Apple's Acquisition of Xnor.ai Aims to Deliver TinyML to Edge Devices

The News: Last week, Apple's acquisition of Xnor.ai was reported, no doubt aiming to deliver TinyML to edge devices. Xnor.ai, a Seattle startup specializing in low-power, edge-based artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Spun off from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the three-year-old startup's technology embeds AI on the edge, enabling facial recognition, natural language processing, augmented reality, and other ML-driven capabilities to be executed on low-power devices rather than relying on the cloud. Analyst Take: Developers of AI applications for edge deployment are doing their work in a growing range of frameworks and deploying their models to myriad hardware, software, and cloud environments. This complicates the task of making sure that each new AI model is optimized for fast inferencing on its target platform, a burden that has traditionally required manual tuning.