Apple’s top executive overseeing its ChatGPT-like search initiative is leaving the company for Meta, marking another senior departure from Apple’s artificial intelligence division.

Ke Yang, who led Apple’s Answers, Knowledge and Information team, known internally as AKI, is departing after only weeks in the role, Bloomberg reported Wednesday (Oct. 15).

The AKI group sits within Apple’s artificial intelligence and machine learning division and is responsible for developing the company’s AI-driven search and reasoning capabilities. Its mission is to enable Siri to retrieve live web data and produce factual responses rather than relying solely on preloaded information, a step designed to bring Apple’s voice assistant closer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini models.

Yang’s exit adds to a growing list of high-profile departures from Apple’s AI and machine learning organization. Roughly a dozen members of the Apple Foundation Models team, including its founder and lead scientist Ruoming Pang, have left the company this year, per the report. Many of them have joined Meta’s new Superintelligence Labs division, which is building large-scale reasoning and multimodal AI systems.

It was reported Sunday (Oct. 12) that Meta recruited Thinking Machines co-founder and AI researcher Andrew Tulloch, one of several executives Meta has hired to strengthen its advanced AI research group. In July, Meta added Mark Lee and Tom Gunter, AI researchers who had worked for Apple.

Together, the exits underscore how Meta’s Superintelligence Labs hiring drive has intensified competition for AI researchers as Apple works to close the gap with OpenAI, Google and other leaders in generative search and conversational computing.

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At Apple, Yang’s team played a central role in a major Siri update planned for March 2026, the Bloomberg report said. The upcoming version is expected to include the ability to pull personal and third-party data to handle more complex requests. Yang had reported to John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president of AI and machine learning, and assumed leadership of AKI after the departure of Robby Walker, another senior AI executive.

Oversight of the AKI group will now shift to Benoit Dupin, who manages Apple’s machine learning cloud infrastructure, according to the report.

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