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Apple's dismissal of 200 self-driving car employees points to a shift in its AI strategy

2019.01.27|
AI

It's not often you hear about layoffs at Apple.

So it came as a surprise Wednesday when CNBC learned that Apple was removing 200 employees from its self-driving car unit. Apple confirmed the staffing change, but reading between the lines of a spokesperson's statement, it sounds like the move is the latest in the company's broader goal to improve its artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities as it faces increased competition from rivals Google and Amazon.

"As the team focuses their work on several key areas for 2019, some groups are being moved to projects in other parts of the company, where they will support machine learning and other initiatives, across all of Apple," the company spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC Wednesday.

Self-driving car technology may still be an important initiative at Apple. But reading between the lines, it looks like it's taking a back seat a Apple beefs up its general AI staff.

"I think they're making the decision that, at least in the near term, it's better to have these people doing AI in other projects," said Gene Munster, a venture capitalist and analyst at Loup Ventures.

Apple's self-driving car project, called Titan internally, started out with the desire to create an Apple-branded electric car, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2015. But over the last few years, Apple has scaled back its ambition and lost leaders and other employees in the process. Today, the unit mostly explores the underlying technology that makes self-driving cars possible. CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly called self-driving "the mother of all AI projects."

Since Apple started its self-driving division, the consumer AI space has exploded through the rise of digital assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant and devices like Amazon's Echo. Apple's own digital Assistant, Siri, had a head start when it launched on the iPhone 4S back in 2011, but has not kept up with the competition.

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