Apple Loses Head of ChatGPT-Like Search to Meta

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00:00Who is this executive, and how significant is it, Mark, that he's jumping to Meta?

00:07Yeah, this is Ki-Yang, and to give you an idea of how significant this is, we've talked about

00:12maybe a dozen Apple AI departures over the last few months. This is probably the most significant

00:18or second most significant of that group. This person was a direct report to John Gianandrea,

00:23the senior VP who runs all of AI at Apple. This person was actually put into their role only a

00:30few weeks ago when his predecessor, Robbie Walker, left Apple. Walker had been in charge of Siri,

00:38but he was removed from being in charge of Siri in March after the major delays and the blowback

00:44against Apple intelligence. And then he started a new team called AKI, Answers Knowledge and

00:49Information. And that team is focused on AI-powered web search tools. So basically adding ChatGPT,

00:56perplexity, Gemini-like functionality to Siri and other parts of the Apple operating system.

01:02And Yang, he became in charge of that program just a few weeks ago. Before that, he was running the

01:07search-related functionality. Then he was running the whole thing. And so now Apple's AI team is

01:12going through another major reorganization in light of that significant departure.

01:16And a key line in your story is several of the Apple team members think that this is going to

01:21continue to happen, more departures to come.

01:24This is going to keep happening. I mean, the core team developing the models underlying

01:29Apple intelligence, it's a team called AFM or Apple Foundation Models. They've been bleeding talent

01:35since July. The creator of that team and the person who ran that team, Roman Pang, he left for a

01:41$250 million multi-year pay package and is now a senior AI executive at Meta. Since his departure,

01:48they've lost about a dozen people. I'm told there's several other people on that team continuing to

01:53interview. Other people are going to Meta still. Other people are going to startups, OpenAI and

01:59Google. We've been reporting this out as these departures have been happening and these new

02:04companies have been hiring these folks. And this is going to continue given the pay packages that

02:09these competitors are offering. And given the embarrassment that Apple's AI efforts have

02:15become for some of these people actually working on them.

02:17Mark, you've come on Bloomberg Tech and you've broken all these stories about people departing

02:22Apple. A reasonable question, and we just have 60 seconds, is, is there actually anyone left at

02:27Apple of note working on AI?

02:29Oh, Apple has tons of, tons of folks. They're working on acquisitions to try to refuel the ranks

02:37there. Uh, John Gianandrea, despite there being, uh, rumors and discussions about him stepping down,

02:44uh, are being pushed out of the company for several months now. He remains in charge. Uh, he may not be

02:51there for long as I'm told that Apple has been looking for outside replacements, uh, for him, but for now

02:56he's there. Craig Federighi, who runs all software engineering has now taken an ownership role over

03:02all the AI strategy at Apple. Mike Rockwell, who created the Vision Pro, he's heavily involved in

03:08the AI strategy there now too. Um, so yeah, they have definitely have folks, but it's just about

03:13refueling the ranks and putting the right people in place. Uh, but certainly this is another

03:17considerable setback, uh, to, to Meta's gain potentially.

03:20Okay.