Apple has fired no less than 200 of the employees who have been working for several years on the development of the intelligent and autonomous car that the American company would like to launch on the market someday. In recent years, the project focused more on the development of autonomous guidance systems for cars, dozens of cars with Apple equipment circulating on the streets of the USA to collect data to be used for their improvement.
Apple had this project under the name for a very long time Project Titan, and the US press says that 200 of the employees there were recently fired, but the company says otherwise. A spokesperson for the Apple company stated that various groups of employees are being relocated within the company to further develop artificial intelligence systems, so some of those remaining will no longer work on this project, but will be involved in others.
Apple is reducing the number of employees developing the car of the future
Apple is not the first massive layoff made within this team, more than 2 years ago having a similar round of layoffs before rethinking the objective of the project, and hiring new leaders for it. It was rumored about 2 years ago that Apple would have almost 1000 employees Project Titan, so the dismissal of 200 of them, and the relocation of others, does not mean that there are still many who work to bring the technologies to consumers.
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 announced a reduction in the number of employees due to the substantial drop in iPhone sales, so we can expect to hear about similar changes being made in its other divisions. Those at Apple have invested billions upon billions of dollars in various projects over the years, all thanks to the good sales of the iPhone, but since they no longer generate much money, it was expected that the investments would be reduced by those from Cupertino.
