Alan Dye, the design executive who led Apple’s user interface team for the last decade, is leaving the company to join Meta. This news comes from a report by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
This hire is a significant move for Meta as the company pushes further into consumer devices like smart glasses and virtual reality headsets. At Meta, Dye will focus on improving AI features in these devices and will report directly to Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth.
At Apple, Dye will be replaced by Steve Lemay. Apple CEO Tim Cook stated that Lemay has had a key role in the design of every major Apple interface since 1999.
Meta appears to be recruiting heavily from its competitors to bolster its position in the AI race. The company also poached researchers from OpenAI earlier this summer. In a notable anecdote from that recruitment effort, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg allegedly hand-delivered homemade soup to an OpenAI employee. OpenAI’s chief research officer, Mark Chen, said he has since delivered his own soup to promising Meta recruits.
Shortly after the news of Dye’s departure broke, Zuckerberg announced a new creative studio within Reality Labs that will be led by Dye. He will be joined there by several other prominent designers, including Billy Sorrentino, another former Apple designer who led interface design across Reality Labs; Joshua To, who also led interface design across Reality Labs; Meta’s industrial design team, led by Pete Bristol; and its metaverse design and art teams led by Jason Rubin.
Zuckerberg said the studio would bring together design, fashion, and technology to define the next generation of the company’s products and experiences. On Threads, the Meta CEO wrote that their idea is to treat intelligence as a new design material and imagine what becomes possible when it is abundant, capable, and human-centered. He stated they plan to elevate design within Meta and pull together a talented group with a combination of craft, creative vision, systems thinking, and deep experience building iconic products that bridge hardware and software.
This article was updated after publication with additional information about Meta’s plans.