Meta now notching another name and its expensive hunt for AI talent poaching a top Apple executive for reportedly tens of millions of dollars.

But is the spending starting to stack up? Deirdre Boza digs into that for today's tech check. Hi, Dee.

Hey, guys. Good morning. So Wells Fargo calls it Zuckerberg Steinbrenner moment. Of course, that's a reference to the Yankees

owner who famously spent whatever it took to win, signing the biggest names, writing blank

checks, daring anyone to outbid him. Now, that is what Zuckerberg is doing in AI right now. He's

not just buying GPUs, but people. And the latest comes from Apple. His name is Roaming Pung, the researcher

who came from Google before then. He led a 100-person team that builds LLMs, powering Apple

intelligence. Now, you could call this a pull from the minor leagues. Apple wasn't exactly seen as a

hotbed for talent, but Zuckerberg saw something that the rest of the

field did not.

The rest of the league overlooked, and he paid up.

A source tells me that Pang was probably the top guy at Apple, though not a household

name.

However, spending big doesn't always guarantee wins.

Talent without cohesion can quickly become chaos and Zuckerberg has brought

in a lot of big personalities. The highest profile of which there's Alexander Wang, Nat Friedman,

Daniel Gross. They come from the product side, not academia. But inside Meta's new super

intelligence unit, they now outrank some of the most decorated names in AI.

28-year-old Wang, for example, he sits on par or possibly even above Yan Le Kun.

He is a founding father of deep learning and Meta's longtime chief AI scientist.

The question now, though, isn't whether Zuckerberg can outspend the field.

It's whether Meta still knows what it's building and why.

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