Apple takes aim at Microsoft's crown with latest move

Apple has acquired an AI-focused company based in California, WaveOne. Apple hasn't made an official announcement regarding the acquisition, but an employee of the acquired company confirmed it.

According to a report from TechCrunch, Apple has recently acquired WaveOne to widen its span in the artificial intelligence field. WaveOne focused on compressing videos using AI solutions and recently got the tech giant's attention. WaveOne was founded in 2016 by Lubomir Bourdev and Oren Rippel, ex-employees of Meta. Bourdev was one of the founding members of Meta's AO research division, and after working for the company, he decided to team up with Rippel to build WaveOne.

Revealed by an employees statement

The company's sales and business development executive, Bob Stankosh, gave the news in a post on LinkedIn. "After almost 2 years at WaveOne, last week we finalized the sale of the company to Apple. We started our journey at WaveOne, realizing that machine learning/deep learning video technology could potentially change the world. Apple saw this potential and took the opportunity to add it to their technology portfolio," he said.

TechCrunch also found out that several employees, including one of the co-founders, are now working with Apple's various machine learning groups.

Apple is known for acquiring promising technologies developed by startups. However, the company never announces them officially, so the same case will likely happen with WaveOne. Apple surely wants to gross in the AI industry, and recent reports showed that it has many engineers working on Siri's development despite technical obstacles.

The company wants to launch a new LLM and many different AI tools, employees were also briefed about it. WaveOne's acquisition might be one of the steps further to implement more AI-powered technologies to company products or use them in the upcoming technologies and devices.

Microsoft is heavily investing in AI-powered solutions, and the company has announced several new features in the last month. It looks like Microsoft will invest more and lead the field, while Apple wants to prevent it.

On a side note, Apple recently took financial precautions and tightened its belt. The company froze its hiring processes and decreased the number of yearly bonuses for its employees.

Advertisement