Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
In 2017, Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed what the global auto industry had long feared: the tech giant was working on a driverless car.
“We’re focusing on autonomous systems. And clearly, one purpose of autonomous systems are self-driving cars,” Cook said in an interview with Bloomberg. “And 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.”
Where it took Apple was essentially nowhere. On Tuesday, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman confirmed that Apple was scuttling its secretive car project, with most of the team’s workers moving over to generative AI initiatives. Others would…