back to article Qualcomm slurps Uni of Amsterdam AI spinoff Scyfer

Two years after setting up an artificial intelligence research laboratory with the University of Amsterdam, Qualcomm Technology has acquired one of its a spinoffs - an outfit called "Scyfer". The acqui-hire brings the university's Dr Max Welling into the Qualcomm fold. Dr Welling is a research chair in Machine Learning at the …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The real reason?

    How's about a few hundred more patents to use in their battle against Apple etc?

    IP and using it as a weapon in the courts seems to be a big part of tech companies these days.

    Forget the patent trolls in East Texas... they are mere minnows when it comes to the big boys.

    Soon we will have to pay money to someone just to breathe if it carries on the way it is going...

    Then boom!

    1. Mage Silver badge

      Re: The real reason?

      Yes, absolutely. Qualcomm are a species of patent troll. They do produce chips, but as a way to licence their IP and unlike most others they often not only make profit from chip but insist on a percentage of total equipment sale price as "royalty." There is name for that sort of thing.

  2. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    "function even when the host is offline"

    I wonder how many generations of hardware will have to pass before that is actually possible.

    In the meantime, we have Cortana and Siri, and both of these phone home with requests that are analyzed and treated on vast platforms with huge data banks before getting a possible response that is sent back.

    They won't be able to shrink that down to a phone, so there's going to have to be some very, very clever programming.

    I wish them luck.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "function even when the host is offline"

      you forgot to mention alexa and Goggles Artificial Intelligence Assisstant. All of them just have simply input /output on the consumer devices for the big central AI

      1. Mage Silver badge
        Devil

        Re: "function even when the host is offline"

        All of them just have simply input /output on the consumer devices for the big central AI data slurping & privacy theft.

  3. MT Field
    Alert

    So at the moment the AI assistant model is very much client-server oriented. Perhaps the next move will be towards AI in the user equipment. Stage three would be a return to the client-server model, except now the server is the one true AI to rule over us all. Will the server become the master?

    I for one welcome our new god-on-the-cloud AI overlord.

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