Apple goes deeper into AI by acquiring Lattice Data, a company that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to structure dark data and turn it into more usable information. By pushing into machine learning, Lattice Data is meant to strengthen Apple's own capabilities in the field.
After the $200 million acquisition deal, 20 of Lattice Data's engineers were joining Apple.
Dark data are those information that are unstructured and cannot be used. They consist of information that contains no labels, categories, or any kind of structure. Because of this state, the data is not useful. But once it can be organized, the possibilities can be countless.
According to a research, there were 4.4 zettabytes of data in 2013, and that’s projected to grow to 44 zettabytes by 2020. IBM estimated that 90 percent of the data in existence today was produced in the last two years, and somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of all of this data is “dark".
By acquiring Lattice Data, Apple aims to make use of its AI technology to structure those unstructured data.
The company was co-founded in 2015 as the commercialization of DeepDive, a system to "extract value from dark data." DeepDive was founded by Stanford professor and MacArthur Genius Grant winner Christopher Ré, Hadoop co-founder Michael Cafarella, Raphael Hoffmann, and Feng Niu.
Lattice Data that was relatively unknown because it largely remained far from news coverage, but raised at least $20 million funding from GV, Madrona and InQTel.
In 2017, the AI market is booming, double its worth since 2016 when it was valued at $643.7 million. Besides Apple, other tech companies that are also investing actively on AI, include Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
