Apple's AI Crisis: Talent Loss to Competitors

The crisis of Apple's artificial intelligence lies not in Siri, but in the loss of talent that is moving to competitors. Since the beginning of the year, the company has lost about ten employees in the AI sector, becoming one of the main victims of the fierce competition for talent in Silicon Valley, reports Financial Times. It is noted that in the past seven months, several researchers have transitioned to Meta, OpenAI, xAI, Cohere, and other companies.

A significant loss was Ruiming Pang, head of Apple's core models team, who joined Meta last month after receiving a $200 million offer from Mark Zuckerberg. Other departures this year include Brandon McKinsey and Dian Ang Yap from OpenAI, Lytong Zhou from Cohere, as well as Mark Li, Tom Hunter, Bowen Zhang, and Shuang Ma from Meta. Some of them were involved in AI model research published by Apple last year.

The core models team at Apple consists of only 50-60 people, so each departure has a serious impact. According to FT, recruiters consider this situation a "crisis of confidence" in the future of the company's AI. Aaron Sines from the recruiting firm Razoroo notes that elite AI specialists are now strategic assets, comparable to intellectual property or even entire business units. "There are only a thousand to two thousand people in the world with real experience in developing core models," he says. "Losing such talent complicates the update of Siri, which is currently facing difficulties integrating new language models (LLMs)."

New AI offices are planned to be established in Zurich, where a new architecture for Siri will be developed. It is based on the concept of a "monolithic model"—a completely new system that uses an LLM engine and is set to replace the old "hybrid" architecture, which has become increasingly fragmented due to the addition of new features. The goal is to make Siri more conversational, smarter, and better able to understand and process information.

Apple CEO Tim Cook stated during a conference call with investors that the company is making significant progress in creating a more personalized Siri, which operates based on Apple Intelligence. According to him, these new features, which will allow for better consideration of the user's personal context and provide deeper customization for each application, will be available next year.