Apple’s failed self-driving car program left a legacy of powerful AI chips
TL;DR
Apple's self-driving car program never really got off the ground, but it may have been what made the company's chips the powerful AI performers they are. Early in the development of the self-driving platform, Apple realized that it would need powerful on-device AI processing. While the car processor was never finished, as Mark Gurman details in his latest Power On newsletter, it did lead to the development of the Neural Engine, the backbone of Apple's on-device AI processing.
Nauti's Take
The practical lesson for small teams is simple: hardware advantages are often built years before the product that made them visible. If you plan AI workflows around Apple devices, verify which tasks actually run locally on the Neural Engine and where you still need cloud compute.
That is where privacy, latency, and cost either improve in practice or stay mostly unchanged.
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