Apple Executive Leading Siri Revamp Project Reportedly Snagged by Meta

Apple executive tasked with developing a key feature for the planned Siri revamp is reporting leaving the company for Meta. As per the report, Ke Yang, the Senior Director of Machine Learning at Apple, was appointed the head of a team that was developing a feature that would allow Siri to pull information from the web and present it conversationally, similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT. Meta's reported poaching of the artificial intelligence (AI) talent could pose further challenges for Apple as it works to ready its AI-powered version of Siri in time.

Apple Reportedly Loses Key AI Talent to Meta

According to a Bloomberg report, Yang is stepping down from his position to join Meta in the coming days. Citing unnamed people with knowledge of the matter, the report claimed that he was appointed the head of a team dubbed “Answers, Knowledge and Information” or AKI. This team was reportedly developing functionalities and features to make Siri's responses similar to ChatGPT.

In particular, it is said that Yang's focus was to build an AI-powered web search feature, allowing Siri to pull information similar to ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI chatbots. While the voice assistant can still scour the Internet, the search results it surfaces are very surface-level, and the presentation is not conversational.

The AI-powered web search feature was reportedly being developed to let Apple compete with players such as Google, Perplexity, and OpenAI in the AI search market. With the rise of AI, many companies are now tapping into this space to bypass Google's dominance.

The revamped Siri project is reportedly a collaboration between Apple's AI and machine learning group (AIML) and the Siri engineering team. Yang belongs to the former and was a direct reportee to John Giannandrea, the Senior Vice President of AIML. On the other hand, the Siri engineering team is part of the software organisation, which is headed by Craig Federighi.

The report claims that Yang was believed to be the most important employee working on the Siri revamp project. His departure marks the ongoing trend of the company's AI researchers exiting to join rivals. Notably, the report claims that more than 10 members of the Apple Foundation Models team, including the lead scientist, Ruoming Pang. All of them reportedly joined Meta.