Twitter today announced the acquisition of another machine learning company. This time, it’s Magic Pony, a company whose expertise comes in the area of understanding imagery in video.
The Magic Pony team has been working on solutions for enhancing the look of a video in areas like sharpness. It does this by tapping into a large neural network of imagery that can find photos similar to the subject in a video, and use the information from those photos to automatically apply enhancements.
While Twitter had no word on how, exactly, Magic Pony would be put to use, they did give off a general expectation that it’ll be an important aspect of not only their video and live video efforts, but their machine learning efforts in general.
Our acquisition of Magic Pony builds on other investments we’ve made in machine learning, beginning with the acquisitions of Madbits in July 2014 and Whetlab in June 2015. Magic Pony’s team will be joining Twitter Cortex, a team of engineers, data scientists, and machine learning researchers dedicated to building a product in which people can easily find new experiences to share and participate in.
The deal is reportedly worth $150 million.
[via Twitter]