Apple Inc. has moved its self-driving car unit under the leadership of top artificial intelligence executive John Giannandrea, who will oversee the company’s continued work on an autonomous system that could eventually be used in its own car.
The project, known as Titan, is run day-to-day by Doug Field. His team of hundreds of engineers have moved to Giannandrea’s artificial intelligence and machine-learning group, according to people familiar with the change. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.
Giannandrea joined Apple in 2018 as its vice president of AI Strategy and Machine Learning before being promoted to Apple’s executive team as a senior vice president later that year. He ran Google’s machine-learning and search teams before that. At Apple, in addition to the car project, he is in charge of Siri and machine-learning technologies across Apple’s products.
Mark Gurman
In other news around self-diving cars… In contrast to Uber, Apple should have both the engineering resources to design custom chips and sensors for autonomous vehicles, and the finances to support long term development. Where Apple struggles is the AI component – subordinating this project to the same leadership in charge of Siri does not exactly inspire confidence in future breakthroughs, considering how poorly Siri performs compared to other digital assistants. Project Titan underwent several reorganizations and scale-backs over the years, and according to recent reports it performed significantly less public road testing in 2019; I would not be surprised if it is completely abandoned in coming years.
Meanwhile, Google’s Waymo launched a public, driverless taxi service this October, but with a very limited scope and careful restrictions around speed. As much as I would like to see self-driving cars adopted widely (so that I don’t need to get a driver’s license), I have low expectations for their success over the next decade.
So Waymo is approaching the problem very gradually. Its cars are limited to roads with a maximum speed of 45 miles per hour. That makes sense since high-speed highway crashes are most likely to get someone killed. Waymo is also rolling out its fully driverless service at a glacial pace. Two years after it had hoped to launch a driverless commercial service, the company is still only doing about a few hundred rides a week.
I would guess there’s an army of people behind the scenes monitoring and analyzing each ride to make sure it goes flawlessly. If those evaluations are positive, the company will presumably increase the number of cars on the road. Eventually, Waymo will become confident enough in its strategy to expand to a larger area—first across the Phoenix area and then in other metropolitan areas.
Timothy B. Lee
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