Apple has made an interesting acquisition. The company has gone shopping and picked up Lattice Data, a company that uses an AI enabled reference engine and deploys it to turn unstructured data into structured.
So basically, you have data that isn’t particularly useful and then in comes Lattice Data and poof! Not much data is available about the deal but from what we have been able to gather, around 20 engineers from the smaller company have joined Apple and the deal is being said to have cost the Cupertino giant somewhere around $200 million.
Lattice Data is based upon DeepDive, a system that was created at Stanford with the explicit aim of deriving information from unstructured data which is rather useless in its natural form. Christopher Ré, Michael Cafarella, Raphael Hoffmann, and Feng Niu co-founded the company and in doing so, commercialized the tool as well. The team is currently working in positions of research and development while Andy Jacques, who joined Lattice only last year, is leading as its CEO.
Here are a couple of fun facts for you since we are talking about data — 90 percent of data produced came into existence in the last 2 years, imagine that! And around 70-80 percent of that data is dark or unusable. That is exactly where Lattice Data plans to come in.
The potential is certainly huge, but it will be interesting to see how Apple deploys this technology.
