Apple Buys Artificial Intelligence Startup Xnor.ai For $200 Million

According to a GeekWire report, Apple has acquired artificial intelligence startup, Xnor.ai. Xnor.ai is headquartered in Seattle and develops low-power artificial intelligence technologies. The report states that Apple acquired Xnor.ai for $200 million. The Xnor.ai team may move to Apple's Seattle office.


Xnor.ai's focus is on machine snow and image recognition tools, their technologies can run on low-power devices (smartphones and wearables) without relying on a cloud computing architecture. The startup also created a "self-service" platform for developers to use artificial intelligence code and data in their applications. Xnor promises complete privacy of data as well, which is enough to explain why Apple bought the AI business.

In a statement to Axios, Apple acknowledged the acquisition, but the iPhone maker declines to provide additional details on the purchase of Xnor.ai. "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans," the company told Axios.

Nonetheless, based on Xnor's work, it could eventually in some ways help Siri become smarter and possibly making iOS more secure and privacy-oriented, since it doesn't rely on cloud computing.

In 2016, Apple acquired artificial intelligence technology company Turi, in which we saw it released the framework for Turi Create on GitHub that make it easier for developers to build machine learning models. Two years later, Apple acquired Silk Labs, a firm that aims to protect user privacy by making use of artificial intelligence.

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