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Apple confirms buyout of machine learning company Laserlike

Sometimes you just buy a machine learning company.

Apple on Wednesday confirmed its acquisition of Laserlike, a Silicon valley startup that’s worked to apply machine learning to content discovery.

Per The Information, Laserlike was absorbed sometime in 2018, albeit it’s unknown as to what the terms of the deal were or why Apple wanted the business.

Laserlike was active for four years and concentrated on an “interest search engine” that could fetch news, video, and general Web content relative to each user. A key assumption was that people may want to know about things that don’t necessarily pop up in their usual sources, such as a car recall or an upcoming music festival. The app for the engine is no longer available.

It’s thought that Apple might use Laserlike’s technology and/or staff to strengthen its own machine learning efforts. In the past, Siri has been criticized as weaker than AI assistants from Amazon and Google, which have the advantage of being hooked into massive quantities of cloud data. Apple’s privacy stance has left Siri out of the cloud in many cases, with the technology often relying on on-device processing for its workload.

The Laserlike crew has reportedly joined Apple’s AI division, led by John Giannandrea, who was hired away from Google in 2018. His unit oversees the strategy for AI and Machine Learning across all Apple products, as well as the development of Core ML and Siri.

It’s also been said that Giannandrea dismissed Bill Stasior out of the Siri department, the team’s new goal being to work towards research and away from evolutionary upgrades. It’s unknown if Stasior has been replaced as this point in time.

Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.

Via AppleInsider and The Information