Meta stole another top AI researcher from Apple, making its smart Siri issue even worse

Over the last week, Apple has lost three more AI engineers, who were all part of the Apple Foundation Models team. John Peebles and Nan Du are going to OpenAI, and Zhao Meng is going to Anthropic.



The Apple Foundation Models team was at the core of the creation of Apple Intelligence. The platform was launched last year, but so far it has failed to catch up with the leading AI labs. That failure has exposed many internal issues at Apple, which have led to one of the most embarrassing episodes in the company’s recent history.

Apple’s struggles with AI are so serious that the company is considering using external technology to catch up. One of the company’s options may be to rely on Google’s Gemini AI to finally deliver on the smarter Siri it promised last year.

According to other reports, Apple had internal discussions to solve its issues through acquisitions. Among the companies it was looking at were the Paris-based Mistral AI and Perplexity, which is behind one of the most popular AI-powered search engines.

While Apple is losing talent, Samsung and Google are offering powerful AI integrations on their devices. The Pixel 10 and Galaxy S25 are already getting the best of Gemini, while the “built for Apple Intelligence” iPhone 16 is falling behind.

We won’t hear about Apple’s internal drama at the iPhone 17 premiere on September 9, but I hope we learn more about where the company is heading. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple has some big announcements, though it might be even less likely to follow up on them than before.