Apple Is Working On “The Mother Of All AI Projects”

Tim Cook has been hinting at Apple’s interest in autonomous cars for a year now. Every single time, Cook answered to straight questions with evasive answers, refusing to elaborate on a potential Apple car project. Recently though, Apple’s CEO spoke loud and clear about their focus … and it doesn’t necessarily involve the production of an Apple vehicle #automagic

In an interview for Bloomberg, Tim Cook talked about the challenge and privilege of working on a mystery program linked to the automotive industry. He described the new project as the “mother of all AI projects” because it’s “probably one of the most difficult AI projects to work on.”

The entire discussion, in fact, was centered around artificial intelligence; that tells us Apple is more invested in perfecting the brain of a potential device than creating the device itself. In fact, Cook said that his team is “focusing on autonomous systems”.

“Autonomy is something that is incredibly exciting for us. But we’ll see where it takes us — we’re not really saying from a product point of view what we’ll do. It’s a core technology that we view as very important.” That said, Apple’s CEO is aware of the general trend of the industry to couple autonomous technology with electric cars and ride-sharing services. 

It will be interesting to see if Apple gets a place at the “automotive table”, where Tesla has already secured a great position. The company has definitely taken a first step in that direction by getting a vehicle permit that allows them to conduct tests with self-driving cars in California.