It looks like Apple"s AI division has yet again failed to take off, as Ke Yang, who was recently appointed to lead its ambitious ChatGPT-like AI search project, is now leaving for Meta just weeks after his appointment, as per a new report by Bloomberg.
Yang was the head of the Answers, Knowledge, and Information (AKI) team, which was built for Apple"s upcoming Siri revamp. The team was tasked to build a world-knowledge engine for Apple, similar to OpenAI"s ChatGPT and the updated Google Search that features AI mode. The revamped Siri was planned for a March 2026 release and was supposed to finally deliver complex request handling and deep integration with personal data, features that were already promised by Apple last year and have been delayed repeatedly.
Yang"s departure isn"t a one-off case, with at least half a dozen senior AI resources jumping ship to Meta over the past few months, including engineers and managers from core teams working on foundation models and cloud AI infrastructure. Unfortunately for Apple, though, the AKI team was perhaps its most prominent effort to get back on track following missed milestones.
Meta"s new "superintelligence" team, under Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun, now boasts several Apple alumni along with those from OpenAI and Google DeepMind as well, and they"re expected to contribute directly to building Meta"s next-generation LLM models and search functionalities, with the ultimate goal of building artificial general intelligence (AGI).
It"s unclear who will lead the AKI team now, as Apple continues to lag behind the competition for its AI ambitions. The company is still somehow moving forward with reports suggesting planned integrations with major third-party AI platforms like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity. Although the company will lose its "closed-system" advantage with these third-party partnerships, with only privacy and device-scale intelligence as possible differentiators among its competition.
Via: Bloomberg (paywall)