Since Apple announced that it was going to enter the smart car market, many people have already started to save money, hoping to one day have access to the brand's cars.
After a lot of mystery and years without talking about the subject, finally the automaker (is it?) revealed more details about what it is creating. Ruslan Salakhutdinov, director of artificial intelligence research, came forward to speak, who last week gave a presentation revealing everything the "autonomous driving team" has been creating all this time.
Some of the things are nothing new among self-driving vehicles, while others show that Apple is making a big splash in this market.
For starters, Apple has created a system that uses on-board cameras to identify objects, even in difficult situations, like when raindrops are covering the lens, for example. As for the recognition provided by the cameras, they can now estimate the position of a pedestrian, even when he is hidden by a parked car.
Other additions included giving vehicles different directions through simultaneous location and mapping, creating more detailed 3D maps thanks to the sensors present in the cars, and decision making in life-or-death situations (a pedestrian crossing in front of your car , for example).
It's not yet certain if, or how, Apple will commercialize these technologies. At the moment, its immediate objective is the creation and implementation of driverless convoys that will circulate with the company's employees through the company's campuses in Silicon Valley, since they obtained (in April of this year) the license to test autonomous vehicles on the street next to the DMV. from California (like the Detran there).
Apple currently hasn't said whether it will make vehicles (nor has it said it won't), which raises a question. Is he creating these technologies to sell to automakers like Tesla, just as Google created the Android system and licenses it to Motorola, Sony, etc? The matter is still nebulous and if this technology sale were to materialize, it would be, at the very least, unusual, since Apple is known for maintaining exclusivity over what it develops.
The event itself was somewhat unusual for Apple. Last Friday, Salakhutdinov hosted about 200 artificial intelligence experts who signed up for a free lunch and to see how Apple's machine learning research was going, the process used to analyze piles and piles of data and extract strategic information from it.
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The event came at the end of a week-long conference on machine learning called NIPS. About 8 people participated, an increase of almost five times since 2012. There was a strong presence of recruiters - including Elon Musk - hoping to attract ML engineers, highly valued employees due to their low availability in the market.
In fact, this lack of specialized professionals was one of the main reasons for Apple's event, which sought to convince students from the best American universities to think about a future in Tim Cook's company, or to do those already employed in giants such as Facebook and Alphabet, to join Salakhutdinov's team.
