Why Apple Abandoned Its Revolutionary Car Project for AI

The end of the Apple car. Oh, have you been horribly depressed about this? I

Were I was shocked as I think the world was I say, you know

Apple reportedly cancelled all development on self-driving car news day. That's that's two days ago

Company shifting its focus. You don't believe this to AI Well, it does seem like it would be more lucrative for them to be honest with you. Yeah

Project Titan Apple's not-so-secret project to develop a self-driving vehicle has been going on for about ten years

We've heard multiple management changes and at least one round of layoffs I

Loved that the New York Times had a story this week that said that internally Some of the people on the project called it instead of calling it project Titan. They called it the Titanic disaster project Titanic

Yeah, so yeah, you're just saying like it as recently as January app Apple supposedly switched the project's goal from high-level

autonomous driving to electric vehicle with limited driver assistance Capabilities sort of like a you know, like a Tesla a me to Tesla. Yeah

Now the company's abandoning the whole ideas Become the you know, German, of course over at Bloomberg broke this story the report cited unnamed quote people with knowledge of the matter

Saying Apple pulled the plug on project Titan and told the entire development team of about 2,000 people the bad news this week

2,000 people Wow, it's unbelievable. It's not I mean That's a that's a u-turn for your your career, right so on

The end the Apple car was announced by CEO Jeff Williams and Kevin Lynch who headed up the project

German reported many employees on the team working on the car known as the special projects group or SPG

Will be shifted to the artificial intelligence division under executive John John

Andrea hard name to pronounce Those employees will focus on generative AI projects and increasingly key priority for the company

That's the part that I found depressing What I found really sad about this is the idea of Apple

Abandoning this sort of moonshot project, you know New York Times again had a story, you know later this week talking about it, you know

Kind of like behind the scenes what's going on? This is a quote from them the group developed an array of new technologies

Including a windshield that could display turn-by-turn just directions and a sunroof that would feature special polymer to reduce heat from the Sun

Johnny Ive and his team of designers drew concepts of a car that would look like a European minivan such as the Fiat

Multipla Multipla 600 which has a half dozen windows on a curving roof

No, sir, this supposedly of the idea at you know, one point way back at the beginning was no steering wheel

And that this thing would be controlled using Siri, which is only slightly terrifying

Oh Got a story, but I'll reference So helpful so helpful She's here to help me with some results that I probably have to look at on my iPhone to see and hear wouldn't wait

Wait, sorry now now you're giving me you give me a crack. I gotta dive in here just real fast

I was using dictation with Siri the other day and I was saying so so and such and such has

Done this thing has you know has HAS and it changed it into capital H a SS

Because everybody's talking about avocados at all time day and night that is just that good truly mind-blowing to me

I hope that AI can fix that. Yeah, so, uh, let's see here. I

Don't know. I mean I wrote this piece about it, you know laying out my sort of

Depressing I found a whole very depressing, you know, it's sort of a revolutionary self-driving car, you know

We're gonna have they're gonna spend all their time and effort, you know Because a bunch of these people are moving to generative AI efforts, right

So what's that gonna be? You know like pages will be able to summarize your rough draft into bullet points or you know

Maybe you can generate some kind of image that may or may not be accurate Instead of like this, you know, let's change the the transportation industry. Let's let's come up with a

fantastic car that has all these amazing features, you know, they've had I

Don't know how many tons and tons of patents over the years, right cool features that could have gone into this car

Yeah, I mean that's just those two examples that the New York Times mentioned, you know

I mean, wouldn't that be awesome have a car that was actually like better and smarter and

An actual like leap forward as opposed to just just another electric car. I mean, there's tons of them out there is

Certain people were pointing out in their own opinion pieces about this topic

So I found it kind of weird and I also It made me really feel kind of sad about Apple, you know, and like like they they basically just acknowledged

Well, we can't do this. We can't we can't make a difference in this

And Instead they are gonna do what everybody else is doing it feels like they're going like with the big AI fad I

Don't know if AI is a fad. I don't know if you've taken a look at Nvidia stock lately

My Mac is completely frozen up by the way, so I don't know. Oh great what's gonna go wrong here, but

Oh, no starting to kind of work again, maybe I need to close a few tabs or so that anyway

Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's it's obviously the hottest thing around tech, you know buzzy buzzy buzzy AI I mean

They'll put AI on anything today. One of the things we were talking about joking about in slack today was there's this like

Pet food, you know, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean

We were talking about joking about in slack today was there's this like Pet food company that's talking about how it's AI powered. It's like come on. I mean, I realized that like the market right now is is

You know a Twitter about this yeah, but You know, I I liked apples approach to AI before where they didn't like talk about it every third sentence

Where they just like did things with it and developed features that worked well, but now I mean

Especially the thing that I found really just odd was German specifically saying that they're not just working on AI

they're working on generative AI and that's what you know, the That's where the gibberish comes in right? You know, like oh great. Yeah, you know, it tells you

super Super Confidently facts that just aren't true it creates images that look interesting but have seven fingers, you know

It's I don't know I Found it personally. I found it very disappointing like a

Realization that Apple can't they just they just gave up they gave up on this this kind of big blue sky idea, right

this big interesting project and You know, and then I can't help but think what have we had recently? Oh, we got the vision Pro, which I don't know

Giant it not really Maybe it will be eventually I think eventually I do think that like it's not it's not there yet

and we'll talk about that more later in the episode, but Like, you know having lived with it for

the two weeks I Definitely saw the hype. I was like this is incredible and once they make this smaller and lighter and cheaper

It is gonna be absolutely everywhere, but that's gonna take a while obviously