Apple is switching its leadership that supervises its secretive self-driving car project, according to Bloomberg. The team’s engineers will now report to John Giannandrea, the company’s head of artificial intelligence (AI), who also supervises voice-based digital assistant Siri.
Giannandrea, Google’s former head of search and AI, joined Apple in 2018. His hire was seen as a huge get for Apple, which had a hard time for years to make progress in the progressing fields like AI which includes computer vision and natural language processing. Giannandrea reports directly to CEO Tim Cook as the leader of machine learning and AI strategy.
There is not enough information about Apple’s so-called Project Titan. Unlike most of its rivals, the company has been tight-lipped regarding the self-driving cars it’s testing in California. After starting with the aim of developing a purpose-built self-driving car, the strategies were later scaled back to just developing software, with Apple collaborating with automakers such as Volkswagen to offer the hardware.
There has been legal battle. In 2019, an Apple worker who is a Chinese citizen was accused by the FBI of attempting to steal trade secrets associated with the company’s autonomous car project. It was the second time the government has charged an Apple worker for attempting to steal self-driving secrets in the last seven months. Apple also laid off about 200 workers from the project.
In June 2019, Apple acquired the self-driving startup Drive.ai. Apple bought the company’s assets, including its autonomous cars, and hired many of its workers away from Drive.ai directly.
Earlier in 2020, Apple filed a report with the California Department of Motor Vehicles that revealed the company has seriously downgraded its public road testing in 2019. After driving almost 80,000 miles in 2018, the company only logged 7,544 miles in 2019.
