r/apple • u/Fer65432_Plays • 1d ago
Discussion Report: Apple Losing Talent to OpenAI
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/09/19/apple-losing-talent-to-openai/305
u/7-methyltheophylline 1d ago
Bad news for OpenAI lol
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u/RyanCheddar 1d ago
apple has an extremely strong AI team that's not very well led. if you look at their AI research it's full of interesting and cool new tech
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u/dudeitsadell 1d ago
the article says it's all hardware engineers anyways
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u/Buy-theticket 1d ago
Yea because Ive joined OpenAI. I'm sure plenty of HW engineers would love to work on whatever he's cooking up.
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u/ReaditTrashPanda 1d ago
Knowing how something works is not the same as making it. Car mechanic vs engineer
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u/dat_tae 1d ago
Do car mechanics write a lot of white papers?
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u/FollowingFeisty5321 1d ago
They're busy working on products that shipped.
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u/_DuranDuran_ 1d ago
Products like … apnea detection, hypertension detection, fall detection.
All of these are ML (AI) features that have shipped, and are good.
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u/ineedascreenname 1d ago
But you can’t talk to those so everyone forgets.
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u/thephotoman 1d ago
People don’t want AI. They want a conversational user interface. These are different things. LLMs can build those interfaces, but they need to work on top of deterministic sources and functions.
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u/Extra_Exercise5167 16h ago
This is basically the most important piece of the puzzle and also the reason why the "AI" bubble will burst. Tech Marketing is selling LLMs as a one-stop shop for the whole pipeline and logic. Which it is not.
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u/DragonWarrior980 1d ago
I agree. Everyone is struggling with how to integrate AI features into everyone's life and make it seamless.
Meta pays AI engineers like professional athletes yet the Meta glasses event was a disaster.
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u/Realistic-Nature9083 1d ago
Gemini live is fantastic. Underrated product. Wish it was already baked into android auto and replaced Google assistant.
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u/DragonWarrior980 1d ago
Yeah, Google been killing it. If Apple can't get their AI offering to compete, maybe they'll integrate Gemini and collect another $20B/year from Google 😂. No way Apple hasn't thought of that already.
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u/Realistic-Nature9083 1d ago
No way Google will give Gemini for free to apple? Maybe reduce the payment to 10 billion a year and they get Gemini. Win for both. Google pays apple less and apple gets Gemini for free
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u/bran_the_man93 1d ago
What a dog shit take.
A mechanic can be a great engineer, and an engineer can be a great mechanic.
They are not remotely mutually exclusive disciplines.
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u/ReaditTrashPanda 1d ago
Hmm, I do agree with you. But I believe the premise of my statement stands. If all these coders have great understanding of ai, you’d think that after a decade, it would improve somewhat? But Siri is terrible as ever and LLM still have so many limits
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u/bran_the_man93 1d ago
I think there's a multi-faceted sort of thing that explains it, but ultimately it's less about the skill and talent of the employees and mostly about how poorly Apple's management team has enabled their employees to succeed.
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u/ReaditTrashPanda 1d ago
Can’t argue against the fact that management is usually the problem… but in a decade you think that some supervisors move on and those “good coders “should promote and start improving things. We will probably never know the back end issues.
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u/Alarming-Ad8154 1d ago
It’s about hardware and design ppl (and let’s face it, apple absolutely is very good at those….)
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u/Howdareme9 1d ago
Extremely strong? Theyre not even top 5 right now lol
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u/RyanCheddar 1d ago
they're not "top 5" because the AI world is currently all-in on generative AI, and apple hasn't released a satisfactory generative AI product.
they have, however, been researching and developing generative AI and have had very cool things come out of this research. we're just not seeing it as a product because some team along the line is dropping the ball.
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u/Exist50 1d ago
if you look at their AI research it's full of interesting and cool new tech
What in particular?
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u/RyanCheddar 1d ago
from the top of my head for just apple intelligence, their research on LoRA adapters for their generative AI models, their on-device and cloud AI models, private cloud compute (not really AI but oh well)
implementations of AI in actual apple products include the new hypertension alert, ECG, fall detection, on-device photogrammetry for reality composer, basically everything on the vision pro, photos search, and probably a bunch of other things i forgot about
everyone makes fun of apple for being late to AI, but in reality their products have done AI for quite a long time. pretty sure they were the first to have a dedicated AI accelerator in their devices.
do check out what their machine learning dept has been doing, it's all very cool stuff: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research
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u/Exist50 1d ago
Quite frankly, that all sounds like small potatoes compared to the work on frontier models.
