In an exclusive report, GeekWire revealed that Apple has acquired Seattle-based startup Turi, formerly known as Dato and GraphLab, in a bid to boost its machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities.
The purchase shows more investments by Apple into machine learning and artificial intelligence, while increasing the company's presence in the Seattle region. Apple has been establishing an engineering outpost over the previous couple of years in the area, after its acquisition of cloud networking startup Union Bay Networks in 2014.
Multiple sources have confirmed the acquisition, with some of the sources estimating the purchase price to be about $200 million.
Turi, which was founded by University of Washington professor Carlos Guestrin, started out as an open-source project in 2009 at Carnegie Mellon under the guidance of Guestrin before he joined the faculty of the university in 2012. Guestrin, with his wife Emily Fox, received a $2 million machine learning endowment from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, before the project was spun off into its own company.
Turi has released several products that have been designed to help developers in making machine learning and artificial intelligence applications that automatically scale to larger situations.
Among the software that Turi has launched are GraphLab Create, Turi Distributed, Turi Machine Learning Platform and Turi Predictive Services. They were used for the development of recommendation engines, churn predictors, sentiment analysis, fraud detectors, clickthrough predictors and many more such systems, which can then be built into the applications of the developers.
There is the possibility that Apple will be making these applications available to third-party companies in the future, but it is more likely that Apple will be keeping Turi and its technology to itself.
Apple has been pushing for more power in its machine learning and artificial intelligence technology, similar to other companies within the tech industry, and the purchase of Turi will only make Apple's apps and services smarter. Among the company's products that will most likely receive a boost from the purchase of Turi is its Siri digital personal assistant, which was a major part of Apple's announcements at this year's WWDC 2016 as it finally launched on desktop computers along with macOS Sierra.
Apple, in a statement, said its standard comment in purchasing startups that it does such moves from time to time, and that the company does not reveal its plans or purpose with its acquisitions.
In other Apple news, the company has unveiled its first bug bounty program, offering rewards of up to $200,000. The program, however, is currently invite-only, but security researchers who reveal significant discoveries will be immediately invited to participate.
