This article is more than 1 year old

Twitter joins Skynet arms race with terrifying acquisition of Whetlab

'Employ machines, not people with PhDs,' say machine floggers with PhDs

Twitter has acquired artificial intelligence start-up Whetlab, probably to assist with what it considers "barriers to consumption" by foisting machine-curated content on unsuspecting tweeters.

Confirmed in less than 140 characters, Twitter announced its capture of the machine learning startup on Wednesday (June 17). The financial details of the acquisition have not been disclosed.

A Whetlab statement claimed: "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."

The departed Dick Costolo had previously explained Twitter's machine-learning efforts at the annual shareholders' meeting of 3 June:

Our second strategic priority is to reduce barriers to consumption. This is based on our grand revision and our conviction that we can leverage our rich content and machine learning systems to instantly deliver great experiences.

Whetlab pitched itself to CEOs who had been snagged by AI-heralding headlines and the systems their engineers hacked up in-house. "You've been promised artificial intelligence, but it seems like you need to hire a room full of PhDs to get it!"

Whetlab offers ts own "patent-pending technology" to these CEOs, "rather than having to hire doctorate-wielding machine-learning experts to architect and tune" their systems.

Soon to auto-play advertisements, and now venture with its capital, Twitter is now looking for a new CEO. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like