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Apple allegedly buys AI company Turi for £153 million

It looks like Apple bought an AI company. But it's keeping very quiet about it, and the company that was allegedly acquired is also awfully silent.

But the media are buzzing, and sometimes, that's enough. It was according to Geekwire, and later V3, that it was said how Apple bought Turi for $200 million (£153m). Geekwire pulled the story, in the meantime.

So, what is this Turi thing, anyway?

It's a 'fast, scalable machine learning platform', it says, for both developers and data scientists. Its toolkits allow for simple development of machine learning models.

“Turi toolkits simplify the development of machine learning models. Each incorporates automatic feature engineering, model selection and machine learning visualisations specific to the application. There is no faster way to build performant [sic] models,” the website says.

It says it has clients in fraud detection, customer churn and sentiment analysis industries.

It would make a lot of sense for Apple to make such an acquisition. Artificial intelligence is a hot topic nowadays, with various industries tapping into the new technology and making it work to cut costs and improve the bottom line.

On the other hand, all of Apple's competitors, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, all are experimenting with artificial intelligence at some level.

On top of it all, everyone is expecting for Siri to get a major facelift in the upcoming iOS 10, so adding extra manpower to the development stage would make a lot of sense.

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