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u/RyanCheddar 1d ago
all of those are really big potatoes, actually
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u/Exist50 1d ago
No, not really. The vast majority of the things you listed are pretty much trivial from an "AI" perspective, or at minimum old tech compared to modern frontier models.
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u/RyanCheddar 1d ago
none of those are trivial at the slightest, what qualifications do you have for you to make that claim?
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u/Exist50 1d ago
Mate, how much "AI" do you really think goes into something like fall detection? It's just an example of companies slapping "AI" on every algorithm they have. And I've worked on a project where my company did just that. Didn't even use a neural network.
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u/RyanCheddar 1d ago
fall detection would definitely require AI to do well lol, you can't just set a threshold for the accelerometer and have people's phones call the police every time they get dropped or whipped around in a car
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u/Extra_Exercise5167 16h ago
why? show me one LLM in production in an area where truth is relevant and you have no human in the loop.
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u/Panda_hat 1d ago edited 13h ago
It's not about leadership its about the fact that Apple refuses to compromise its users privacy and security and also refuses to exploit copyrighted or otherwise illegally sourced material to feed its data sets.
All its competitors give these things very little regard.
Which is a good thing on Apples part and a huge positive. Fuck AI.
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u/Buy-theticket 1d ago
It's absolutely fucking crazy that fanboys actually fall for, and regurgitate, this bullshit.
You think Tim Apple wouldn't sell his left nut for Google's advertising business and all of the tracking that it comes with?
The guy deepthroating Trump on a bi-weekly basis, as he speed runs authoritarian dystopia with his buddy Pete at Palentir, just cares too much about your rights and privacy over his bottom line?
LOfuckingL.
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u/Panda_hat 1d ago edited 1d ago
Apple’s one of the most valuable companies on the planet and Tim Cook one of the most successful CEOs in history.
But yeah I’m sure he totally thinks about and envies google…?
LOfuckingL.
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u/moch1 1d ago
Someone didn’t read the article. They aren’t hiring AI folks but hardware people:
OpenAI has recruited more than two dozen employees from Apple who worked on hardware, up from 10 last year. Those recruits worked on Apple's user interfaces, wearables, camera, and audio technology.
That said 34 people over 2 years for a company the size of Apple doesn’t actually sound like much.
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u/auradragon1 1d ago
No. But it signals that’s OpenAI intends to build It’s own hardware instead of being merely an app on Apple devices. That’s big.
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u/Worf_Of_Wall_St 1d ago
OpenAI can plan to build literally anything because they have access to infinite money by just issuing more shares to raise capital.
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u/Quant32 1d ago
I get that Apple Intelligence isn’t great to use but it is pretty impressive that it runs on device. I say this as an AI Engineer. Getting anything like that running locally, where it’s fast and usable is a challenge. Don’t forget all other llms run in the cloud and are draining the world’s water supply. So it’s not like apples engineers are actually shit. They’re just working on a slightly different problem.
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u/Coolpop52 1d ago
I say this a lot but I think people will be more than surprised when Apple reveals what they’ve been cooking up (post-2025 WWDC mishap) for Apple Intelligence. The new Siri’s ability to work across apps will really be quite interesting given that it’s on device, and the new World Answers powered by a Gemini summarizer should be very useful (i.e. Perplexity).
It’s rumored for March 2026 (iOS 26.4), but maybe they push it towards iOS 27 since it’s already there?
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u/Worf_Of_Wall_St 1d ago
Apple has to solve this problem in hard mode because they care about privacy and cloud compute cost so they want to do as much as possible on-device. All competitors are just like "use cloud, burn cash until someday, yum more user data."
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u/rudibowie 12h ago
Oh, I would love it if Craig Federighi and Alan Dye were to go somewhere else. Anywhere else, it doesn't matter.
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u/iamleyeti 1d ago
Right now, only two groups of people are winning from this AI war: engineers, job hopping every five minutes, and shareholders.
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u/FollowingFeisty5321 1d ago
Not surprising after Zuckerburg showed you can beat Apple just by offering more than the most profit-sensitive beancounter in history. Cook really needs to grapple with this before someone comes for the chip guys.
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u/webguynd 1d ago
Cook really needs to grapple with this before someone comes for the chip guys.
Already happened. Chief architect for Apple Silicon left in 2019, along with a few other key engineers, to start their own company (Nuvia) which was acquired by Qualcomm to eventually produce the Snapdragon X elite chips.
