In a recent announcement, Apple has shifted the leadership of its self-driving car unit. Now, the team will directly report to the company’s top Artificial Intelligence executive John Giannandrea. The autonomous system being developed by the company’s self-driving car unit will fall under the leadership of Giannandrea, and he will be responsible for making the decisions for the development.
According to sources, the autonomous system, dubbed Titan, is run by hundreds of engineers led by Doug Field. Now the entire team has been moved to the artificial intelligence and machine-learning group.
“Previously, Field reported to Bob Mansfield, Apple’s former senior vice president of hardware engineering. Mansfield has now fully retired from Apple, leading to Giannandrea taking over.”
Giannandrea was appointed as the vice president of AI Strategy and Machine Learning in 2018. He was then promoted to Apple’s executive team as a senior vice president later that year. Before joining Apple, he ran Google’s machine-learning and search teams. According to sources, he is also in charge of Siri and machine-learning technologies across Apple’s products.
Mansfield initially retired from Apple in 2012, only to return for less than a year as its senior vice president in charge of chip technology. Mansfield stepped down from that role in 2013 and then remained as a part-time consultant.
Apple started its project to an autonomous electric car in 2014. But had to face several setbacks, But after the company appointed Mansfield, an independent system’s development gradually started getting back on its tracks. Mansfield has a history of working with Apple; he previously retired from apple in 2012 but returned soon after as the senior vice president in charge of chip technology.
Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook describes the autonomous system’s effort as the “mother of all AI projects and a core technology that we view as very important.” He also described it as “probably one of the most difficult AI projects to work on.”
