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Twitter Pays $150 Million For Magic Pony Technology (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Following news that Twitter would invest around $70 million in music streaming service SoundCloud, the company is reportedly acquiring Magic Pony Technology, a company out of London that has developed technologies of using neural networks and machine learning to provide expanded data for images. For example, they can be used to enhance a picture or video taken on a mobile phone or to help develop graphics for virtual reality or augmented reality applications. "Machine learning is increasingly at the core of everything we build at Twitter," said Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO and co-founder, in a statement. "Magic Pony's machine learning technology will hep us build strength into our deep learning teams with world-class talent, so Twitter can continue to be the best place to see what's happening and why it matters, first. We value deep learning to help make our world better, and we will keep doing our part to share our work and learnings with the community." "[Magic Pony Technology] made a few further waves this year, as it further revealed the way that its technology worked to help enhance visuals with information that may not be in the picture itself, but essentially be created from composites of similar pictures, much like how the human eye works," writes TechCrunch. The company has remained under the radar for the most part. They have filed a number of patents -- around 20, which now belong to Twitter.
Poor Twitter...
I wonder how long until the economic black hole that is twitter sucks all of the worlds money into it.
Air Dropped Horse Apples via Flying Unicorns. ADHAFU. Emphasis on the FU.
That's terrible.
Hopefully they can get by with a bit of Birmingham or Manchester until they can get some delivered.
At the bottom of the
They should have called it Magic Unicorn.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
The sad thing is, I didn't have any trouble believing for a moment that Magic Pony technology actually was a startup that sold Magic Ponies, because that's probably not even in the top 10 most ridiculous startups that have been acquired by someone.
Track 45 right. Stop. Enhance.
Maybe soon?
... "Twitter Pays $150 Million For My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic Technology?"
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Pwnies!!!
"a company out of London"
Is that London in Kentucky or Ontario?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
does sexting in bad lighting conditions, will this NN have been trained on suitable material to "enhance" the image and will she look like a porn star?
(There is a serious point about machine learning hidden in than example.)
Magic ponies, yt Im still forcd 2 wrt twts lik ths du 2 idiot 140 char limt.
of everything we do... says just about everyone in technology. Nothing to see here. BTW, an interview was conducted over the phone with my mom today and the voice was so even and the interviewer had trouble understanding my mom's, yes response several times on the same question. I thought it was likely an AI, but my mom felt certain it was a real person. I loaded up a few of the Watson commercials and you could hear the difference, but it's likely better since then and who's to say they didn't degrade it to keep people from noticing in real life?
I want a pony.
Requiem for the American Dream
Twitter just gained the magic of friendship? It needed it.
Did anyone else read that as a little girls doll company?
"Magic Pony's machine learning technology will hep us build strength into our deep learning teams with world-class talent, so Twitter can continue to be the best place to see what's happening and why it matters, first.
Buzzword, buzzword, buzzword ... so we can tag even more information from your photos.
Next up: profiling people by their usage of vowels in their texts.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
It is unfortunate that they were purchased by Twitter.
Do they want to buy my company called magic beans?
~ ..yea its monday....
If you want it let's do it
Ride it my pony
My saddle is waiting
Come and jump on it
If you want it let's do it
Ride it my pony
My saddle is waiting
Come and jump on it
~
I wonder if their Weissman scores are past the theoretical limit? I'm sure Nucleus will do a better job at this.
Really: This article reads like an episode of Silicon Valley. How do these companies plan to make money off this crap?
Twitter is so behind the times, only investing millions in Magic Ponies. For six years already the federal government has been investing billions giving it to people selling unicorn farts.
how else could you get that much horseshit.
Remember though, the leave campaign is definitely not about racism and xenophobia.
I actually couldn't tell if this article was a joke or not.
WTF? American cretins. Can't even write English properly.
I hope Twitter ends up leaking or (snowball, meet hell) open sourcing enough of this to get the algos into games. Procedural environment generation needs a serious AI boost. With VR coming into play we need this more now than ever.
What are you doing wasting your time here? Don't you have some more MPs to murder?
Do you not find it cramped inside your tiny little brain with its tiny little horizons?
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
These magic ponies better poop rainbows and skittles!
'neural netwoks'- my god, do execs still fall for this load of old tosh?
Here's the deal. Computers are even better than Indians at doing brain-numbing repetative work for near zero cost. And the average Human takes photos NOT for 'information' but because their photo look very similar to photos that person has seen before.
Thus a TRIVIAL computer program can sort through these CHAFF photos, note the very common visual patterns, and pass on this data to HUMAN operators who use computer tools to add their semantic understanding of the patterns back into the database processing. Like how EVERYTHING Google PRETENDS is AI on their services actually works.
As with all this psuedo-computer-science JUNK, demos under VERY controlled circumstances look like miracles to very credulous execs.
As some have noted here- it all ends up as a 'better' system of tagging and mining for the usual social network and advertising functions.