Charlie StrossFeb 27, 2024

Apple Cancels Work on Electric Car, Ending Decade long Effort

The most recent approach discussed internally was delaying a car release until 2028 and reducing self-driving specifications from Level 4 to Level 2+ technology.

Many employees on the car team — known as the Special Projects Group, or SPG — will be shifted to the artificial intelligence division

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-27/apple-cancels-work-on-electric-car-shifts-team-to-generative-ai

Apple to Wind Down Electric Car Effort After Decadelong Odyssey

Apple Inc. is canceling a decadelong effort to build an electric car, according to people with knowledge of the matter, abandoning one of the most ambitious projects in the history of the company.

Bloomberg
Show threadheavyboots
@cstross What I find hilarious is that having swallowed the EV self-driving myth hook, line and sinker they have now moved on to the myth of AI…
Feb 28, 2024 at 5:12pmMona for Mac
Show threadCharlie StrossFeb 28, 2024

@heavyboots Apple's AI strategy predates the current fad by some years: it runs on the Apple Neural Engine coprocessors embedded in M-series and A-series CPUs, doing stuff like realtime OCR and face recognition on your phone. Some of the LLM work will be rolled into improving Siri, which they first rolled out in 2011.

Hopefully they're not buying into the OpenAI/NVidia driven GPT fad …

Show threadheavybootsFeb 28, 2024

@cstross I will say that I would have more faith if Siri wasn’t so bad at its job compared to the Google Assistant.

Also, I think “generative AI” was specifically mentioned in some articles I’ve seen which increases my level of concern. All we need is every iOS/macOS device on the planet added to the pool of things that can easily generate incorrect data to help swamp the internet’s trustworthiness…