Photo by Omar Houchaimi

Cellphone manufacturers are struggling to differentiate themselves. In the ads from the late 2000s — new phones were sleeker, faster, contained more memory, and could even have a touchscreen. Fast-forward to today and only the almighty camera receives attention. Apple’s acquisition of Xnor.ai is the latest move in the battle for phone photo supremacy, and AI-on-the-edge is the weapon of choice.

What is Xnor.ai and why does Apple want it?

Xnor.ai’s technology enables you to run deep learning models on Edge devices which, in English, means you can run software that can extract insights from photos and videos on the type of low-power processors you have on your smartphone. Why would you want this? Privacy and bandwidth for one. Wouldn’t you like to be able to search your photos (i.e. have them auto-tagged) without them having to be uploaded to a server in the cloud? But it also enables a host of photo editing features on your phone. These deep learning models make it possible to autosegment your photos and videos which allows you to, for example, easily put yourself against an entirely different background, or just apply a filter to your friend (and, just maybe, create deepfakes).

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Originally published by:

Kjell Carlsson, PH.D.

(Jeremy Vale co-authored this post.)

Forrester

January 22nd, 2020