Apple Acquires AI startup Lattice.io

Apple Acquired Lattice Data –AI Enabled Implication Engine

Apple has acquired its own company to fill up its potentials in the areas of machine learning and artificial intelligence, as huge tech companies tend to gear up in making stronger headway in this area. Apple has precisely picked up Lattice Data, a company which tends to apply an AI enabled implication engine to take unstructured `dark’ data turning it into structured information and it had been reported from a source that Apple had paid a price of about $200 million for the same.

The deal had been closed recently according to a source and around 20 engineers had joined the bigger company. A standard Apple confirmation had been received wherein a first source had alerted regarding the same. According to Apple spokesperson who had informed TechCrunch, stated that Apple tends to buy smaller technology companies from time to time and generally no discussions are done on the purpose or plans.

Last year, Lattice had unobtrusively raised around $20 million funds from GV, Madrona and InQTel before exiting from stealth. Lattice founded in 2015 had been under the radar though it has a outstanding pedigree. The company was co-founded by Christopher Re, Michaeol Cafarella, Raphael Hoffmann and Feng Niu as commercialization of DeepDive which is a system developed at Stanford to `extract value from dark data’.

Dark Data

A professor at Stanford, Re, had won a MacArthur Genius Grant for his work on DeepDive and is presently the chief scientist at Lattice. Cafarella who had started at CEO of Lattice now the CTO is a professor at the University of Michigan and is recognised as one of the co-creators of Hadoop while Niu is the chief engineering officer of lattice.

According to his LinkedIn, Cafarella together with Hoffmann who had since moved to Google also had worked on developing DeepDive. Andy Jacques is the CEO of Lattice who had joined last year, is a seasoned enterprise executive. What could possibly be called the dark data?

Our linked, digital world tends to produce data at a fast-tracked speed and in 2013; there were 4.4 zettabytes of data which is anticipated to increase to 44 zettabytes by 2020. IBM has estimated that 90% of the data prevailing today was produced in the last two years.

Application of System - Diverse

However between 70 and 80% of the said data is unstructured which is `dark’ and hence mostly useless with regards to processing and analytics. Lattice tends to utilise machine learning to basically utilise that data in order and make it useful.

Applications of the system is said to be diverse and can be utilised in international policing as well as solving crimes like in this case in detection of human trafficking, in medical research as well as in helping to organize and analyse paleontological research. Besides this it could also be utilised in assisting in training AI systems in the creation of added useful data feeds.

It is not known who Lattice has been working with and also how Apple plans to utilise the technology. It is speculated that there could be an AI play. As per a source, Lattice had discussions with the other tech businesses with regards to the improvement of their AI assistants including Alexa of Amazon and Bixby of Samsung and had recently spent some time in South Korea.