meta has already recruited more than 10 researchers from OpenAI and specialists from Anthropic, Google and other rivals, with some candidates said to receive signing bonuses of about $100 million and total pay packages reaching $300 million over four years. Zuckerberg has also promised unrestricted access to advanced chips to entice researchers eager for computing power. Meta’s talent offensive follows its $14.3 billion purchase of a 49 percent stake in data-labeling firm Scale AI and the appointment of Scale founder Alexandr Wang as chief AI officer. OpenAI chief Sam Altman has criticised Meta’s poaching tactics, while LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman argues that outsized pay is justified given the potential economic impact of frontier AI breakthroughs. The bidding war underscores the mounting cost of attracting the small pool of experts capable of advancing systems approaching super-human intelligence.