After a chase that lasted months, OpenAI has finally poached AI infrastructure expert Ruoming Pang from Meta Platforms Inc. With his third big jump in the industry within 12 months (from Apple Inc. to Meta and now from Meta to OpenAI), Pang is slowly becoming every tech giant's dream catch.
Meta had offered a $200 million compensation package to hire him as an AI Research Scientist. Before joining Meta in July 2025, Pang was Apple's former head for its AI models team, where he founded models.
He worked under the position of 'Senior Distinguished Software Engineer' for Apple for a period of four years from August 2021 to July 2025, according to his LinkedIn page.
ALSO READ: Govt Sticks To 'Three-Hour Takedown' Norm In Meeting With Big Tech Firms
He spent the longest stint of his professional career at Google, where he was co-founder, co-team leader on projects such as 'Bigtable Index' and 'ZipIt' from 2006-2012.
He then went on to co-found Zanzibar, Google's global consistent authorisation system along with Abhishek Parmar and Zhifeng Chen in 2012. Pang served as sole team leader from 2014-2017 for Zanzibar.
From 2017, he led Google Brain's speech recognition research and product engagement. He served as co-lead on the project with Yonghui Wu and Zhifeng Chen.
Pang worked on development of the Babelfish/Lingvo framework, which is the most heavily used deep learning framework by tensor processing unit usage at Google, ahead of AdBrain and DeepMind.
He was also a key contributor to Tacotron 2, a text-to-speech system for Google.
Pang pursued a Bachelor of Science degree from 1995-1998 from the University Of Shanghai Jiao Tong, then pursued a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University Of Southern California, and a Phd in Computer Science from the year 2000-2006.
ALSO READ: India's New AI Rules: MeitY Mandates Deepfake Labels But Scraps 10% Labelling Threshold
Essential Business Intelligence, Continuous LIVE TV, Sharp Market Insights, Practical Personal Finance Advice and Latest Stories — On NDTV Profit.
