Apple AI executive Ke Yang to join Meta, Siri AKI team in flux

Ke Yang, an Apple executive who had been appointed weeks ago to lead the company’s Answers, Knowledge and Information team, is leaving to join Meta, people familiar with the matter said, marking the latest high-profile exit from Apple’s artificial intelligence division. Yang’s departure comes as the group he led is central to a planned overhaul of the Siri voice assistant scheduled for next March that aims to add web-based, AI-driven answers.

The AKI team was created earlier this year to develop features that would allow Siri to pull information directly from the web and handle more complex, personal requests using on-device data. Yang had been overseeing search-focused elements of that work and was recently elevated to head the entire group, reporting to John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president of AI and machine learning. It is not yet clear who will assume leadership of the AKI team following his exit, people familiar with the matter said.

Yang joined Apple in 2019, according to his LinkedIn profile. His move to Meta follows a broader pattern of recruitment in Silicon Valley as major technology companies expand investments in large language models and generative AI....