Twitter has purchased New York-based startup Madbits to make use of its deep learning technology.
The acquisition was revealed on Monday by Clement Farabet and Louis-Alexandre Etezad-Heydari, the co-founders of Madbits, according to CNET. The cost of the deal was not revealed.
Madbits said it was looking forward to working with Twitter, a company that it said "shares our ambitions and vision and will help us scale this technology."
"We are excited to join the folks at Twitter to merge our efforts and see this technology grow to its full potential."
The computer vision company said on its website that since its founding one year ago, officials have been working on visual intelligence technology capable of automatically understanding, organizing and collecting important information from raw media, even when there are no tags connected to the files, PCWorld reported.
Manbit also designed its technology to use an approach for statistical machine learning called "deep learning," in which simple projections are stacked to form strong models of a signal that are based on hierarchy. Close to ten different application prototypes were created for this approach, and the company was getting ready to launch publicly before deciding to sell its technology to Twitter.
The startup describes itself on LinkedIn as one that focuses on "building new user experiences in the media space," and especially surrounding photos and videos, CNET reported. Manbits added that the team is "primarily interested in the task of image search, and the creation of intelligent, dynamic image sets, to automatically organize large databases of images."
Similar acquisitions have also been made recently by Google, Yahoo, and Dropbox, with Google buying U.K. artificial intelligence company DeepMind in January for $400 million.
Monday's deal is the latest move in Twitter's effort to add image-related features to its message platform, PCWorld reported. The social networking service introduced a photo tagging feature in March able to link photos to the Twitter usernames of those shown in them without taking up characters, of which there is a limit of 140 per message. Twitter also gave its users the ability to include up to four photos in one message.
