Another Artificial Intelligence Catch For Apple
Apple has been resembling Pac-Man lately with its appetite for gobbling up startups focused on Artificial Intelligence. Just a few days ago, VoiceIQ and now Bloomberg reported that Apple has acquired Perceptio, a start-up that develops artificial intelligence for machine learning, or more specifically “deep learning”. Deep learning is an approach to Artificial Intelligence that lets computers identify and classify sensory input. To be more specific Perceptio’s technology categorizes photos on smartphones. Percepto’s technology facilitates advanced calculations on smartphones without storing user data. This gels with Apple’s desire to minimize usage of customer data and maximize processing on the device.
This could also be a move to keep Siri ahead of the competition since this technology would allow Apple to improve Siri without compromising on user privacy. We can only speculate since Apple will only provide the usual boilerplate response when asked about this acquisition: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”
Perceptio on its own is very secretive. The company doesn’t even have a website. The co-founders of Perceptio, Zak Stone and Nicholas Pinto have PhD.’s from Harvard and MIT. Pinto’s Twitter bio lists him as a hacker, research scientist, and lecturer and Stone’s PhD is in computer vision.
