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> The two executives told staffers that the project will begin winding down and that many employees on the car team — known as the Special Projects Group, or SP

> The two executives told staffers that the project will begin winding down and that many employees on the car team — known as the Special Projects Group, or SPG — will be shifted to the artificial intelligence division under executive John Giannandrea. Those employees will focus on generative AI projects, an increasingly key priority for the company. This line really excited my PR-spin senses. The set of people working on automobile R&D who are good candidates to work on "generative AI projects" is so small that it's hardly worth mentioning. "Many employees" will be moving to jobs within Apple only insomuch as ~5% of 2000 people is arguably "many" (or whatever the size of the autonomous vehicle software team is). I understand this line as a large layoff announcement that reads more like an internal team reassignment.

alsetmusic 3y ago
I thought the skills for building an engine and those for building software were largely the same? /s Yes. They'll be letting a lot of people go. This smells like a controlled leak to signal that the company isn't experiencing cooling sales / services when that happens.
anonylizard 3y ago
Where does it say only 5% will move jobs? You underestimate the overlap between GenAI and EVs. Apple is not merely a software company, their AI strategy will not be merely send data to datacenter to run LLMs. Apple has to run local LLMs heavily amongst its devices, for responsiveness, cost, and privacy reasons. This will entail a holistic effort from batteries to the neural inference chips to the AI models to the user design. Much more complicated than the datacenter only approach. The car division would have also had people working on the battery, neural chips, UI design, etc. I would estimate 30% at least get moved to AI.
tibbar 3y ago
There is more overlap between the two than you'd think, specifically in producing and evaluating datasets for training and fine-tuning models. Most software engineers and ML engineers who worked on self-driving cars would do fine at working on GenAI; in fact, they're more qualified than the vast majority of engineers to work in a brand-new industry. Same goes for engineers working on compute hardware. Even engineers working on automotive controls and sensors could easily have a role working on increasingly multimodal models and applications, though I have no idea what projects Apple is actually prioritizing within that space.
- pquki4 3y ago
  The question is: does Apple actually need so many people working on GenAI? Would a team with 300 people be twice as good as a team with 150 people for what Apple is going to release as products? I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is going to lay off most of them.
  - maxerickson 3y ago
    It doesn't need to be twice as good, it needs to generate more net income.
    - jletienne 3y ago
      has anyone cared about net income in decades? maybe it's about signaling to investors, "we have 100s of people working on [emergent technology]"
      - huytersd 3y ago
        Just during every quarterly earning report
        jletienne 3y ago
        just tell investors to look at adjusted net ebitda. you'll be fine, they won't even notice (sarcasm because you need this stuff spelled out for you) It called the fully adjusted number “community adjusted Ebitda,” by which it subtracted not only interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, but also basic expenses like marketing, general and administrative, and development and design costs. Those earnings were $233 million, WeWork said.
      - rezonant 3y ago
        > has anyone cared about net income in decades? Uh, you mean net income also known as "net profit"? So your question is effectively "has anyone cared about profit in decades?" Well... yes
pavon 3y ago
> "Many employees" will be moving to jobs within Apple only insomuch as ~5% of 2000 people is arguably "many" (or whatever the size of the autonomous vehicle software team is). I would expect the majority of the people on that team to be working on autonomous driving. So the software folks would be a good fit for genAI and most of the remainder would be mechanical and electronics folks working on the sensors who also have very transfer skills in a company that builds their own hardware. From all the rumors I've heard Apple was never planning on building this car from scratch, so most those 2000 employees weren't focused on designing a car.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  > From all the rumors I've heard Apple was never planning on building this car from scratch One theory was that Apple started their own car project in the mid-2010s to retain their top UX and SWE (and AI) talent because Tesla was poaching them all (and it shows: Tesla's visual UI designs is very Apple-ish: clean, consistent, tasteful, especially when compared to the mishmash you get on a Ford, Toyota, or even BMW); and I don't think it's a coincidence that Tesla's self-driving project really took-off after Siri started getting worse... The other plausible theory was that ever since Apple launched CarPlay, they realised how inept the bulk of the carmaker industry is when it comes to software/high-technology and they saw an opportunity to make their own self-driving software platform and then license it out to automakers, and using CarPlay as a beachead into the carmaker industry; I want to believe this because it does make the most sense... excepting how those same automakers tend to be very protective of their brand identity: we've seen how GM and others clearly resent having to share their platform with AndroidAuto and CarPlay, so there's no way they'd publicly license Apple's tech - though still, some might. I speculate that had this plan ever worked Apple would have spun-off the company rather than try to put the Apple brand on it - but I don't think Apple has really spun-off any companies since ClarisWorks. At the other-end of the plausibility spectrum, I noticed a lot of people (MacRumors' forums, et al) wanted to believe Apple was somehow going to ship a one-size-fits-all "iCar", with styling right out of the Bondi Blue iMac G3 book - and as the 1990s jokes go - it would only work driving on Apple owned highways, require an proprietary EV charging connector on a cable that gets frayed after only a few months, and if you get a chip in the windscreen you have to replace the whole thing.
doctorpangloss 3y ago
> The set of people working on automobile R&D who are good candidates to work on "generative AI projects" is so small that it's hardly worth mentioning. Maybe the entire, most valuable part of the team is working on synthetic data, since at least 2020, and maybe as early as 2017. Apple’s Hypersim dataset is a good example of how essential it is. Synthetic data delivered Sora. It delivered Parallel Domain, an autonomous driving data startup. It’s been the state of the art idea for longer than GPT 3 has been around.
deleted 3y ago
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upbeat_general 3y ago
As someone who works on both, this is just not the case. If you're talking about general automotive R&D, sure. If you're talking about the total employee makeup of a current self-driving company, the number might be ~10-50%, depending on the company. But if you take the subset of employees that work on software, this number is much much larger. There's lots of typical SW dev needed for GenAI (think data pipelines) but a good chunk of ML-folks doing self-driving work can be useful on GenAI as well.
deleted 3y ago
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alsetmusic 3y ago

