Apple appears to be working on building its AI background with a new acquisition.
According to TechCrunch, the company appears to have acquired WaveOne, an organization that was using AI to compress videos.
As the publication reports, Apple has yet to confirm the news, but a LinkedIn post from Bob Stankosh, former head of sales at WaveOne, provided confirmation.
“After almost two years at WaveOne, last week we finalized the sale of the company to Apple,” Stankosh wrote in a month-old post, around the same time Apple hosted an employee-only AI summit.
“We started our journey at WaveOne, realizing that machine learning and deep learning video technology could potentially change the world. Apple saw this potential and took the opportunity to add it to their technology portfolio.”
WaveOne’s website went offline in January, and several employees now work with Apple. Co-founder Oren Rippel is part of this group, TechCrunch reports.
WaveOne offered a “compression and decompression algorithm” that could utilize AI accelerators most phones already had.
“The startup’s technology could essentially ‘understand’ a video frame — allowing it to, for example, prioritize faces at the expense of other elements within a scene to save bandwidth,” TechCrunch says.
Image credit: Shutterstock
Source: TechCrunch
