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SamuelTse
2021-06-16

Layoffs, executive resignations, and repeated rejections, Apple has been really difficult to build cars in the past seven years

七年过去了，苹果汽车还是个 PPT 产品吗？屡被拒绝的苹果近日，根据路透社报道，苹果公司正在与宁德时代、比亚迪就电动汽车项目的电池供应进行初步洽谈。更早之前，苹果被传出与现代、日产等传统车企洽

Layoffs, executive resignations, and repeated rejections, Apple has been really difficult to build cars in the past seven years

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{"i18n":{"language":"en_US"},"data":{"magic":2,"id":169699105,"tweetId":"169699105","gmtCreate":1623831436307,"gmtModify":1703820771890,"author":{"id":3575693618857163,"idStr":"3575693618857163","authorId":3575693618857163,"authorIdStr":"3575693618857163","name":"SamuelTse","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/7c835f9ee5e2d52dafa611e8a1cf083d","vip":1,"userType":1,"introduction":"","boolIsFan":false,"boolIsHead":false,"crmLevel":12,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"individualDisplayBadges":[],"fanSize":2,"starInvestorFlag":false},"themes":[],"images":[],"coverImages":[],"extraTitle":"","html":"<html><head></head><body>?</body></html>","htmlText":"<html><head></head><body>?</body></html>","text":"?","highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"favoriteSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/169699105","repostId":1132950320,"repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1132950320","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1623829906,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/1132950320?lang=en_US&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2021-06-16 15:51","market":"us","language":"zh","title":"Layoffs, executive resignations, and repeated rejections, Apple has been really difficult to build cars in the past seven years","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1132950320","media":"AI前线","summary":"七年过去了，苹果汽车还是个 PPT 产品吗？\n\n屡被拒绝的苹果\n近日，根据路透社报道，苹果公司正在与宁德时代、比亚迪就电动汽车项目的电池供应进行初步洽谈。\n更早之前，苹果被传出与现代、日产等传统车企洽","content":"Seven years have passed, is Apple Car still a PPT product?Repeatedly rejected applesRecently, according to Reuters, Apple is conducting preliminary negotiations with CATL and BYD on battery supply for electric vehicle projects.Earlier, Apple was rumored to be negotiating cooperation with traditional car companies such as Hyundai and Nissan. This negotiation became the focus of the industry. There were even rumors that Apple had actually signed relevant agreements with Hyundai's subsidiaries, but unfortunately there was no result in the end.According to Wall Street News, as early as May 2018, Apple was in talks with German auto giant Volkswagen to produce an autonomous employee shuttle based on the T6 Transporter commercial vehicle-a plan that will lead to the development of Apple cars for the mass market. But the partnership between the two companies was stifled after a series of test crashes and employee leaks, with little disclosure about the matter.Since launching the Titan Project in 2014 and making it clear that it wants to enter the automotive industry, Apple has suffered repeated setbacks in advancing its own plans and seeking partners. As a result, seven years have passed, and the outside world has not seen much substantial progress. Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo recently claimed that the Apple Car may not launch until 2028 or later given the stalemate in negotiations, so expect a long wait to see it on the road.According to people familiar with the matter, Apple has a small team dedicated to developing a new car, hoping to eventually compete with Tesla, but the development work is still in its early stages. It will take at least five years for Apple to launch a self-driving electric car, because the research and development work is still in its infancy. Combined with the forecasts of the above analysts, it will really take some time to wait for this Apple car.Layoffs, frequent executive departuresWhy is it so difficult for Apple to build a car?There hasn't been much movement for a long time since Apple launched the \"Project Titan\" autonomous driving program in 2014. In 2018, what exposed the progress of this project turned out to be a leak, and relevant documents showed that Apple's autonomous driving project had more than 5,000 employees at that time, of which about 2,700 were core employees.In January 2019, the \"Titan Project\" was reported to be laid off again, and more than 200 employees were laid off in this incident.Unlike the past, an Apple spokesman acknowledged the news of layoffs and said the company still believes there are opportunities in the field of autonomous driving:\"At Apple, we have a very talented team working on autonomous systems and related technologies. In 2019, they will focus their work on several key areas, and some team members will be transferred to projects in other departments of the company, where they will support machine learning and other projects across Apple. However, we continue to believe that there are huge opportunities for autonomous systems and that Apple has the unique ability to contribute, which is the most ambitious machine learning project ever undertaken. \" As mentioned earlier, Apple's autonomous driving plan sprouted as early as 2014. It is said that at that time, more than 1,000 employees were working on the project at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, San Francisco. However, as internal strife, leadership issues and other privacy issues affected the project, Apple laid off employees and fired hundreds of employees on the project.A month later, the safety report of Apple's self-driving car was pointed out to be \"too simple\", with only seven short pages, and even fewer key safety-related contents.Basically, it can be said that since the establishment of Apple's autonomous driving project, as long as it appears on news pages, it is basically not good news.In the second half of 2019, the \"Titan Project\" finally had pretty good news: In June, Apple officially acquired Drive.ai, a \"mom-and-pop store\" co-founded by AI big coffee Andrew Ng and his wife. Inject fresh vitality into its own self-driving project.Then, there was another long period of silence, and the progress of Apple's autonomous driving disappeared from the public's view again. Until January 2020, new progress appeared.On January 29, local time, some media discovered that Apple published a paper on Arxiv.org. The paper pointed out that Apple scientist Yichuan Charlie Tang and his team are using a method to simulate the driving scene of vehicles merging and gradually create a more diverse simulation environment.Tang and his co-authors write: \"We demonstrate this technology in a challenging multi-agent lane change simulation. In this simulation environment, experimental targets must interact and negotiate with other vehicles to successfully merge on the road. Although the environment starts with simple road conditions, as the training progresses, we increase its complexity by repeatedly adding increasingly diverse factors to the agent'zoo '. Qualitatively, we found that through self-training, experimental targets automatically learn interesting behaviors, such as defensive driving, overtaking, giving way, and using signal lights to communicate with other agents. \"<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/01883ebc73afc1f71d865339da65ecbf\" tg-width=\"1080\" tg-height=\"531\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\">Lane change simulation schematic diagramAs explained by the researchers, lane-changing behavior is considered a complex operation in the field of autonomous driving because it requires