Apple is axing one of its highly-anticipated and open secret projects – the autonomous electric car, to shift its focus to developing generative AI initiatives.
The company’s chief operating officer Jeff Williams, and Kevin Lynch, vice president leading the EV project, announced the decision during an internal meeting this week, as per a report by Bloomberg.
Apple Kills off EV Project to Focus on Generative AI
Apple will be shifting most of the 2,000 employees part of the “Special Projects Group” (SGP) – as the electric car development team is called, to the AI division led by John Giannandrea, senior vice president of Machine Learning and AI Strategy at the company.
Giannandrea, who joined from Google in 2018, is in charge of developing Apple’s core machine learning and Siri technologies, including large language models like AI chatbots.
Apart from those who were transferred to the AI team like software engineers and others working closely with AI, all remaining employees will either be reassigned to other roles within the company or will be let go. The SGP also included hardware and automotive engineers, who may now be unable to apply for other positions at Apple.
Apple reportedly began working on its electric car project in 2014 and is estimated to have invested billions of dollars into the fully autonomous EV set to compete with industry giants like Tesla, BMW, and others.
Apple is Quiet About its AI Endeavor
Apple has been relatively quiet about its artificial intelligence endeavor. While its biggest rivals – Google (Gemini), Microsoft (BingChat), and Samsung (Galaxy AI) – have all been riding the AI wave and releasing bespoke LLM models to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the company’s latest product was the Vision Pro mixed-reality headset.
Reports surfaced last July indicating that Apple is working on a generative AI model intended for internal use, dubbed the Apple GPT.
It is rumored to be running on a proprietary foundational model. These systems are custom-made models that are designed to meet specific business requirements. They come with robust security protocols, making them a safe choice for handling sensitive data.
Rumors also suggest that Apple could showcase some of the features of its generative AI at this year’s WWDC, to be held in June.
Apple GPT is Coming
For the last several months, Apple has been testing the Apple GPT, which is regarded as a priority project for the tech giant. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gruman, the company is designing an “Ajax” framework for large language models.
Ajax has been trained on 200 billion parameters and is said to be more capable than ChatGPT 3.5. The company is reportedly spending millions of dollars every day on conversational AI research.
Apple is on track to spend over $4 billion on AI servers and hardware in 2024.
Apple is also testing a ChatGPT-style chatbot with support employees at AppleCare, called ‘Ask’. The generative AI tool is designed to generate responses to technical questions about Apple products and source information from the internal knowledge base to amp up responses from its support team. The chatbot is currently in beta where advisors are grading its responses.
Generative AI for Siri
In February 2023, Apple held an AI summit where it briefed employees on its work related to large language models. There is speculation that the company’s AI model could eventually be incorporated into the voice assistant, Siri.
Because of Siri’s “cumbersome design”, as John Burkey – a former engineer for the project – put it, it may take quite some time before it could support AI capabilities. This will require rebuilding the Siri database, a process that could take up to six weeks each time, and developing a search tool, a complicated procedure that can take upwards of a year.
Apple’s Existing AI Features
Apple already leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning for certain functions in its various products and services; like in the Photos app where ML is used to enhance photos taken with the iPhone, the Spotlight Search feature in iOS and macOS that is powered by AI, or the Crash Detection and Fall Detection features on the Apple Watch that use ML to determine whether someone has been involved in an accident or had a fall based on data collected from on-device sensors.
Apple is said to include some kind of generative AI feature in the iPhones and iPads coming out this year.
