In a report presented yesterday by CNBC, Apple mentioned that 200 employees have been let go from the self driving cars department known as “Project Titan”, even though Apple stated that the company still sees great potential in the field of self driving vehicles.
The news does not come as a surprise though, as in the last few days allot of rumors have emerged mentioning about the cutting off the employment opportunities planned by Apple. Meanwhile, the CEO of the company, Tim Cook, has rushed to defend the decisions of the company, giving reassurances to investors that the importance of a department is not measured by the hiring rates of the company.
Alongside letting people go, it seems that part of the personnel have been relocated to other divisions from within the company, like AI and self-learning departments.
“We have an incredible talented team who works at autonomous systems and associated technologies. As long as the team is concentrating its activity on more key-domains for the year 2019, some groups are being shifted to other projects within the company, where they will support automated learning and other initiatives. ” a spokesman from Apple has declared.
The recent report shows the reduction in personnel made by the same department in 2016, while Apple did not made any public statements about the state of the autonomous cars projects for a long long time. More than that, Tim Cook left to the public’s understanding that the main priority for Apple in 2019 will be projects in the health field, declaring that this will be the biggest contribution to mankind by Apple, therefor the number of employees for health related projects in the company has increased by 400% in the last two years.