Apple's artificial intelligence has suffered another major loss as Ke Yang, who recently took the lead on the company's AI-powered web search effort, is leaving to join Meta, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
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Yang had just recently taken over as head of Apple’s newly formed Answers, Knowledge, and Information team, known internally as “AKI.” The team is responsible for developing technology that will make Siri more like ChatGPT, including the ability to retrieve live information from the web. The AKI project is seen as a central component of Apple’s planned Siri upgrade, which is scheduled to be released in March 2026. The update is expected to include features that were delayed earlier this year, such as the ability for Siri to access personal data and handle more complex, multi-step requests.
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Yang’s promotion to AKI leadership came just a few weeks ago, following the departure of Robby Walker, another longtime Apple executive who had led the team. Yang had previously overseen AKI’s search-focused division before being elevated to lead the entire department, reporting directly to John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy. With Yang’s departure, the AKI team will now report to Benoit Dupin, one of Giannandrea’s deputies responsible for Apple’s machine learning infrastructure.
The AKI project has reportedly become a key component of Apple's efforts to close the gap with competitors like OpenAI, Perplexity , and Google Gemini, which have made rapid progress in AI-powered search and conversational interfaces. Gurman describes the Answers feature as a new layer of Siri designed to synthesize answers from live web data, allowing it to provide up-to-date answers and contextual information.
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Yang’s departure is the latest in a growing series of departures from Apple’s AI team, which has reportedly seen more than a dozen senior researchers and engineers leave this year alone. Many of those departures came from the Foundation Models , which is tasked with developing Apple’s core AI generative models. That unit was led by Ruoming Pang, who also left for Meta earlier this year to help found a new research arm known as Superintelligence Labs.
