“Apple is on a machine learning company buying spree,” Greg Kumparak reports for TechCrunch. “After buying Perceptio at the end of 2015 and Turi just a few months ago, Apple has now acquired an India/US-based machine learning team, Tuplejump.”
Kumparak reports, “We’d been hearing rumors of another acquisition in this space by Apple for some time. While Apple won’t outright confirm it, when asked about Tuplejump this morning, a representative from Apple gave us the company’s standard we’re-not-saying-yes-but-well-yes response that they only give when they have, in fact, bought the company in question: ‘Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.'”
“We’re hearing that Apple was particularly interested in ‘FiloDB’,” Kumparak reports, “an opensource project that Tuplejump was building to efficiently apply machine learning concepts and analytics to massive amounts of complex data right as it streamed in.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple is serious about leading in artificial intelligence.
We’ve been seeing over the last five years a growth of this inside Apple. Our devices are getting so much smarter at a quicker rate, especially with our Apple design A-series chips. The back ends are getting so much smarter, faster, and everything we do finds some reason to be connected. This enables more and more machine learning techniques, because there is so much stuff to learn, and it’s available to [us]… We use these techniques to do the things we have always wanted to do, better than we’ve been able to do. And on new things we haven’t be able to do. It’s a technique that will ultimately be a very Apple way of doing things as it evolves inside Apple and in the ways we make products… Machine learning is enabling us to say yes to some things that in past years we would have said no to. It’s becoming embedded in the process of deciding the products we’re going to do next. — Phil Schiller, August 2016
SEE ALSO:
Apple transforms Turi into dedicated machine learning division to build future product features – August 31, 2016
An exclusive inside look at how artificial intelligence and machine learning work at Apple – August 24, 2016
Apple rumored to be taking big piece of Seattle-area office market in expansion – August 12, 2016
Why Apple will become a leader in artificial intelligence – August 8, 2016
Apple buys machine-learning startup Turi for $200 million – August 6, 2016
Apple touts Artificial Intelligence in iOS and opens ‘crown jewels’ to developers – June 14, 2016
Smartphones to die out within five years, replaced by artificial intelligence – survey – December 9, 2015
Apple’s extreme secrecy retarding its artificial intelligence work – October 30, 2015
Apple hires NVIDIA’s artificial intelligence director – October 24, 2015
Apple acquires advanced artificial intelligence startup Perceptio – October 5, 2015
Apple buys artificial intelligence natural language start-up VocalIQ – October 2, 2015
I know that the acquisition of Tuplejump is somewhat different, but I’m very impressed with the way that Apple is making iPhones much more intelligent and doing it in ways that respect the user’s privacy..
The automatic indexing feature built into Photos is absolutely amazing. It quietly analyses your photos while the iPhone is being charged, but otherwise unused and it does it entirely within your iPhone – your pictures do not get sent to Apple or anywhere else. I previously mentioned in a posting how it can automatically find subjects like cars and boats, but it’s much more sophisticated than that. I’ve been able to search for my images corresponding to less obvious topics such as ‘blue sky’, ‘cloudy’, “fireplace’, ‘cold’, ‘go kart’, “pub”, ‘pizza’, ‘fireworks’, ‘restaurant’, ‘SUV’ and ‘ice cream’.
It’s quite incredible that Photos is able to do this without any intervention by me. I used to index favourite images so that I could easily search for them, but now it indexes all of my images without me doing anything at all.
If you haven’t already done so, try it on your own iPhone – you’ll be very impressed.