the driving system to accurately predict intentions and respond accordingly. Traditional solutions make assumptions and rely on manually coded behaviors, but these flexibility-limited and fragile strategies do not handle edge cases well, such as several vehicles trying to merge into the same lane at the same time. In contrast to rule-based systems, reinforcement learning directly learns strategies through repeated interactions with the environment.Although it is still being tested in a simulated environment, Apple's autonomous driving has finally shown some decent progress.Since the beginning of this year, many executives of Apple's autonomous driving have resigned one after another. In February, Benjamin Lyon, a veteran member of Apple's self-driving, officially left. It is reported that Benjamin Lyon is one of the founders of Apple's self-driving car project and served as Apple's senior director of self-driving hardware.During his 21 years at Apple, he worked on the research and development of Touch ID, a fingerprint recognition technology for iPhone, and then he joined Apple's self-driving car team. In the same month, Jaime Waydo, who is in charge of the self-driving car safety and supervision team, left Apple, and the engineer was praised by Apple CEO Cook as \"the mother of all artificial intelligence projects.\" In the following months, three more executives left one after another.According to relevant sources, Apple's chip division, led by Johny Srouji, is also involved in automotive research and development. Since 2018, Srouji's team has been developing customized Arm-based chips, mainly focusing on machine learning processing to drive the underlying self-driving car system.Since 2017, Apple has been testing autonomous technology on public roads. Cars tested by companies averaged 118 miles in 2019 until human safety drivers needed control. According to the California Department of Vehicles, this figure is an increase from 1 mile per hand-dropped drive in 2018. According to the California Department of Vehicles, the company owns 66 vehicles. This is an increase from 55 licensed vehicles as of mid-2018.In the excitement of Robotaxi, there is no AppleIn the past two years, Robotaxi has been in the limelight in the field of autonomous driving, and many domestic and foreign companies have deployed in this field.On September 26, 2019, Baidu launched Robotaxi service to the public in Changsha City, Hunan Province; On August 5, 2019, Didi Chuxing announced that its autonomous driving department had been upgraded to an independent company, focusing on autonomous driving research and development, product applications and related business development. It is understood that RoboTaxi is also one of the main businesses developed by Didi Autonomous Driving Company. As a domestic travel service provider, Didi seems to have innate advantages in this field; Pony.ai is the first company to launch Robotaxi services in both China and the United States. In addition to Beijing, it currently provides services to the public in Guangzhou, China, Irvine, California, and Fremont.In Beijing, the service scope of Pony.ai Robotaxi will cover the core operating area of 150 square kilometers in Beijing Economic and Technological Development Zone, including about 150 sites. The operating hours will last from 8:30 am to 22:30 pm, including morning and evening peak hours and night time.From 2017 to 2018, BMW, Volkswagen, General Motors, Ford and other car manufacturers joined forces with Intel, Nvidia, Google, Lyft and other companies to enter RoboTaxi, and this is also the hottest period for autonomous driving.In April 2019, Tesla founder Elon Musk publicly stated that the Tesla RoboTaxi network will be established in 2020. As part of the Tesla network's \"RoboTaxi\" service, owners of operating vehicles can earn up to $30,000 