Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg last week:

The executive, Ke Yang, is leaving for Meta Platforms Inc., according to people with knowledge of the matter. Just weeks ago, he was appointed head of a team called Answers, Knowledge and Information, or AKI. The group is developing features to make the Siri voice assistant more ChatGPT-like by adding the ability to pull information from the web. [...]

The new Siri is being developed as a joint effort between Apple’s artificial intelligence and machine learning group, known as AIML, and the Siri engineering team now overseen by Craig Federighi’s software organization. Within AIML, Yang was regarded as the most prominent executive working on the new Siri initiative. His exit ranks among the biggest departures from Apple’s AI organization this year — a period marked by a steady exodus of top researchers building the company’s AI core models.

Roughly a dozen members of that team — known internally as Apple Foundation Models — have departed, including its founder and lead scientist, Ruoming Pang. He and a number of others also joined Meta, which is building a new group called Superintelligence Labs.

I am reminded of a piece Guy English wrote back in 2012, “Three Things That Should Trouble Apple”, and that I’ve long thought his third item, “People”, ought to have been the first:

Ultimately, the retention of talent will be Apple’s Achilles’ heel.

The smartest people will always want to be working on the smartest thing. Sometimes that comes together in one amazing project. iOS has been that project for this decade.

If there’s a problem for Apple it’s that they’ve already invented the future. It’s a done deal. The best and brightest engineers and product managers may move on to other ventures. Less likely to succeed, of course, but that’s less of an issue for them given the rainfall of AAPL gains. We’ll have to see what happens.