Twitter announced Wednesday that it has acquired Whetlab, a Cambridge-based artificial intelligence firm, as part of its plan to boost the social networks' analytic capacity.
Whetlab is a data analysis software startup co-founded by a Harvard professor over a year ago with the goal of helping companies make better use of artificial intelligence, or machine learning, Beta Boston reported.
"Over the past year, we have created a technology to make machine learning better and faster for companies, automatically. Twitter is the platform for open communication on the Internet and we believe that Whetlab's technology can have a great impact by accelerating Twitter's internal machine learning efforts," Whetlab said in a statement on its website.
Twitter has not made public its use for the AI service, though it can be noted that AI functions can be used to determine the most relevant tweets and advertising messages for each user on the social platform, making it an effective filter.
The move comes as the company looks for a new chief executive following Dick Costolo's announcement that he is stepping down. Co-founder Jack Dorsey will be the interim CEO in the meantime, according to NDTV.
Twitter is growing at a slower pace compared to other social media rivals, despite its 300 million active users and its new one-to-many messaging service. The Whetlab purchase aims to remedy this issue for a greater profit.
