While 2024 is expected to be the year Apple enters the AI scene in a big way, every move it makes will attract attention. So naturally, the news that Apple has acquired a Canada-based AI startup is a big story.
Bloomberg reported this week that Apple acquired DarwinAI, a small startup with a few dozen employees, for an undisclosed amount earlier this year. Apple has reportedly integrated DarwinAI staff into its own AI team, including DarwinAI co-founder Alexander Wong, an AI researcher at the University of Waterloo who “has published more than 600 articles in peer-reviewed journals lectures and lectures, as well as patents, in various fields such as computer imaging, artificial intelligence, computer vision and multimedia systems.
According to its LinkedIn profile, DarwinAI is “a rapidly growing visual quality inspection company that provides manufacturers with an end-to-end solution to improve product quality and increase production efficiency.” Simply put, this means that Apple is likely interested in DarwinAI to streamline its manufacturing to be more efficient. This is something that could save Apple a lot of money in annual costs.
Much more interesting for our consumer devices, however, is Bloomberg’s report that DarwinAI’s technology can be used to make AI models more efficient in general. Apple would like all generative AI features to run on the device rather than in the cloud. The models will therefore need to be as small as possible and DarwinAI could certainly contribute to this.
Apple is expected to unveil some major AI advancements at WWDC in June, including an all-new Siri and generative AI functionality in iOS 18.
