Apple has a new move in AI。

Earlier this year, Apple acquired a Canadian AI startup called DarwinAI.。Dozens of DarwinAI employees have joined Apple's artificial intelligence division。

After Apple's acquisition, DarwinAI's official website is now unavailable and multiple social media accounts have been suspended for updates.。

According to DarwinAI's introduction on linkedin, the company was established in 2017 and is a fast-growing visual quality inspection company that provides end-to-end solutions for manufacturers to improve product quality and increase production efficiency。DarwinAI said its patented Explainable AI (XAI) platform has been adopted by many Fortune 500 companies to easily integrate AI they can trust.。DarwinAI said its XAI platform was built through years of research (more than 500 publications, including numerous awards) led by the company's co-founder, Dr. Alexander Wong.。

In addition, the official profile also mentioned that the company has dozens of employees, covering artificial intelligence, neural networks, deep learning, machine learning, software and research.。

According to Crunchbase, DarwinAI has raised a total of six funding rounds since 2017, raising a record $17.8 million.。The most recent round of funding, in December 2022, was a Series A round involving four investors, which eventually raised $8.1 million.。The Series A round was preceded by three seed rounds, a convertible note offering and non-equity assistance, with major investors including Honeywell's venture capital firm。According to Canadian startup community Communitech, DarwinAI has also worked with companies such as Lockheed Martin and Intel.。

There is speculation that Apple is buying DarwinAI because of a core technology that could make AI systems smaller and faster.。And this technology may help Apple, because for privacy reasons, Apple is more inclined to run artificial intelligence on the device, rather than run entirely in the cloud。

As part of the deal, co-founder Alexander Wong has joined Apple as director of Apple's artificial intelligence team, according to people familiar with the matter.。

According to the official website of the University of Waterloo (University of Waterloo), Alexander Wong is a professor in the Department of Systems Design Engineering at the university and is currently the Canadian Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Medical Imaging, a member of the Royal Society of Canada, and co-director of the Vision and Image Processing Laboratory.。

Apple did not respond positively to the acquisition of DarwinAI, saying only that the company would "acquire smaller technology companies from time to time."。

Although Apple has acquired more AI companies than most of its competitors in the past decade, Apple still lags behind in the AI competition。In 2022, the birth of ChatGPT caught a number of companies off guard, but then a number of tech giants, including Google and Microsoft, urgently adjusted their strategies and launched their own artificial intelligence tools.。Among the "Big Seven" of the US stock market, only Apple did not come up with any new results, and did not even disclose its artificial intelligence plan.。

Apple's "slow half-beat" in AI competition has been worrying its investors。However, Apple CEO Tim Cook recently promised that Apple will "break new ground" in artificial intelligence this year.。It is expected that Apple may announce AI achievements or related plans at Apple's global developer conference in June this year.。

Although Apple is "silent" about the company's internal AI strategic layout, there are still some gossip。It is reported that Apple has begun to test the large language model internally, and integrate generative artificial intelligence into Siri, Messages, Apple Music and other functions.。Apple also plans to add the ability for its software to automatically create presentations and complete blocks of text。Apple is developing a new version of its Xcode programming software, which uses artificial intelligence to help developers write code.。

Affected by the news of the acquisition, Apple shares rose slightly on March 14, or more than 1%, to $173。Apple is down about 10% this year.。