Head of Apple's AI Search Project Leaves to Join Meta (www.macrumors.com)

Apple lost another senior AI lead as Ke Yang, who had just been promoted to head the Answers, Knowledge, and Information (AKI) group, is leaving to join Meta, Bloomberg reports. AKI—tasked with making Siri more ChatGPT-like by synthesizing live web data into up-to-date answers—is a central part of Apple’s planned Siri overhaul slated for March 2026. Yang had recently taken over after Robby Walker’s departure and reported to John Giannandrea; with Yang gone the team will now report to Benoit Dupin, a deputy overseeing machine learning infrastructure. The exit underscores a broader talent drain from Apple’s AI effort, which has seen more than a dozen senior researchers and engineers leave this year, including leads from the Foundation Models team. For the AI/ML community, this signals potential disruption for Apple’s timeline and continuity on live-retrieval, multi-step conversational features and personal-data integrations that AKI aims to deliver. At the same time, Meta’s hires—like Yang and earlier recruit Ruoming Pang—could accelerate its internal research and productization. The shuffle highlights how competition for experienced model builders and search-integration expertise will be a decisive factor as companies race to combine retrieval, grounding, and generative models in consumer-facing assistants.