Apple Acquires Startup DarwinAI As AI Efforts Ramp Up

According to Bloomberg, Apple has acquired Canada-based AI startup DarwinAI for an undisclosed sum. Macworld reports: Apple has reportedly folded the DarwinAI staff into its own AI team, including DarwinAI co-founder Alexander Wong, an AI researcher at the University of Waterloo who 'has published over 600 refereed journal and conference papers, as well as patents, in various fields such as computational imaging, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and multimedia systems.'

According to its LinkedIn profile, DarwinAI is 'a rapidly growing visual quality inspection company providing manufacturers an end-to-end solution to improve product quality and increase production efficiency.' In layman's terms, that means Apple is likely interested in DarwinAI to streamline its manufacturing to be more efficient. That's something that could save Apple a ton of money in annual costs.

Far more interesting to our consumer devices, however, is Bloomberg's report that DarwinAI's tech can be used to make AI models more efficient in general. Apple has been said to want any generative AI features to run on the device rather than the cloud, so models will need to be as small as possible and DarwinAI could definitely help there. Last month, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the iPhone maker sees 'incredible breakthrough potential for generative AI, which is why we're currently investing significantly in this area. We believe that will unlock transformative opportunities for users when it comes to productivity, problem solving and more.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.