in revenue every year. Musk has set his sights on the autonomous mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) market. In a conference call after Tesla announced its rate hike, Musk pointed out that RoboTaxi could eventually push the company to a market value of $500 billion.It is worth mentioning that, just like the promise of \"realizing fully autonomous driving by 2020\", most companies set 2025 as the target year for fully realizing RoboTaxi. From this point of view, it is somewhat difficult for Apple to catch up with this wave.","source":"lsy1580199951562","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Layoffs, executive resignations, and repeated rejections, Apple has been really difficult to build cars in the past seven years</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 12.5px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nLayoffs, executive resignations, and repeated rejections, Apple has been really difficult to build cars in the past seven years\n</h2>\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\nAI前线2021-06-16 15:51\n\n</h4>\n</header>\n<article>\nSeven years have passed, is Apple Car still a PPT product?Repeatedly rejected applesRecently, according to Reuters, Apple is conducting preliminary negotiations with CATL and BYD on battery supply for electric vehicle projects.Earlier, Apple was rumored to be negotiating cooperation with traditional car companies such as Hyundai and Nissan. This negotiation became the focus of the industry. There were even rumors that Apple had actually signed relevant agreements with Hyundai's subsidiaries, but unfortunately there was no result in the end.According to Wall Street News, as early as May 2018, Apple was in talks with German auto giant Volkswagen to produce an autonomous employee shuttle based on the T6 Transporter commercial vehicle-a plan that will lead to the development of Apple cars for the mass market. But the partnership between the two companies was stifled after a series of test crashes and employee leaks, with little disclosure about the matter.Since launching the Titan Project in 2014 and making it clear that it wants to enter the automotive industry, Apple has suffered repeated setbacks in advancing its own plans and seeking partners. As a result, seven years have passed, and the outside world has not seen much substantial progress. Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo recently claimed that the Apple Car may not launch until 2028 or later given the stalemate in negotiations, so expect a long wait to see it on the road.According to people familiar with the matter, Apple has a small team dedicated to developing a new car, hoping to eventually compete with Tesla, but the development work is still in its early stages. It will take at least five years for Apple to launch a self-driving electric car, because the research and development work is still in its infancy. Combined with the forecasts of the above analysts, it will really take some time to wait for this Apple car.Layoffs, frequent executive departuresWhy is it so difficult for Apple to build a car?There hasn't been much movement for a long time since Apple launched the \"Project Titan\" autonomous driving program in 2014. In 2018, what exposed the progress of this project turned out to be a leak, and relevant documents showed that Apple's autonomous driving project had more than 5,000 employees at that time, of which about 2,700 were core employees.In January 2019, the \"Titan Project\" was reported to be laid off again, and more than 200 employees were laid off in this incident.Unlike the past, an Apple spokesman acknowledged the news of layoffs and said the company still believes there are opportunities in the field of autonomous driving:\"At Apple, we have a very talented team working on autonomous systems and related