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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.
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.
... "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.
Not in a particularly useful manner, as it makes up the details in the gaps... but that said, it really gets some amazing results. I wish they had more examples. Blows away all of the non-neural-net-based deblurring and texture expansion techniques I've ever seen.
Monkeywrench Ex Machina.
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.
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.
Licensing. App and web usage, and thus ad revenue. The usual.
A rather... um... interesting thought just occured to me. They talk about the potential use of this being paired with cameras, to fill in the detail that the camera couldn't capture. And I totally agree. But think of where that'll go. At first it'd just be implemented in software. But if it really works out well, they'll want to implement it in hardware. Meaning... hardware neural nets in all of our phones.
Monkeywrench Ex Machina.
I actually couldn't tell if this article was a joke or not.
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!