Meta continues poaching high-profile executives from Apple’s AI team for its Superintelligence group. The latest hire is Ke Yang, who Apple recently appointed to lead its Answers, Knowledge and Information team.
The team is making an “answer engine” that will crawl to web to answer simple search queries.
Another high-profile exit from Apple’s AI team
In the last few months, Meta has poached several of Apple’s top AI brains. This includes Ruoming Pang, who managed Apple’s foundation models team, and Bowen Zhang, a crucial multimodal AI researcher.
In August, a report detailed that Apple assembled a new internal team, “Answers, Knowledge and Information,” to develop a ChatGPT-like search tool. The team operates under John Giannandrea, Apple’s current AI head. Robby Walker initially led the team before Ke Yang stepped in to take charge after his exit.
“Within AIML, Yang was regarded as the most prominent executive working on the new Siri initiative. His exit ranks among the biggest departures from Apple’s AI organization this year — a period marked by a steady exodus of top researchers building the company’s AI core models,” says the Bloomberg report.
The AKI group’s work will play a foundational role in powering the revamped Siri. But such high-profile departures will derail Apple’s progress on this matter.
The company is already behind Google, OpenAI and others in the AI race, and it now risks falling behind further.
Will key AI departures push back Apple’s smarter Siri launch?
With Yang’s departure, Apple’s AI team has lost almost 12 members. Their departure will have a domino effect, with other executives also likely to leave in the coming months.
Meta is poaching top AI experts from Apple, OpenAI and Anthropic by offering them packages worth tens of millions of dollars per year.
Benoit Dupin will take over the AKI team’s leadership following Yang’s departure.
With these key departures, it’s uncertain whether Apple can stay on track to unveil its revamped, AI-powered Siri in early 2026 as planned.