technologies. In 2019, they will focus their work on several key areas, and some team members will be transferred to projects in other departments of the company, where they will support machine learning and other projects across Apple. However, we continue to believe that there are huge opportunities for autonomous systems and that Apple has the unique ability to contribute, which is the most ambitious machine learning project ever undertaken. \" As mentioned earlier, Apple's autonomous driving plan sprouted as early as 2014. It is said that at that time, more than 1,000 employees were working on the project at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, San Francisco. However, as internal strife, leadership issues and other privacy issues affected the project, Apple laid off employees and fired hundreds of employees on the project.A month later, the safety report of Apple's self-driving car was pointed out to be \"too simple\", with only seven short pages, and even fewer key safety-related contents.Basically, it can be said that since the establishment of Apple's autonomous driving project, as long as it appears on news pages, it is basically not good news.In the second half of 2019, the \"Titan Project\" finally had pretty good news: In June, Apple officially acquired Drive.ai, a \"mom-and-pop store\" co-founded by AI big coffee Andrew Ng and his wife. Inject fresh vitality into its own self-driving project.Then, there was another long period of silence, and the progress of Apple's autonomous driving disappeared from the public's view again. Until January 2020, new progress appeared.On January 29, local time, some media discovered that Apple published a paper on Arxiv.org. The paper pointed out that Apple scientist Yichuan Charlie Tang and his team are using a method to simulate the driving scene of vehicles merging and gradually create a more diverse simulation environment.Tang and his co-authors write: \"We demonstrate this technology in a challenging multi-agent lane change simulation. In this simulation environment, experimental targets must interact and negotiate with other vehicles to successfully merge on the road. Although the environment starts with simple road conditions, as the training progresses, we increase its complexity by repeatedly adding increasingly diverse factors to the agent'zoo '. Qualitatively, we found that through self-training, experimental targets automatically learn interesting behaviors, such as defensive driving, overtaking, giving way, and using signal lights to communicate with other agents. \"<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/01883ebc73afc1f71d865339da65ecbf\" tg-width=\"1080\" tg-height=\"531\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\">Lane change simulation schematic diagramAs explained by the researchers, lane-changing behavior is considered a complex operation in the field of autonomous driving because it requires the driving system to accurately predict intentions and respond accordingly. Traditional solutions make assumptions and rely on manually coded behaviors, but these flexibility-limited and fragile strategies do not handle edge cases well, such as several vehicles trying to merge into the same lane at the same time. In contrast to rule-based systems, reinforcement learning directly learns strategies through repeated interactions with the environment.Although it is still being tested in a simulated environment, Apple's autonomous driving has finally shown some decent progress.Since the beginning of this year, many executives of Apple's autonomous driving have resigned one after another. In February, Benjamin Lyon, a veteran member of Apple's self-driving, officially left. It is reported that Benjamin Lyon is one of the founders of Apple's self-driving car project and served as Apple's senior director of self-driving hardware.During his 21 years at Apple, he worked on the research and development of Touch ID, a fingerprint recognition technology for iPhone, and then he joined Apple's self-driving car team. In the same month, Jaime Waydo, who is in charge of the self-driving car safety and supervision team, left Apple, and the engineer was praised by Apple CEO Cook as \"the mother of all artificial intelligence projects.