• by Laurie Sullivan , 2 hours ago

Ke Yang, who had recently been appointed to lead Apple’s ChatGPT-like search project, has left the company for Meta Platforms.

Yang had been appointed head of a team called Answers, Knowledge and Information, or AKI. The group is developing features to make the Siri voice assistant similar to ChatGPT by adding the ability to pull information from the web, Bloomberg reported, citing people with knowledge of the situation.

That team is central to redesigning Siri. The new version is planned for release in March 2026. 

The new version of Siri will include features reportedly delayed from earlier this year, such as the ability to tap into personal data to handle more complex requests.

Apple announced its partnership with OpenAI in June 2024 at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). The agreement was to integrate ChatGPT capabilities into Apple's operating systems as part of its "Apple Intelligence."

Yang's departure occurred just after Apple upgraded the iPad Pro, MacBook Pro, and Vision Pro with its new M5 chip. The news was announced yesterday in a press release stating that all products support Apple Intelligence.

The MacBook Pro 14-inch, for example, is powered by the M5 chip. It features a next-generation GPU with a Neural Accelerator in each core, delivering up to 3.5x the AI performance and up to 1.6x faster graphics than the previous generation, according to Apple. All the devices are supported by ChatGPT-like features. 

Yang worked for 11 years at Google at the beginning of the move toward artificial intelligence for hardware, software and advertising. He was an early member of the Google Brain team, building the machine learning infrastructure that powers AI. He contributed to the TensorFlow platform, according to one report. 

A quick search on AI Mode suggests at least one dozen artificial intelligence experts have left Apple's AI models team. Several of them, including some key leaders, have joined Meta's Superintelligence Labs within the past few months.