Apple AI Team Faces Intensive Talent Drain: Siri Executive and Several Key Researchers Leave

Bloomberg reported that Apple's artificial intelligence (AI) development team is experiencing severe talent loss. In the current fierce global competition for AI talent, the flow of core technical forces to competitors has raised high concerns in the industry about the stability of its R&D.

Exodus of Core Research Talent

The four key AI researchers who have been disclosed as leaving and their destinations are as follows:

Yinfei Yang: Plans to join the AI startup field after leaving.
Haoxuan You: Has joined Meta's Superintelligence research department, exploring cutting-edge models.
Bailin Wang: Has joined Meta, focusing on research and development related to recommendation systems.
Zirui Wang: Also recently chose to leave Apple's R&D position.

In addition to the loss of researchers, Stuart Bowers, the former senior director of Siri, has also left and joined Google DeepMind. Before leading the Siri voice assistant business, Bowers was the head of Apple's autonomous car project. Since 2025, his responsibilities were further expanded, mainly focusing on optimizing Siri's understanding of user needs, and directly reporting to the new head of Siri, Mike Rockwell.

The successive departures of these core members not only take away valuable technical expertise but also reflect the serious challenges Apple faces in maintaining the stability of its AI team.

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The CEO of Google admitted that they do not have full control over the operating mechanism of AI systems, revealing the mystery of the AI black box. Large language models demonstrate emergent behaviors through training with massive data, such as the Google PaLM model, which can handle Bengali translation with only a small amount of data, reflecting the leap from training to self-study by AI.

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Apple AI Team Faces Intensive Talent Drain: Siri Executive and Several Key Researchers Leave

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