Twitter said Monday that it has acquired Magic Pony Technology, a London-based developer of machine learning and visual processing technology, expanding the machine learning capabilities in Twitter’s video technology and adding talent to the company’s Cortex team.
This acquisition builds on Twitter’s investment 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, according to Twitter.
“Machine learning is increasingly at the core of everything we build at Twitter,” said Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO and co-founder.
“Magic Pony’s machine learning technology will help us build strength into our deep learning teams with world-class talent, so Twitter can continue to be the best place to see what’s happening and why it matters, first,” he added
Magic Pony’s interdisciplinary team includes 11 PhDs and alumni of some of the top labs in the world with expertise across computer vision, machine learning, high-performance computing, and computational neuroscience.
“Our team has researched and developed state-of-the-art machine learning techniques for visual processing that can identify the features of imagery and use that information to process it in new ways,” said Rob Bishop, Magic Pony CEO and co-founder.
Twitter Also Made Changes To Videos On Its Platform
Where previously, uploaded videos were limited to 30 seconds, now users can create video Tweets up to 140 seconds long, said Twitter. (Select publishers will continue to be able to post videos up to 10 minutes long through our professional publisher tools.)