Apple lays off 200 employees on autonomous vehicle project
American tech giant axed 200 staff on Project Titan — set up to develop autonomous vehicle systems
Apple has axed 200 members of staff from its autonomous vehicle development program.
CNBC says the tech giant has made the significant cuts to Project Titan — which is developing systems for autonomous driving — as part of a restructuring plan under new leadership.
In a statement to the news network, Apple acknowledged the layoffs, stating: “We have an incredibly talented team working on autonomous systems and associated technologies at Apple. 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.
“We continue to believe there is a huge opportunity with autonomous systems, that Apple has unique capabilities to contribute, and that this is the most ambitious machine learning project ever.”
Apple re-hired former Tesla chief engineer Doug Field in 2018 to lead Project Titan. He was previously one of Apple’s top hardware engineers for product design and Mac computers. The programme is believed to be resuming work on developing autonomous systems despite the reduction in staff
In 2017, Apple chief executive Tim Cook described autonomous vehicle technology as ‘the mother of all AI projects’. Speaking to Bloomberg, he said: “We’re focusing on autonomous systems. And clearly, one purpose of autonomous systems are self-driving cars. There are others.
“We sort of see it as the mother of all AI projects. It’s probably one of the most difficult AI projects actually to work on and so autonomy is something that’s incredibly exciting for us, but we’ll see where it takes us.”
