Twitter gallops in to buy machine learning 'unicorn' Magic Pony

British company to join Madbits and Whetlab in Twitter's machine learning paddock

Twitter has lassoed London-based machine learning start-up Magic Pony in a bid to acquire both technology and expertise.

The news was announced this afternoon by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. It isn't the first machine learning or artificial intelligence company that Twitter has acquired in the past two years - Magic Pony will join Madbits and Whetlab in Dorsey's Twitter Cortex AI paddock.

"Our acquisition of Magic Pony builds on other investments we've made in machine learning, beginning with the acquisitions of Madbits in July 2014 and Whetlab in June 2015. Magic Pony's team will be joining Twitter Cortex, a team of engineers, data scientists, and machine learning researchers dedicated to building a product in which people can easily find new experiences to share and participate in," wrote Dorsey.

Magic Pony's niche is image recognition, and the acquisition, continued Dorsey, is very much about both picking up this technology as well as the skills of the individuals behind it.

"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," added Dorsey.

Twitter's value isn't in the platform it provides to its users to share information, promote themselves and their companies and, frankly, to argue with each other. Rather, it is the ability of other companies to target advertising at users, as well as to scoop up the information about users that their online sharing provides.

Machine learning can therefore provide better targeted advertising and ought to glean new insights into users, their opinions and habits.