Ke Yang, an executive leading Apple’s efforts to develop a ChatGPT-like AI-driven web search, is stepping down to join Meta, according to Bloomberg. This comes weeks after Yang was appointed head of a team called Answers, Knowledge and Information.
“Answers, Knowledge, and Information (AKI),” is working to build an “answer engine” that can respond to questions with information found across the web. AKI is also central to the Siri voice assistant’s overhaul, planned for March 2026. The formation of this team has been considered a major step for the company as it tries to catch up with competitors like OpenAI and Google in the AI race.
While Apple has been on its AI journey for a while, it currently lags behind its competitors. The company also faced a setback with the delay in conversational Siri. Apple has several AI plans for the upcoming year, however, it is unsure when these advanced features will roll out to users. Yang has been with the company since 2019, according to his LinkedIn profile.
READ: Meta invests $14.3 billion in Scale AI, brings CEO Alexandr Wang onboard (
Meta has been intensifying hiring of late as AI companies increase their efforts into developing superintelligence. The Facebook-parent had previously poached multiple executives from Apple, as well as other companies like OpenAI.
Last month, Apple’s lead AI researcher for robotics Jian Zhang departed from the company to join Meta. Zhang led a small team of academics focused on automation technology and the role of AI in such products.
Another key Apple executive who left the company was Ruoming Pang, who led Apple’s in-house AI modeling team and played a big part in building features like Genmoji, Priority Notifications, and on-device summarization. Pang’s team was also behind the scenes working on the next version of Siri and some of Apple’s key personalization features.
READ: Apple’s lead AI robotics researcher leaves company to join Meta (
Meta also invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI, and brought CEO Alexandr Wang onboard. Wang is now the chief AI officer of Meta.
Meta had also recruited a number of OpenAI employees, including senior researchers. This included Trapit Bansal, a senior researcher who was a key player in starting the company’s work on reinforcement learning, as well as Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai, top researchers from OpenAI’s Zurich team. Most of these employees became part of Meta’s “superintelligence” team. However some such employees ended up leaving the company, some even returning to the ChatGPT-maker.