Apple continues an innovation brain drain with Siri, as Meta just recently hired Ke Yang to oversee the revamp of its lagging voice and GenAI assistant as rivals continue to topple it. Just a few weeks ago, Yang was tapped to run struggling Siri (including Apple Intelligence) and bring it up to par with other competitive products of its stature like Gemini, and ChatGPT.

The group is developing features to make the Siri voice assistant more ChatGPT-like by adding the ability to pull information from the web.

Yang was leading the Answers, Knowledge, and Information (AKI) team which was tasked with making Siri more GenAI like where an ‘answer engine’ was being created to more easily craw the internet for information.

In August, a report detailed that Apple assembled a new internal team, “Answers, Knowledge and Information,” to develop a ChatGPT-like search tool. The team operates under John Giannandrea, Apple’s current AI head. Robby Walker initially led the team before Ke Yang stepped in to take charge after his exit.

The setbacks continue as GenAI leaders such as OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic are poaching talent from other firms who are currently behind in similar product enhancements. These outfits have been known for recently paying high dollar, high bonus figures to build out their own GenAI divisions to help differentiate themselves from other commodified products in the pack.

This isn’t the first time that Meta has been acquiring talent from Apple, as the AKI team has seen many departures within the past few months.

The Mark Zuckerberg-led company had poached top AI executives from the iPhone maker before, including Robby Walker and Ruoming Pang, as earlier reported by Bloomberg News.

Apple has yet to set aside portions of its vast balance sheet to developing GenAI products but rather is more interesting in utilizing Google’s Gemini as it already has Google Search as its default search engine and has for years. This development may not be as dire as it seems. It’s been much more conservative in its R&D as it seeks to develop more hardware products, which would give Google an upper hand in consolidating placement within the rumored smart display and robotics devices.

If we are in an AI bubble as Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman predict, the amount of investment will crater, creating a new playing field of only the strongest contenders. Apple would be wise to hold on to its vast balance sheet of roughly $40 billion of cash and cash equivalents to continue to product R&D.

The only component of GenAI that changes hands more than component deals is talent. Apple is not alone in this manner. All of the largest Fortune 500 company investors like Meta, Google, and Microsoft will purchase talent from acquihires and from the largest private firms like Anthropic and OpenAI.

This talent funnel goes both ways and has yet to show signs of slowing down, as each are attempting to find their way to the next big breakthrough in either agentics (MCP, etc…); or to break free out of the commodified LLM roadmaps they find themselves in.