As Apple scrambles to play catch-up within the generative AI race, a brand new report says the corporate has thought of making its greatest acquisition ever.
In keeping with Bloomberg, Apple executives have held inside discussions a couple of potential bid for Perplexity AI, the fast-growing AI startup identified for its conversational net search platform.
This is able to mark Apple’s greatest acquisition ever
As reported by Mark Gurman, the talks are nonetheless at an early stage and should not end in an precise supply, however the concept has reportedly been floated between Apple’s mergers and acquisitions lead Adrian Perica, companies chief Eddy Cue, and high AI management inside the corporate.
Perplexity lately closed a funding spherical that valued it at $14 billion, which might make its acquisition an unprecedented transfer for Apple, nicely above the $3 billion Beats deal in 2014.
Right here’s Gurman on the doable acquisition:
“Shopping for Perplexity would give Apple an infusion of AI expertise, a identified model within the AI area and a client product. A deal may additionally doubtlessly help with future recruiting efforts.”
Whereas the report says Apple has held a number of conferences with Perplexity in current months, and its inside AI groups have been evaluating the expertise carefully, Apple declined to remark, and Perplexity stated it has “no information of any present or future M&A discussions”.
The case for getting Perplexity
First, there’s the looming risk of Apple’s $20 billion-a-year search cope with Google being unwound following the US authorities’s ongoing antitrust case. Eddy Cue himself hinted at this throughout his testimony earlier this yr, as he claimed that the business is pivoting away from conventional net search towards AI-driven solutions.
Second, Perplexity already has what Apple lacks: a consumer-facing AI search product with real-time net entry and title recognition within the AI area, at a a lot decrease (though nonetheless astronomical) value than direct rivals like, say, OpenAI. Perplexity even has its personal iPhone assistant that, regardless of the system’s intentional limitations, does approach higher than Siri and ChatGPT at a number of duties.
Which possibly is why past a full-blown acquisition, Apple can be stated to be exploring a possible partnership, one that might see Perplexity built-in into Safari as a search possibility or baked into Siri responses.
One large wrinkle: Samsung. The report says Samsung is near finalizing its personal main partnership with Perplexity, which may make any unique Apple deal extra sophisticated. It’s price mentioning that Bloomberg reported earlier immediately that Meta has additionally held acquisition discussions with Perplexity, though it appears to have given up on the thought and moved on to its current $14B funding in Scale AI as a substitute.
Do you assume Apple can purchase Perplexity? If not them, who do you assume Apple ought to purchase? Tell us within the feedback.
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