Apple Acquires Machine Learning and AI Startup Turi

An anonymous reader quotes a report from GeekWire: Machine learning and artificial intelligence startup Turi has been acquired by Apple in a deal characterized as a blockbuster exit for the Seattle-based company, formerly known as Dato and GraphLab, GeekWire has learned. The acquisition reflects a larger push by Apple into artificial intelligence and machine learning. It also promises to further increase the Cupertino, Calif.-based company's presence in the Seattle region, where Apple has been building an engineering outpost for the past two years. Multiple sources with knowledge of the deal confirmed that Turi has been acquired. Sources close to the deal pegged the purchase price at around $200 million, marking a huge outcome for the original investors and early shareholders. Apple's plans for Turi's technology are not clear, but the company has been making a broad push into artificial intelligence through an expansion of its Siri personal assistant and related technologies. Turi lets developers build apps with machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities that automatically scale and tune. Its products -- which include the Turi Machine Learning Platform, GraphLab Create, Turi Distributed, and Turi Predictive Services -- are largely designed to help large and small organizations make better sense of data. Use cases include recommendation engines, fraud detection, predicting customer churn, sentiment analysis, and customer segmentation.

Apple Car

[sexconker]

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An odd choice

[Coryoth]

I have to admit to being a little unclear as to Apple's plans here. I'm somewhat familiar with Turi's product offerings (at least, I was back when they were called Dato). It's more of pure data analytics tool than anything, and personally I found the underlying python libraries which are open source far more compelling than the point and click predictive analytics and charting GUIs which seemed to be their main product. And even on that front I would put more stock in scikit-learn, pandas, dask and the many open source deep learning libraries (mostly built on theano and tensor flow) if I really wanted to do machine learning and distributed machine learning.

Now don't get me wrong, Turi has some nice products, but they tend to be standalone suites designed to let front-line analysts have a nice GUI interface to basic machine learning tools, not "push the envelope AI". I really can't see what Apple would do with it beyond build up a business analytics suite to compete with Tableau and Azure ML. Anyone have any better ideas?

Re:An odd choice

[UnknowingFool]

Apple's acquisition history suggests that sometimes what they acquire may not be obvious. For example Fingerworks made peripherals like keyboards. They were actually acquired for the multi-touch technology and patents that became the backbone of the iPhone. Beats Electronics was for their licensing deals and not their headphones so that Apple Music could become a reality. Other acquisitions were straight-forward. Emagic became Logic Pro and Garage Band. PA Semi and Intrinsity were about acquiring the personnel to design ARM chips.

Re:

[Coryoth]

In that case I would be asking what what Apple wants to do with distributed graph analytics because that was probably Turi's most interesting/unique product and expertise. They have a great library for handling extremely large graphs distributed over many nodes, and a lot of expertise in exactly how to do that really well.

How About A Personal A.I.?

[LifesABeach]

Why not take the AI software in the wild and combine it into a single type package so that it is in a Tablet or Phone? It would also make a great movie and game idea.