Twitter had made another acquisition. It has snapped up tech startup, Madbits.
Madbits is a deep learning company that focuses on search technologies. The announcement came July 28.
The company's co-founders, Clement Farabet and Louis-Alexandre Etezad-Heydari, are former students of Facebook artificial intelligence (AI) lab director Yann LeCun, according to reports. Their company was purchased by Twitter for an undisclosed sum, the report continues.
"We are excited to join the folks at Twitter to merge our efforts and see this technology grow to its full potential," the startup company said in a statement on its website.
The Madbits founders said their technology will be valuable to a social network like Twitter.
The technology is impressive and seems to remove the need to tag content, according to their statements:
"Today, after a tremendous year of development and iterations, we are excited to announce that we are joining Twitter.
"Over this past year, we've built visual intelligence technology that automatically understands, organizes and extracts relevant information from raw media. Understanding the content of an image, whether or not there are tags associated with that image, is a complex challenge. We developed our technology based on deep learning, an approach to statistical machine learning that involves stacking simple projections to form powerful hierarchical models of a signal."
The company said it tested about 10 different application prototypes. It had plans of going public, but decided that Twitter shared its ambitions and vision, so it offered its technology to the social media player.
Other social media companies have invested in this type of technology, seeking to understand image data better and to implement that understanding in practical application, such as making searches more relevant by including images in the results according to reports.
So what exactly is deep learning? A recent Tech Times article explains how Netflix was working with the technology to provide suggestions of what users may want to watch. It is essentially an AI software that allows for computer vision, text analysis and speech-recognition algorithms that can be used to manipulate data presented to the end user.
The technology was developed at least a decade ago. Many of the researchers involved now work for the world's biggest tech companies like Microsoft and Google. Other companies that are interested in deep learning include Facebook and Pinterest.
