Apple Buying AI Startup Turi (@inafried)

Apple confirmed it is buying Seattle-area startup Turi for $200 million:

The company confirmed to Recode it is buying Turi, which earlier in life was known as both GraphLab and Dato, It grew out of the GraphLab open-source project, which companies such as Pandora used to power recommendations.

Turi is run by University of Washington Professor Carlos Guestrin. After the recent speculation about what Apple is doing regarding artificial intelligence, this seems to bolster the company’s claims that it can compete with Google, Microsoft, and Amazon in enhancing its products and services with AI.

In addition to Turi, recent AI acquisitions by Apple include:

• Perceptio, “a startup developing technology to let companies run advanced artificial intelligence systems on smartphones without needing to share as much user data.”
• Vocal IQ, “the world’s first self-learning dialogue API — putting real, natural conversation between people and their devices.”
• Emotient, “a startup that uses artificial-intelligence technology to read people’s emotions by analyzing facial expressions.”

Categories    Apple    Technology