\" In the following months, three more executives left one after another.According to relevant sources, Apple's chip division, led by Johny Srouji, is also involved in automotive research and development. Since 2018, Srouji's team has been developing customized Arm-based chips, mainly focusing on machine learning processing to drive the underlying self-driving car system.Since 2017, Apple has been testing autonomous technology on public roads. Cars tested by companies averaged 118 miles in 2019 until human safety drivers needed control. According to the California Department of Vehicles, this figure is an increase from 1 mile per hand-dropped drive in 2018. According to the California Department of Vehicles, the company owns 66 vehicles. This is an increase from 55 licensed vehicles as of mid-2018.In the excitement of Robotaxi, there is no AppleIn the past two years, Robotaxi has been in the limelight in the field of autonomous driving, and many domestic and foreign companies have deployed in this field.On September 26, 2019, Baidu launched Robotaxi service to the public in Changsha City, Hunan Province; On August 5, 2019, Didi Chuxing announced that its autonomous driving department had been upgraded to an independent company, focusing on autonomous driving research and development, product applications and related business development. It is understood that RoboTaxi is also one of the main businesses developed by Didi Autonomous Driving Company. As a domestic travel service provider, Didi seems to have innate advantages in this field; Pony.ai is the first company to launch Robotaxi services in both China and the United States. In addition to Beijing, it currently provides services to the public in Guangzhou, China, Irvine, California, and Fremont.In Beijing, the service scope of Pony.ai Robotaxi will cover the core operating area of 150 square kilometers in Beijing Economic and Technological Development Zone, including about 150 sites. The operating hours will last from 8:30 am to 22:30 pm, including morning and evening peak hours and night time.From 2017 to 2018, BMW, Volkswagen, General Motors, Ford and other car manufacturers joined forces with Intel, Nvidia, Google, Lyft and other companies to enter RoboTaxi, and this is also the hottest period for autonomous driving.In April 2019, Tesla founder Elon Musk publicly stated that the Tesla RoboTaxi network will be established in 2020. As part of the Tesla network's \"RoboTaxi\" service, owners of operating vehicles can earn up to $30,000 in revenue every year. Musk has set his sights on the autonomous mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) market. In a conference call after Tesla announced its rate hike, Musk pointed out that RoboTaxi could eventually push the company to a market value of $500 billion.It is worth mentioning that, just like the promise of \"realizing fully autonomous driving by 2020\", most companies set 2025 as the target year for fully realizing RoboTaxi. From this point of view, it is somewhat difficult for Apple to catch up with this wave.\n<div class=\"bt-text\">\n\n\n source：<a href=\"https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/DiAEY2Hho3JCnzymaNuzZA\">AI前线</a>\n\n\n</div>\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0e9c6038c922a501076310ac125cdbb5","relate_stocks":{"AAPL":"苹果"},"source_url":"https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/DiAEY2Hho3JCnzymaNuzZA","is_english":false,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1132950320","content_text":"七年过去了，苹果汽车还是个 PPT 产品吗？