Twitter strengthens AI team with acquisition of London startup Magic Pony

Social giant Twitter has expanded its capabilities in machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence that seeks to teach computers how to learn, with the acquisition of London-based startup Magic Pony Technology.

The US-headquartered firm has today (June 20) announced a multi-million dollar deal that sees Magic Pony become the latest tech firm to join the ever-increasing Twitter fold.

According to TechCrunch, Twitter is paying $150m (around £102m) in total.

Writing in a blog post, the social network’s CEO and co-founder, Jack Dorsey, said the transaction builds on other investments made by Twitter in recent years, including its acquisition of image search startup Madbits in 2014 and Whetlab, another machine learning company, last year.

He wrote: “Magic Pony’s technology – based on research by the team to create algorithms that can understand the features of imagery – will be used to enhance our strength in live and video and opens up a whole lot of exciting creative possibilities for Twitter.

“The team includes 11 PhDs with expertise across computer vision, machine learning, high-performance computing, and computational neuroscience, who are alumni of some of the top labs in the world.”

Mr Dorsey continued: “We are continuing to build strength into our deep learning teams with world-class talent to help Twitter be the best place to see what’s happening and why it matters, first.

“We value deep learning research to help make our world better, and we will keep doing our part to share our work and learnings with the community.”

The team at Magic Pony will join Twitter Cortex, the social site’s team of data scientists, engineers and machine learning researchers.