After staying away from news related to Artificial Intelligence, Apple shows its interest in the market after silently negotiating the purchase of WaveOne, a startup that uses AI’s for compression and decompression based on algorithms.
Although Apple kept these negotiations under a certain degree of secrecy by avoiding answering questions about negotiations with the startup, the closure of WaveOne’s website in January set a precedent that was confirmed by the linkedin post by Bob Stankosh, former head of sales and business development at Waveone, in which he talks about the purchase. In addition, various former employees, including Oren Rippel, co-founder of the company, they are already working on the Apple learning groups.
“After almost 2 years at WaveOne, last week we finalized the sale of the company to Apple. We started our journey at WaveOne realizing that this machine learning/video deep learning technology could potentially change the world. Apple saw this potential and took the opportunity to add it to its portfolio of technologies”, describes Stankosh in part of his publication.
WaveOne is a company founded in 2016 that was born with the idea of working on video compression and decompression by using algorithms and artificial intelligence to recognize patterns that are considered important in audiovisual material, such as faces or text. In this way, the project allows the devices to be able to process important data from the files based on the effectiveness of the AI and without resorting so much to hardware, making the process faster and with fewer demands for cell phones and computers.
Example of WaveOne quality improvement compared to other compression formats
Now, Apple has its eyes on using this format based on the use of AI to improve the reproduction of videos on its devices and reduce bandwidth consumption thanks to compression, preventing the videos from freezing in exchange for reducing details in the image that the algorithm considers “less important”. At the moment, all that remains is to wait to see the results of the purchase, which adds Apple to companies interested in artificial intelligence.
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