By Sally Ward-Foxton, EETimes (January 16, 2020)
Seattle startup runs AI on tiny embedded devices
Reports are circulating that the Seattle-based AI at the edge company Xnor has been quietly acquired by Apple. An investigation by GeekWire suggests the deal was worth in the region of $200 million. This development could mean Xnor’s low-power algorithms for object detection in photos end up on the iPhone.
Xnor, a spin-out from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), had raised $14.6 million in funding since it was founded three years ago. Xnor’s founders, Ali Farhadi and Mohammed Rastegari, are the creators of YOLO, a well-known neural network widely used for object detection.