Apple just lost another critical AI executive to Meta in what's becoming an alarming pattern for Tim Cook's team. Ke Yang, who was leading Apple's ambitious AI-powered web search project, is jumping ship to Meta's Superintelligence Labs just months before Apple's make-or-break Siri revamp launches in March. The departure compounds Apple's growing AI talent crisis at the worst possible moment.
Apple is hemorrhaging AI talent to Meta at exactly the wrong time. Ke Yang, the executive who was supposed to lead Apple's charge into AI-powered web search, is heading to Meta's Superintelligence Labs, according to Bloomberg. Yang had just taken over the Answers, Knowledge, and Information team a few weeks ago - the group tasked with making Siri smart enough to compete with ChatGPT and Google's AI search.
The timing couldn't be more brutal for Apple. Yang's departure comes as the company races toward a March launch of its revamped Siri, which promises to pull information from the web and tap into personal data for complex tasks. After years of Siri falling behind Alexa and Google Assistant, this upgrade represents Apple's biggest bet on conversational AI - and now the project lead is walking out the door.
This isn't an isolated incident. Yang becomes the latest casualty in what industry insiders are calling Meta's systematic raid on Apple's AI division. Earlier this year, Meta poached Rouming Pang, Apple's former head of AI models, along with roughly a dozen other team members from Apple's AIML (AI and machine learning) unit. Several joined Meta's new Superintelligence Labs, the company's ambitious attempt to build artificial general intelligence.
The brain drain reflects a broader talent war raging across Silicon Valley, where AI researchers command signing bonuses in the millions. Meta has been particularly aggressive, offering multimillion-dollar pay packages to lure top talent from rivals. For engineers working on foundational AI models at Apple, the financial incentives at Meta are reportedly hard to ignore.
What makes Yang's departure especially concerning is the strategic importance of his role. Apple's AKI team sits at the heart of the company's AI ambitions, working to transform Siri from a basic voice assistant into something that can rival OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Search Generative Experience. The project requires deep expertise in natural language processing, knowledge graphs, and real-time information retrieval - exactly the skills Yang brought to the table.
