The Apple car just made the 'mother of all' lists: Tim Cook's most-hyped projects

Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) chief executive Tim Cook made a lofty proposition this month: That Apple was working on "the mother of all A.I. [artificial intelligence] projects."

Cook tipped his hand in an interview with Bloomberg, when he confirmed the company is working on self-driving cars, something that had been reported by a variety of media outlets since early 2015.

"We're focusing on autonomous systems," Cook told Bloomberg. "Clearly one purpose of autonomous systems is self-driving cars. There are others. We sort of see it as the mother of all AI projects."

It certainly sounds dramatic — except that Cook has said this just a few times before. Here are some other products that Cook has called "the mother of all" innovations.

"The mother of all products"

• Apple's new headquarters: Cook told Fortune that Apple Park, the company's long-awaited space-ship like headquarters, was the "mother of all products." "I hate the word 'headquarters," he told Fortune in 2015. "There's real work going on here. It isn't overhead, and we're not bureaucrats."

"The mother of all opportunities"

• Enterprise technology: "Enterprise is like the mother of all opportunities," Cook told Bloomberg Businessweek this month. "At one point in time you had to choose, 'Do you want to do consumer or enterprise?' But the reality today is a bit different: Enterprises are a collection of consumers."