As if the technology needed any more promotion, Twitter announced its acquisition of a London-based company that has developed machine-learning techniques for visual processing. According to reports, Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) paid about 150 million for AI startup Magic Pony Technology. "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. The startup's technology reportedly works by combining neural networks designed to learn with machine learning tools to expand the amount of data in an image.

Computer vision is essentially an arm of artificial intelligence that lets machines analyze and understand images by breaking them down and processing them on a pixel-by-pixel basis, rather than by meta data (such as keywords and descriptions that rely not only on human actions, but on human accuracy too). Predictive typing keyboard company SwiftKey was recently snapped up by Microsoft -- not because it has a popular little app for Androids and iPhones, but because it's building a sophisticated back end built on artificial intelligence and machine learning. This includes artificial neural networks (ANNs) that are more directly based on the structure and workings of the human brain. From enterprise software and drug discovery through to predictive typing and now stock photography searches, machine learning is less of an abstract research field now and more of a reality.