Remember when Apple wanted to make a car? For about a decade, starting around 2014, Apple quietly spent billions developing a self-driving car. The project was cancelled in early 2024 before it could bear fruit—terrible pun intended—but that doesn't mean the whole effort was useless.
In fact, the Apple Car that never was might actually end up being considered one of the tech giant's most important projects of this century. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, one of the foremost Apple whisperers, the knowhow and hardware developed during "Project Titan" would go on to power all of its products moving forward.
To get ahead of Musk and his early claims of an imminent autonomous future, Apple wanted to bring full Level 5 autonomy to its electric car. And it realized that wasn't going to be possible without next-level machine learning and artificial intelligence. So it went full-throttle on AI, both at the hardware and software levels. Apple's big wigs didn't want Siri just searching stuff from a database quickly, but also to have its chipsets handle AI processing themselves, in the device.
"Most notably, that effort gave rise to its Neural Engine, the dedicated portion of Apple’s chips responsible for on-device AI processing," Gurman wrote on Sunday.