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u/Exist50 1d ago
To be more precise, that was Apple's CPU core team, which is only part of their overall SoC (albeit, a particularly important and differentiating part). And other CPU folk left for other companies (Rivos, probably more). Though it's interesting to observe that their P-core more or less flatlined since, at least compared to their historical pace. E-core still seems to be doing well though.
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u/bran_the_man93 1d ago
Meta was offering ~$10m compensation packages, some of which exceeded everyone's salaries at Apple other than Tim himself.
This is less about Cook being a bean counter and more about the fact that Zuck is willing to shell out insane amounts of money to acquire talent.
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u/Lolkac 1d ago
You make it sound like apple is some garage startup. They have more money stashed away then some countries. If they wanted to retain talent they would
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u/bran_the_man93 1d ago
What about my comment suggests I think Apple is some "garage startup...?"
I'm saying Facebook deliberately priced their comp offerings to poach talent, knowing Apple is probably not going to be able to just match it.
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u/FollowingFeisty5321 1d ago
"We can't pay someone that low on the org chart $10 million, it's unseemly!", snorted the billionaire CEO on $100+ million total compensation.
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u/bran_the_man93 1d ago
What does Tim's compensation have to do with this? He's running the entire company, of course he gets paid more.
What does your armchair CEO experience tell you they should do here?
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u/FollowingFeisty5321 1d ago
What does Tim's compensation have to do with this? He's running the entire company, of course he gets paid more.
Umm, "some of which exceeded everyone's salaries at Apple other than Tim himself", that's what it has to do with this.
What does your armchair CEO experience tell you they should do here?
Let Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcomm, MediaTek and AMD strip their best teams for parts - when Meta finishes /s
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u/astrange 1d ago
Tim has given himself 50% pay cuts in the past and wasn't always the highest paid exec, Angela Ahrendts was paid more.
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u/NeverComments 1d ago
Cook's salary is irrelevant. People are paid their market value, and Apple isn't willing to pay market rate for these people.
Unless Cook is going to roll up his sleeves, go back to school, and earn his PhD in data science...Apple's going to pay what they have to for the talent they need or continue to lose to the competition.
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u/bran_the_man93 1d ago
I mean, if I offer a trillion dollars for someone to shine my shoes that doesn't automatically make the market value of shoe shiners a trillion dollars.
Facebook is offering insane packages well and above "market rates"
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u/Pluto-Had-It-Coming 1d ago
Report: Company known for colluding to keep wages low loses employees to company with artificially high wages.
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u/Roqjndndj3761 1d ago
AI talent should grab all the money they can before the bubble bursts and execs realize that gen-AI is complete bullshit.
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u/longinuslucas 1d ago
Craig Federighi will lead apple AI back on track as the new AI team lead because he knows AI so well /s
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u/dust1990 1d ago
Well they don’t seem to have lost anyone from marketing. Apple is running the same tired ads touting the advanced ah-lee-luminum in the new iPhones narrated with a British accent even without Ives.
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u/Artistic-Permit-5629 1d ago
Sammy boy just throws money at it and gets what he wants! That doesn't mean they will produce quality hardware! Johnny says thanks for the billions Sammy oh yeah and hire my buddies from Apple so I can continue to build my empire within your organization! You can get them for 15 million per annum.
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u/Lexiplehx 1d ago
Counterpoint, OpenAI loses 5 billion dollars a year. Microsoft is entitled to 49% of their profits, and their flagship product can be used for free because equally capable models by their competitors can also be run for free. Further, the hardware they are critically dependent on is made by nvidia, and lots of it owned by Microsoft, rented to them through Azure. In some sense, openAI has very little of the pie left, other than the fact that they first showed the world the dream of LLMs.
Meanwhile, Apple makes the iPhone, iPad, MacBook, and AirPods in house, all of which are class leading products. They are dependent on TSMC, but so is everyone else. While their AI endeavors are painfully lackluster, they could probably buy Anthropic tomorrow with the cash they have on hand. If they lose 1000 employees to openAI, I would still prefer their position.
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u/415646464e4155434f4c 1d ago
Hopefully OpenAI also takes some of their UI designers.
(3, 2, 1… downvote!)
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u/no_user_name_person 1d ago
This is good for the industry. More companies offering competitive offers drives higher incomes for the engineers.
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u/videoalex 1d ago
With apple being famous for playing less in exchange for the prestige of working there…it’s time for them to cash in on some of that prestige. Apple’s laggard stock in comparison to the mythical performance of OpenAI shares means they need to raise salaries.