I thought the skills for building an engine and those for building software were largely the same? /s Yes. They'll be letting a lot of people go. This smells like a controlled leak to signal that the company isn't experiencing cooling sales / services when that happens.

anonylizard 3y ago

Where does it say only 5% will move jobs? You underestimate the overlap between GenAI and EVs. Apple is not merely a software company, their AI strategy will not be merely send data to datacenter to run LLMs. Apple has to run local LLMs heavily amongst its devices, for responsiveness, cost, and privacy reasons. This will entail a holistic effort from batteries to the neural inference chips to the AI models to the user design. Much more complicated than the datacenter only approach. The car division would have also had people working on the battery, neural chips, UI design, etc. I would estimate 30% at least get moved to AI.

tibbar 3y ago

There is more overlap between the two than you'd think, specifically in producing and evaluating datasets for training and fine-tuning models. Most software engineers and ML engineers who worked on self-driving cars would do fine at working on GenAI; in fact, they're more qualified than the vast majority of engineers to work in a brand-new industry. Same goes for engineers working on compute hardware. Even engineers working on automotive controls and sensors could easily have a role working on increasingly multimodal models and applications, though I have no idea what projects Apple is actually prioritizing within that space.

pquki4 3y ago
The question is: does Apple actually need so many people working on GenAI? Would a team with 300 people be twice as good as a team with 150 people for what Apple is going to release as products? I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is going to lay off most of them.
- maxerickson 3y ago
  It doesn't need to be twice as good, it needs to generate more net income.
  - jletienne 3y ago
    has anyone cared about net income in decades? maybe it's about signaling to investors, "we have 100s of people working on [emergent technology]"
    - huytersd 3y ago
      Just during every quarterly earning report
      - jletienne 3y ago
        just tell investors to look at adjusted net ebitda. you'll be fine, they won't even notice (sarcasm because you need this stuff spelled out for you) It called the fully adjusted number “community adjusted Ebitda,” by which it subtracted not only interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, but also basic expenses like marketing, general and administrative, and development and design costs. Those earnings were $233 million, WeWork said.
    - rezonant 3y ago
      > has anyone cared about net income in decades? Uh, you mean net income also known as "net profit"? So your question is effectively "has anyone cared about profit in decades?" Well... yes

pavon 3y ago

> "Many employees" will be moving to jobs within Apple only insomuch as ~5% of 2000 people is arguably "many" (or whatever the size of the autonomous vehicle software team is). I would expect the majority of the people on that team to be working on autonomous driving. So the software folks would be a good fit for genAI and most of the remainder would be mechanical and electronics folks working on the sensors who also have very transfer skills in a company that builds their own hardware. From all the rumors I've heard Apple was never planning on building this car from scratch, so most those 2000 employees weren't focused on designing a car.

DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
> From all the rumors I've heard Apple was never planning on building this car from scratch One theory was that Apple started their own car project in the mid-2010s to retain their top UX and SWE (and AI) talent because Tesla was poaching them all (and it shows: Tesla's visual UI designs is very Apple-ish: clean, consistent, tasteful, especially when compared to the mishmash you get on a Ford, Toyota, or even BMW); and I don't think it's a coincidence that Tesla's self-driving project really took-off after Siri started getting worse... The other plausible theory was that ever since Apple launched CarPlay, they realised how inept the bulk of the carmaker industry is when it comes to software/high-technology and they saw an opportunity to make their own self-driving software platform and then license it out to automakers, and using CarPlay as a beachead into the carmaker industry; I want to believe this because it does make the most sense... excepting how those same automakers tend to be very protective of their brand identity: we've seen how GM and others clearly resent having to share their platform with AndroidAuto and CarPlay, so there's no way they'd publicly license Apple's tech - though still, some might. I speculate that had this plan ever worked Apple would have spun-off the company rather than try to put the Apple brand on it - but I don't think Apple has really spun-off any companies since ClarisWorks. At the other-end of the plausibility spectrum, I noticed a lot of people (MacRumors' forums, et al) wanted to believe Apple was somehow going to ship a one-size-fits-all "iCar", with styling right out of the Bondi Blue iMac G3 book - and as the 1990s jokes go - it would only work driving on Apple owned highways, require an proprietary EV charging connector on a cable that gets frayed after only a few months, and if you get a chip in the windscreen you have to replace the whole thing.

doctorpangloss 3y ago

> The set of people working on automobile R&D who are good candidates to work on "generative AI projects" is so small that it's hardly worth mentioning. Maybe the entire, most valuable part of the team is working on synthetic data, since at least 2020, and maybe as early as 2017. Apple’s Hypersim dataset is a good example of how essential it is. Synthetic data delivered Sora. It delivered Parallel Domain, an autonomous driving data startup. It’s been the state of the art idea for longer than GPT 3 has been around.

deleted 3y ago

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upbeat_general 3y ago

As someone who works on both, this is just not the case. If you're talking about general automotive R&D, sure. If you're talking about the total employee makeup of a current self-driving company, the number might be ~10-50%, depending on the company. But if you take the subset of employees that work on software, this number is much much larger. There's lots of typical SW dev needed for GenAI (think data pipelines) but a good chunk of ML-folks doing self-driving work can be useful on GenAI as well.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]