Apple Just Lost Yet Another Top AI Executive To Meta

As Apple struggles to keep pace in the increasingly competitive AI space, Meta is making things much more difficult. Over the past few months, Meta has lured away some of Apple's top AI talent. Most recently, the company poached Ke Yang. Originally brought to light by Bloomberg, Yang was a fast-rising Apple executive who was just recently tapped to head Apple's nascent "Answers, Knowledge, and Information" team. The AKI team's mission is to improve the Siri user experience by providing accurate answers to general knowledge questions. The team, according to reports, also wants to make the Siri experience more conversational, similar to what already exists on chatbots like ChatGPT.

Yang's departure marks yet another setback for Apple's seemingly dwindling roster of AI talent. Bloomberg notes that Kang was "regarded as the most prominent executive working on" Apple's new and ambitious version of Siri. Overall, Apple has lost more than 10 members from its top AI and machine learning teams over the past year alone. Back in August, for example, Ruoming Pang left Apple for Meta after being offered a pay package in the $200 million range. Pang's departure was a big blow given that he led Apple's Foundational Model team and helped develop the foundational models that underpin Apple Intelligence. What's more, Meta also poached some top engineers from Pang's team, including Tom Gunter and Bowen Zhang.

It's becoming clear that Apple is having a tough time competing with the cash Meta is dangling in front of AI engineers and researchers. Underscoring just how aggressive Meta's poaching efforts have been over the past year, recall that the company a few months ago offered engineers from Thinking Machines Lab upwards of $1 billion in compensation over a multi-year period. While Apple obviously has enough cash to match any offer Meta makes, the company has never been one to get into bidding wars for top talent.

All told, Meta raiding Apple's engineering teams puts Apple in a tough situation for two reasons. First, the company is losing many top engineers who, in some cases, are incredibly hard to replace. Second, if top AI engineers are filling the ranks at companies like Meta and OpenAI, it makes it harder for Apple to attract top AI talent in the first place. Apple clearly needs to do a better job at retaining talent, but it's unclear what the solution is when Meta's strategy is to offer engineers gargantuan sums of cash.

Notably, Apple isn't the only company Meta has its eyes on. This past June, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that Meta tried to poach OpenAI engineers by offering certain employees upwards of $100 million in compensation packages. In contrast to Apple, however, Altman noted that "so far none of our best people have decided to take them up on that."

Incidentally, Meta's hiring spree may be coming from a perceived position of weakness. According to a CNBC report, Zuckerberg is "frustrated that rivals like OpenAI appear to be further ahead than Meta in underlying AI models." As a result, he's willing to spend billions to bridge the gap.

Despite losing top talent, Apple CEO Tim Cook remains confident that Apple isn't going to be left behind. This past August, Cook held an internal meeting with employees where he said that the AI race is still in its early stages. "We've rarely been first," Cook told employees. "There was a PC before the Mac; there was a smartphone before the iPhone; there were many tablets before the iPad; there was an MP3 player before iPod. But Apple invented the modern versions of those product categories. This is how I feel about AI."

Cook also added that Apple isn't afraid to make the necessary investments to ensure that its AI software is best-in-class. Incidentally, a few months ago, there were rumblings that Apple might purchase Perplexity AI. Talks between the two companies were at a high level and even included Eddy Cue and Adrian Perica. Note that Perica is the head of Apple's mergers and acquisitions team. Ultimately, those talks seemed to have fizzled out, perhaps due to the fact that Perplexity AI currently has a valuation of $20 billion.

Looking ahead, all eyes will be focused on Apple's next-gen version of Siri which, if all goes according to plan, will launch in March 2026. During a recent earnings call, Cook said: "We're making good progress on a more personalized Siri, and as we've said before, we expect to release these features next year." With Apple set to report its earnings for the recent quarter on October 30, we may hear an update on Apple's Siri efforts very soon.