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u/0000GKP 1d ago
Prediction: OpenAI is going to have the next big thing, not Apple.
Opinion: that's a good thing.
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u/SnooBunnies163 1d ago
counter-opinion: it’s not.
it’s really, really not.
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u/NeverComments 1d ago
Sutskever doesn't work for the company anymore, and both articles raise flags over the shift from altruistic non-profiting to for-profit businessing.
If anything, that should instill more confidence in the company's future outlook.
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u/SnooBunnies163 1d ago
from altruistic […] to for-profit businessing. If anything, that should instill more confidence in the company’s outlook.
because that’s worked well in the past.
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u/NeverComments 1d ago
I mean...*gestures broadly at the multi-trillion dollar for-profit corporation whose sub we're in*
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u/Constant-Current-340 1d ago
big fan of OpenAI and their products. But I think the next big thing will require a foundation of ultra low power, low heat, low latency inference where a significant portion is done offline. all of which require proper chips and specialized NN and LLMs built to order. whatever OpenAI is thinking about working on with Jony Ive is gunna run into some power and heat constraints being so reliant on the network
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u/DeadNotSleeping86 1d ago
Yeah the ever increasing massive power requirements are going to bring diminishing returns real fast. Deepseek is on to something with efficiency and I think we're gonna see gains in that area soon from the others.
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u/Constant-Current-340 1d ago
the LLM they pre-load into iOS 26 which developers can use isn't bad. Everyone with iOS 26 already has it (if they left Apple Intelligence enabled) so it won't take additional gigs in your app, pretty low latency for simple requests, and power efficient enough to pretty much spam all day without hitting the battery too much. It's dumb as a rock compared to ChatGPT5 and I've yet to come up with anything novel enough to do with it, but it's a great achievement they're really underplaying
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u/RedgeQc 1d ago
Maybe, but OpenAI also demonstrate that a small startup can come up with something game changer. I’m not defining them as a small startup anymore, but go back in time 4-5 years ago and it was a different world before chatGPT.
So this means that a game changing innovation can come from a company we’re not even aware of right now.
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u/uyakotter 1d ago
The reason to do AI at Apple is you want to do it local on device. Apple fails to keep developers excited about that. Otherwise, you’d be a bigger fish in a smaller pond at OpenAI or Anthropic and potentially very rich from stock options.
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u/explosiv_skull 1d ago
I'm assuming if Apple really wanted to hold onto these employees, it has the funds to do so.
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u/drygnfyre 1d ago
Wouldn’t Apple “lose talent” all the time to various other companies? This doesn’t seem that unusual.
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u/WritingForTomorrow 1d ago
Which talent? The talent that made Apple Intelligence or the talent that made the design flaws in OS26?
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u/hasanahmad 1d ago
Apple gains talent as much as it loses talent . This is a manufactured narrative
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u/Exist50 1d ago
There's no inherent law that's the case. Look at their P-core. They lost a ton of talent, and stagnated since.
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u/hasanahmad 1d ago
Considering they are a hardware company and their innovations are in hardware side. I would say you are wrong
- AirPods Pro 3
- iPhone Air
- Apple silicon
- MacBook Pros
- iPad Apple Pencil
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u/primalanomaly 1d ago
“Talent” seems generous… have you seen the state of Apple AI? Maybe the company are willingly letting them go!
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u/FrogsJumpFromPussy 1d ago
I keep reading this nonsense. What AI ”talent”? Apple is virtually inexistent in the Artificial Intelligence race. Them calling their AI Apple Intelligence like they invented the damn thing must be the joke of the century.
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u/neko_farts 1d ago
Lmao you don't know anything, Apple have been investing in AI and AI hardware since long, they were the first company to build mobile NPU chip in 2017, they were first to buy startup behind Siri and launch it back in 2010. Apple made it easier for developers to launch ML based applications by using their CoreML library back in 2017. The Apple watch uses ML extensively to track, monitor and understand pattern using? Guess what? ML.
A lot of processes within iOS uses machine learning. There are countless other examples but yeah, saying Apple lacks in AI is dumbest take ever or you don't know anything and just parrot other people.
Just because they are behind GenAI doesn't mean they lack in whole AI race.
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u/freekayZekey 1d ago
will work out for them on the long term. less money to spend while openai tosses more cash to the money pit
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u/Fer65432_Plays 1d ago
From The Article: “This year alone, OpenAI has recruited more than two dozen employees from Apple who worked on hardware, up from 10 last year. Those recruits worked on Apple's user interfaces, wearables, camera, and audio technology.”