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.
Apple’s team is making an “answer engine” that will crawl the web to answer simple search queries.
Another high-profile exit from Apple’s AI team
Artificial intelligence is all the rage right now, transforming workflows and culture — and propelling AI companies’ stock prices into the stratosphere. Apple’s Siri, introduced in 2011 on the iPhone 4s, served as an early example of how a digital assistant could make life easier for users.
But Apple squandered its lead, and now the company is under the gun to prove it can compete with the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. After announcing that a new, smarter Siri is on the way, the project to give the digital assistant an AI boost has faced embarrassing delays.
The AI brain drain at Apple can’t be helping. In the last few months, Meta has poached several of Apple’s top AI leaders. The list includes Ruoming Pang, who managed Apple’s foundation models team, and Bowen Zhang, a crucial multimodal AI researcher.
In August, Apple assembled a new internal team, called “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,” Bloomberg reported Wednesday. Benoit Dupin will take over the AKI team’s leadership following Yang’s departure.
Will key AI departures push back Apple’s smarter Siri launch?
The AKI group’s work will play a foundational role in powering the revamped Siri. But such high-profile departures could derail Apple’s progress.
The company is already behind Google, OpenAI and others in the AI race. Now Apple risks falling further behind.
With Yang’s departure, Apple’s AI team has lost nearly a dozen members. Their departures could have a domino effect, with other executives likely to leave in the coming months.
Meanwhile, Meta keeps poaching top AI experts from Apple, OpenAI and Anthropic by offering them packages worth tens of millions of dollars per year.
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.
Rajesh has been closely following and writing about the latest happenings in the world of mobile for nearly a decade now. While he prefers Android, he does not deny the superiority of Apple’s products and ecosystem.
