Shifting gears
« Apple is not building a car. Not today, not tomorrow, not this year. Not ever. It’s not building a gas one or a diesel one. It’s not building an electric one or nuclear-powered one. It’s not. »
I wrote this in 2015 and it’s just as true today as it was then.
Did it spend potentially billions investigating the possibility, even launching Project Titan as a focal point of all its efforts? Yes, it did. Did it even acquire at least one car tech company, Drive.AI, in 2019? Yup. But I’m not sure that the company’s heart, or at least Apple CEO Tim Cook’s heart, was ever in it. Cook is too savvy a supply-chain and business-process guy to get mired in the difficult business of building a large, mostly mechanical device to house a hopped-up, big-screen iPhone.
According to typically accurate Apple secrets digger Mark Gurman, Apple is shifting the efforts of the Apple Car team to a more clear and present target: generative AI. Stalled
It’s now accepted wisdom that Apple’s WWDC 2024 will be the springboard for Apple’s substantive new generative AI efforts. We expect to see an all-new Siri with generative AI powers in text, imagery, and more that rivals OpenAI’s ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Google Gemini.
The beauty of focusing on Generative AI over an Apple Car is that Apple doesn’t have to introduce any new hardware. Virtually all the magic will be on the software, machine learning, and algorithm side.
