Apple Unleashes M5 AI Chip, but Its ChatGPT Expert Flies to Meta

Apple is in midst of an AI push and the iPhone creating tech giant has taken a big hit in the ongoing silicon war. Just as Apple unveiled its new M5 chip this October which is much more than just another hardware upgrade. It is a clear statement that the company intends to embed AI more deeply and natively across its core products.

But at almost the same time, a surprising personnel move shook Apple's AI mission as the executive recently put in charge to lead Apple's ChatGPT style search team is allegedly walking out to join Meta. This shocking twist tells a contentious story about Apple's evolving AI tech and the pressures it faces in the battle for talent and technological leadership in the ruthless silicon war.

The M5 chip: Apple's new AI engine

Apple grandly described its latest AI tech in a press release describing M5 as 'the next big leap in AI performance for Apple silicon.' Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of Hardware Technologies added, 'With the introduction of Neural Accelerators in the GPU, M5 delivers a huge boost to AI workloads. Combined with a big increase in graphics performance, the world's fastest CPU core, a faster Neural Engine, and even higher unified memory bandwidth, M5 brings far more performance and capabilities to MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro.'

This means it is a design choice that allows for richer neural processing without draining power. Beyond raw specs though, what makes the M5 especially interesting is how it changes what devices can do offline. Apple is seemingly positioning it to run large language models, image generation, and other AI experiences locally, and doing all this without needing to continuously hit cloud servers.

Moreover, in products like the updated 14″ MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and the next Vision Pro headset, the M5 will likely boost rendering, even speed up machine learning tasks, and extend battery life that would be a joy for the users. For example, on the Vision Pro, the M5 is said to render 10 percent more pixels as per reports and even push the refresh rate up to 120 Hz, while improving battery life modestly as of now.

So it is clear that Apple wants to shift the AI paradigm for good and go from offloading AI work to servers, toward making devices more intelligent on their own. Furthermore, this also reduces latency, enhances privacy, and gives Apple a tighter control over user experience. So it seems that with M5, Apple is trying to stake its claim in the ever growing hardware AI race.

Apple's ChatGPT Expert Leaves for Meta

While Apple's AI dreams seem to be getting real with the M5 chip. In between this technological push, Apple had reportedly appointed Ke Yang to head its 'Answers, Knowledge and Information' (AKI) team which is reportedly a group intended to bring ChatGPT style web search intelligence into Siri and other Apple services. But in a dramatic twist that Apple might not have seen coming, Yang is allegedly leaving Apple to join Meta just weeks into his new role.

Why Yang's exit, who has been with Apple reportedly since 2019, is controversial, is partly because of the timing. He was seemingly one of Apple's hopes to catch up in generative AI and to infuse Siri with more advanced 'answers from the web' capabilities. Moreover, his team, AKI, is believed to be central to Apple's planned overhaul of Siri in March, equipping it to better respond to user queries with contextual awareness and intelligent reasoning.

At this point it's important to reveal that Apple, Meta, and Yang have not publicly commented on this matter as of this writing, but the departure for sure shows the fierce competition for AI talent. As per some reports Meta has been aggressively poaching personnel from rivals. So for Apple, losing Yang before its new AI strategy fully takes shape raises deep issues about whether the company can keep pace in the people war as much as the chips war.