Apple CEO Tim Cook is about to take over one of the most significant parts of Apple’s business: its design team. The team currently reports to COO Jeff Williams, but once Williams begins his just-announced retirement “late in the year,” the design team “will then transition to reporting directly to Cook,” Apple says.

Apple’s chief operating officer plans to hand the role off this month and retire later this year after roughly a decade as the tech giant’s No. 2 under Chief Executive Tim Cook.

The major departure, the most significant in Apple’s AI ranks since the company started working on Apple Intelligence a few years ago, underscores the heightened competition for talent in the

Bloomberg reports that Mark Zuckerberg’s latest high-priced AI hire is Apple’s foundation AI model leader, Ruoming Pang, based on an offer worth “tens of millions of dollars per year,” plus Yuanzhi Li from OpenAI and Anton Bakhtin from Anthropic.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been offering AI engineers massive pay packages to poach them from other companies, and a key Apple engineering