Twitter acquires machine learning startup Whetlab

Social media firm wants machine learning expertise to help better organise Tweets

Twitter has acquired machine learning startup Whetlab in what appears to be a move designed to help the social media platform improve how it collects data on and organises the 500 million Tweets sent each day.

Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Whetlab describes its focus as making "machine learning better and faster, automatically". The team is made up of five experts in fields including computer science, machine learning and neuroscience.

The startup describes itself as sophisticated as a provider of "machine learning techniques that get your in-house machine learning system off the ground".

"Rather than having to hire doctorate-wielding machine learning experts to architect and tune your system, our… technology helps your engineers - your team that already understands your data and your needs - get the latest and greatest deep learning techniques going in days rather than months or years," Whetlab said.

Twitter's acquisition of a machine learning service follows similar moves by technology firms such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft, which have also made steps into artificial intelligence.

"Over the past year, we have created a technology to make machine learning better and faster for companies, automatically," read a Whetlab statement.

"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."

However, the Twitter acquisition means that as of next month, Whetlab will be shutting down its public facing beta testing service of its machine learning platform.

It's likely that Twitter has made the acquisition in order to better decipher Tweets by organising them into specific categories, such as celebrity or animals.

As a platform, Twitter is popular but it has struggled to monetise itself in the way other social media websites have. The struggle to monetise the service arguably played a large role in Twitter CEO Dick Costolo stepping down this month.

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