Referring to machine learning as “increasingly at the core of everything we build at Twitter”, CEO Jack Dorsey has announced the social media company’s acquisition of the London-based Magic Pony Technology. This move is intended to help Twitter to boost its machine learning capabilities.
Magic Pony, which also revealed the Twitter deal on its own website, has “developed novel machine learning techniques for visual processing”, Dorsey has explained on Twitter’s official blog. He added: “Magic Pony’s technology – based on research by the team to create algorithms that can understand the features of imagery – will be used to enhance our strength in live and video”.
Dorsey declared that the acquisition “opens up a whole lot of exciting creative possibilities for Twitter” – the specifics of which, analysts and the public will doubtless speculate about. Magic Pony’s team will join the group of engineers, data scientists and machine learning researchers called Twitter Cortex.
Magic Pony enthused: “We’ve barely scratched the surface of what we think is possible in this area and are excited to see what the future holds.”
