Apple has acquired Xnor.ai, a Seattle startup specializing in low-power, edge-based artificial intelligence tools for somewhere in the range of $200 million.
Alan Boyle, Taylor Soper, and Todd Bishop for Geek Wire:
The acquisition echoes Apple’s high-profile purchase of Seattle AI startup Turi in 2016…
The arrangement suggests that Xnor’s AI-enabled image recognition tools could well become standard features in future iPhones and webcams… The three-year-old startup’s secret sauce has to do with AI on the edge — machine learning and image recognition tools that can be executed on low-power devices rather than relying on the cloud.
The company’s name refers to the XNOR logic gates that are part of the hardware supporting the system… Xnor.ai will provide Apple with edge computing capabilities that are in line with the Silicon Valley company’s interest in preserving data privacy.
MacDailyNews Take: On-device, versus having to depend on the cloud, is crucial for the high level of user privacy to which Apple is firmly committed.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Brawndo Drinker” for the heads up.]
