Twitter buys “deep learning” company Madbits
Does Twitter know everything? It soon might thanks to its acquisition of intelligence technology firm Madbits.
Twitter users often joke about asking the “hive-mind” questions, but could Twitter soon have an actual hive-mind? (Umm, probably not). The company has built software that will analyse tweets to extract meaning and detail – meaning that Twitter will know even more about your posts. Here’s how the founders of the company describe what they do:
“Over this past year, we’ve built visual intelligence technology that automatically understands, organizes and extracts relevant information from raw media. Understanding the content of an image, whether or not there are tags associated with that image, is a complex challenge. We developed our technology based on deep learning, an approach to statistical machine learning that involves stacking simple projections to form powerful hierarchical models of a signal.”
Basically, Twitter could be about to get a lot smarter. One obvious outcome of this is that it could mean the adverts you start seeing become a lot more relevant, but who knows what’s up Twitter’s sleeve?
