Apple's self-driving car unit now headed by AI chief who oversees Siri: Report

FP TrendingDec 10, 2020 14:47:39 IST

Apple Inc has moved its self-driving car unit under John Giannandrea, who is the top artificial intelligence executive of the company. Giannandrea will be overseeing the company’s work on an autonomous system that could over time be used in its own car, reported Bloomberg. People familiar with the matter told the publication that Titan, which is the name of the project, is run by Doug Field and that Field along with his team of engineers have migrated to Giannandrea's artificial intelligence and machine learning group.

However, an Apple spokesperson has denied commenting on the developments.

John Giannandrea, Apple AI executive

Apple's former senior vice president of hardware engineering Bob Mansfield recently retired and this has led to Giannandrea to take over. Field used to earlier report to Mansfield. Mansfield had initially retired from Apple in 2012. However, he returned for less than a year as its senior VP in charge of chip technology. He stepped down from the role in 2013 and remained a part0time consultant since then.

As per the report, Giannandrea joined Apple in 2018 as its vice president of AI Strategy and Machine Learning. He was promoted to Apple's executive team as a senior vice president later the same year. Giannandrea had earlier run Google's machine-learning and search teams. Apart from the car project, he is also responsible for Siri and machine-learning technologies across Apple products.

Apple had set out to build an EV to rival Tesla and other manufacturers in 2014. However, they reigned back their project due to leadership issues and technical challenges. Apple brought back Mansfield to lead the effort and the now-retired Mansfield oversaw a shift from the development of a car to just the autonomous system.