Apple sidelines car project to double down on generative AI efforts, report

Apple has reportedly put aside its decade-old dream of building a self driving electric vehicle to focus on generative AI. Apple’s chief operating officer Jeff Williams informed employees on Tuesday that many of the workers from the car division, which employs close to 2,000 people, will be shifted to the AI division to work on generative AI products, according to a Bloomberg report.

Details regarding the potential impact of this reshuffle and the number of employees affected by it are still unclear as Apple hasn't officially made any announcement. However, experts believe that this could soon trigger a fresh round of layoffs at Apple.

While Apple has used AI in several of its services including Siri and Face ID, its efforts in the area have been muted in comparison to its rivals, especially Google and Samsung. Recent advancements in generative AI, coupled with strong consumer and business interest in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), seems to have prompted Apple to step up its focus on AI.

Generative AI is expected to add between $2.6 and $4.4 trillion to the global economy every year, according to a June 2023 report by Mckinsey. This is expected to boost the overall impact of AI on businesses and society by 15 to 40%.

Big tech firms including Microsoft and Google have already had a headstart in the generative AI race due to their investments in transformer-based LLMs such as Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) and Pathways Language Model (PaLM). Both have already made announcements integrating generative AI into their products and services to benefit both individual users and businesses.

While Apple has not been very vocal about its work at the car division, it made its intentions clear by hiring several top executives from the auto sector to work on its car project. Doug Field, a former VP of Special Projects who left Apple in 2013 to become Tesla’s chief vehicle engineer, joined back in 2018 to lead the Project Titan. In September 2021, Field left Apple to join Ford.

In June 201, Apple hired former BMW executive Ulrich Kranz, and in November Tesla’s autopilot software engineer Christoper Moore joined to work on Apple’s self-driving software.

According to a January report in Bloomberg, the electric car division suffered another setback, forcing Apple to push the release date to 2028. This comes after the company previously delayed the launch from 2024 to 2026.

Bloomberg also reported that Apple had to scale back on its original vision for the vehicle, and abandon plans for a fully autonomous Level 4 car without a steering wheel or pedals. The new plan involves a car with Level 2+ autonomy, which gives some amount of autonomy such as lane centering and adaptive cruise control, but still requires an attentive driver.