Apple has officially acquired Silk Labs, a startup that specialises in the area of machine learning software. According to the Verge, Apple’s acquisition of the company can be contributed mainly to the brand’s privacy-focused approach towards AI.
Silk Labs is not a company many people would know outside of the realm of machine learning. The company was co-founded by Andreas Gal, the former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to Mozilla. To date, the company has only launched a single product – Sense, a smart camera designed for the smart home.
Unfortunately, the company’s endeavour into the world of smart devices didn’t pan out as well as it had hope, and soon shifted its focus towards on-device machine learning services. To put it plainly, it’s a service that processes data without the need to send it to the cloud.
As mentioned earlier, it’s a method that Apple clearly prefers and approves of. For the simple fact that it lines up with the brand’s policy of keeping personal data under the control of the consumer, thus giving them peace of mind.
(Source: The Verge)