\n\n屡被拒绝的苹果\n近日，根据路透社报道，苹果公司正在与宁德时代、比亚迪就电动汽车项目的电池供应进行初步洽谈。\n更早之前，苹果被传出与现代、日产等传统车企洽谈合作，这场谈判成为了业界的关注焦点，更有传言称苹果实际上已经与现代的子公司签署了相关协议，但可惜最终没有什么结果。\n据华尔街见闻报道，早在 2018 年 5 月，苹果就曾与德国汽车巨头大众汽车进行谈判，以生产基于 T6 Transporter 商用车的自动员工穿梭车——该计划将导致为大众市场开发苹果汽车。但在一系列测试崩溃和员工泄密之后，两家公司之间的合作关系被扼杀了，关于此事的披露几乎没有。\n自 2014 年推出泰坦计划，明确要进军汽车行业之后，苹果公司在推进自身计划和寻求合作伙伴上屡屡受挫，导致七年过去了，外界还没有看到太多实质性的进展。苹果分析师郭明錤最近声称，鉴于谈判陷入僵局，Apple Car 可能要到 2028 年或更晚才会推出，因此预计要等很长时间才能在路上看到它。\n据知情人士透露，苹果公司拥有一个小团队，专门研发一款新车，希望最终能和特斯拉竞争，但是开发工作还处在初期。苹果要推出一款自动驾驶的电动车至少需要 5 年的时间，因为研发工作还处于初期阶段。结合上述分析师的预测，要等到这款苹果汽车着实还需要一些时日。\n裁员、高管频繁离职\n苹果造车怎么这么难？\n自苹果于 2014 年推出“泰坦（Project Titan）”自动驾驶计划之后很长一段时间里都没有什么太大的动静。2018 年，让这个项目进展曝光的竟然是一起泄密事件，而相关文件显示，当时苹果自动驾驶项目拥有超过 5000 名员工，其中约 2700 人为核心员工。\n到了 2019 年 1 月，“泰坦计划”又被传出裁员的消息，有 200 余名员工在此次事件中被裁。\n不同以往的是，苹果公司的一名发言人承认了裁员的消息，并表示公司仍然相信自动驾驶领域存在机会：\n\n “在苹果，我们拥有一个非常有才华的团队，他们致力于自主系统和相关技术。2019 年，他们将把工作重点放在几个关键领域，一些团队成员将被转移到公司其他部门的项目，在那里，他们将支持整个苹果的机器学习和其他项目。但是，我们仍然相信，自主系统存在巨大的机遇，苹果有独特的能力做出贡献，这是有史以来最雄心勃勃的机器学习项目。”\n\n前文也已提到，苹果的自动驾驶计划早在 2014 年就萌芽了，据称当时有 1000 多名员工在位于旧金山库比蒂诺的苹果总部从事项目工作。但是由于内部争斗、领导问题和其他隐私问题影响到了项目，导致苹果裁员，解聘了数百名该项目员工。\n一个月后，苹果自动驾驶汽车的安全报告又被指出“过于简单”，内容仅有短短的 7 页，而安全相关的重点内容则更是少之又少。\n基本上可以说，苹果自动驾驶项目成立以来，只要出现在新闻页面上，基本都不是什么好消息。\n到了 2019 年的下半年，“泰坦计划”终于有了还算不错的消息传来：6 月，苹果正式收购了 AI 大咖吴恩达及其妻子共同创立的“夫妻店”——Drive.ai，为自己的自动驾驶项目注入新鲜活力。\n随后，又是一段漫长的沉寂期，苹果自动驾驶的进展就这样再次消失在了公众的视野里，直到 2020 年 1 月，新的进展出现了。\n当地时间 1 月 29 日，有媒体发现：苹果在 Arxiv.org 上发表了一篇论文，论文指出，苹果科学家 Yichuan Charlie Tang 及其团队正在使用一种方法，模拟车辆并道的驾驶场景，并逐步创建更加多样化的模拟环境。\nTang 及其合著者写道：“我们在具有挑战性的多智能体变道模拟中演示了这项技术。在该模拟环境中，实验目标必须与其他车辆进行交互和协商才能成功地在道路上进行合并。虽然环境从简单路况开始，但随着训练的深入，我们通过向智能体’zoo’反复添加越来越多样化的因素来增加其复杂性。定性地说，我们发现通过自我训练，实验目标会自动学习有趣的行为，例如防御性驾驶、超车、让道以及使用信号灯与其他智能体交流。”\n\n变道模拟示意图\n正如研究人员所解释的那样，在自动驾驶领域，变道行为被认为是复杂的操作，因为这需要驾驶系统准确地预测意图并做出相应的反应。传统的解决方案会做出假设并依赖于手动编码的行为，但是这些灵活度受限且脆弱的策略无法很好地处理边缘情况，例如几辆车试图同时合并到同一车道。与基于规则的系统相比，强化学习通过与环境的反复交互来直接学习策略。\n虽然还在模拟环境中测试，但是苹果自动驾驶总算是展示了一些像样的进展。\n今年以来，苹果自动驾驶的多位高管又相继离职。2 月份，苹果自动驾驶元老成员 Benjamin Lyon 正式离开。据悉，Benjamin Lyon 是苹果自动驾驶汽车项目的创始人之一，曾担任苹果自动驾驶硬件高级总监。\n在苹果公司工作的 21 年中，他从事了 iPhone 的指纹识别技术 Touch ID 研发工作，此后他加入苹果自动驾驶汽车团队。同月，负责自动驾驶汽车安全和监管团队的 Jaime Waydo 离开苹果公司，而这位工程师被苹果 CEO 库克赞赏为“所有人工智能项目之母”。随后几个月内，陆续又出走了 3 位高管。\n据有关人士透露，苹果公司由 Johny Srouji 领导的芯片部门也参与了汽车研发。从 2018 年开始， Srouji 的团队就一直在开发基于 Arm 的定制化芯片，主要集中于机器学习处理，用于驱动底层自动驾驶汽车系统。\n从 2017 年开始，苹果就开始在公共道路上测试自主技术。公司测试的汽车在 2019 年平均行驶 118 英里，直到人类安全驾驶员需要控制为止。据加利福尼亚车辆管理局称，这一数字比 2018 年每次撒手驾驶的里程 1 英里有所增加。据加利福尼亚车辆管理局统计，公司拥有 66 辆汽车。这比截至 2018 年年中的 55 辆许可车辆有所增加。\nRobotaxi 的热闹中，没有苹果的身影\n近两年，Robotaxi 在自动驾驶领域风头正盛，国内外众多企业在此上布局。\n2019 年 9 月 26 日，百度在湖南省长沙市向公众推出 Robotaxi 服务；2019 年 8 月 5 日，滴滴出行宣布旗下自动驾驶部门升级为独立公司, 专注于自动驾驶研发、产品应用及相关业务拓展。据了解，RoboTaxi 也是滴滴自动驾驶公司主要发展的业务之一，作为国内出行服务提供商，滴滴在该领域似乎有着先天的优势；小马智行则是首家在中美均推出 Robotaxi 服务的公司，除北京外，目前在中国广州、美国加州尔湾以及弗里蒙特市向公众提供服务。\n在北京，小马智行 Robotaxi 服务范围将覆盖北京经济技术开发区 150 平方公里核心运营区域，包括约 150 个站点，运营时间从早 8:30 持续至晚 22:30，囊括早、晚高峰以及夜间时段。\n2017 至 2018 年，宝马、大众、通用、福特等车厂联合英特尔、英伟达、谷歌、Lyft 等等公司纷纷入局 RoboTaxi，而这也是自动驾驶最火热的一个时段。\n2019 年 4 月，特斯拉创始人埃隆·马斯克更是公开表示：要在 2020 年建立特斯拉 RoboTaxi 网络，作为特斯拉网络“RoboTaxi”服务的一部分，运营车辆的车主每年可以获得高达 30,000 美元的收入。马斯克已将目光投向 自主移动即服务（MaaS） 市场，在特斯拉宣布加息后的一次电话会议中，马斯克指出：RoboTaxi 最终可能将公司推向 市值 5000 亿美元。\n值得一提的是：就像“2020 年实现全面自动驾驶”的承诺一样，大部分公司把 2025 年设置为全面实现 RoboTaxi 的目标年限。如此看来，苹果要赶上这波浪潮是有些难度了。","news_type":1,"symbols_score_info":{"AAPL":0.9}},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":2124,"commentLimit":10,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"symbols":[],"verified":2,"subType":0,"readableState":1,"langContent":"EN","currentLanguage":"EN","warmUpFlag":false,"orderFlag":false,"shareable":true,"causeOfNotShareable":"","featuresForAnalytics":[],"commentAndTweetFlag":false,"andRepostAutoSelectedFlag":false,"upFlag":false,"length":1,"xxTargetLangEnum":"ORIG"},"commentList":[],"hasMoreComment":false,"orderType":2}