Apple Inc. bought machine-learning startup Inductiv Inc. Apple confirmed the deal with Bloomberg News, saying it “buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
The engineering team from Waterloo, Ontario-based Inductiv joined Apple in recent weeks to work on Siri, machine learning and data science.
Inductiv developed technology that uses artificial intelligence to automate the task of identifying and correcting errors in data. Having clean data is important for machine learning, a popular and powerful type of AI that helps software improve with less human intervention.
John Giannandrea, the Apple executive in charge of Siri and machine learning, has been upgrading the underlying technology that goes into the Siri digital assistant and other AI-powered products from the company.
Inductiv was co-founded by machine-learning professors from Stanford University, the University of Waterloo and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
The professor from Stanford, Christopher Ré, previously co-founded another AI company, Lattice Data, that was bought by Apple in 2017. It’s unclear if Ré, or the other Inductiv co-founders, Theodoros Rekatsinas and Ihab Ilyas, have joined Apple.
MacDailyNews Take: With this Inductiv acquisition, Siri, which has already been showing improvement in recent months, seems set to be supercharged sooner than later!