Twitter is buying Magic Pony Technology, a British company specializing in machine learning, a hot category of artificial intelligence.
The social media company’s co-founder and chief executive Jack Dorsey announced the news in a company blog post on Monday. Terms were not disclosed.
Going forward, London-based Magic Pony will serve as the base for Twitter’s (TWTR) European machine learning efforts, Dorsey wrote.
Machine learning is a term for technology that allows computers to take in a lot of data, process it, and teach themselves new skills using that input. Basically, it’s a “learn by doing” process that helps computers do more with less human intervention.
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Machine learning can, for example, enable computers to recognize objects or people based on images, so it helps machines “see” and learn from seeing. Facebook (FB), for example, is using machine learning to recognize people from digital photographs. Magic Pony’s specialty is in this visual processing realm, according to Dorsey.
Machine learning also helps computers learn by “hearing” as evidenced by Amazon’s (AMZN) Alexa, Apple’s (AAPL) Siri, Microsoft (MSFT) Cortana digital assistants.
For more, read: Amazon Lands AI Brainiac from Carnegie-Mellon
Magic Pony’s 11 PhDs and other employees will join the Twitter Cortex engineering team, which, according to the company, wants to “build the most advanced AI platform in the world, at Twitter scale, to apply the most complex AI algorithms to our most challenging datasets, seamlessly.”
The popular social networking site hopes to parlay machine learning to help its users find the content they need and connect with each other—and theoretically figure out how to make money.
For more on machine learning, watch:
That’s a tall order that virtually every major tech company—including Amazon, Apple, IBM (IBM), Google (GOOG), and Microsoft (MSFT)—are also pursuing.