{"id":79134,"date":"2025-08-13T07:47:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-13T07:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/79134\/"},"modified":"2025-08-13T07:47:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-13T07:47:10","slug":"what-are-apples-options-for-an-ai-acquisition-beyond-perplexity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/79134\/","title":{"rendered":"What are Apple\u2019s options for an AI acquisition beyond Perplexity?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\"Senior<\/p>\n

Since Apple\u2019s latest earnings call, talk of a potential Perplexity acquisition has quieted down (the fact that Perplexity was once again allegedly caught red-handed sidestepping content restrictions didn\u2019t help).<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, with the ever-increasing number of engineers from its Foundation Models team jumping ship, Apple\u2019s need for fresh talent is getting more urgent by the day. But if Perplexity is a no-go, who else could Apple buy?<\/p>\n

I used to agree with Jason Snell\u2019s frequent argument on the Upgrade podcast<\/a>, that the most Apple thing to do would be to acquire a small, unknown AI lab. A tiny team of brilliant engineers building exciting tech that could help jumpstart Apple\u2019s AI push from the inside.<\/p>\n

But I think we\u2019re past that point now. Besides, Apple has already tried that. Although unconfirmed, reports suggest Apple made 30+ AI acquisitions in 2023<\/a>, more than Google, Meta, Microsoft, or Amazon, or even some of them combined.<\/p>\n

And even if those numbers are off, and Apple has bought fewer AI companies than its rivals in recent years, the fact remains: never mind market expectations. Apple has been falling short of its own AI ambitions and promises.<\/p>\n

Just as one example: while OpenAI continuously improves the Canvas<\/a> tool on ChatGPT, and while Anthropic improves the Artifacts<\/a> tool on Claude, Apple\u2019s Writing Tools<\/a> (announced a year ago) have barely moved.<\/p>\n

Then, there\u2019s the AI Siri revamp, whose long list of well-documented stumbles<\/a> speaks for itself.<\/p>\n

At this point, I do believe that Apple needs more than raw talent, especially given the fact that it can\u2019t even seem to keep<\/a> the raw talent it already has. What Apple needs is an infusion of product-ready technology, made by a company that has already proven that it can actually ship good products, preferably based on its own foundation model.<\/p>\n

The problem is: that\u2019s a very short list.<\/p>\n

Who could be a good fit?<\/p>\n

OpenAI is obviously off the table. So is Anthropic, realistically. So let\u2019s skip those two.<\/p>\n

Perplexity could be a good fit for powering Siri\u2019s new brains, but honestly\u2026 that\u2019s about it. Besides, their focus seems to be elsewhere. Granted, they have built a great AI-based assistant, but that\u2019s like Amazon producing great TV shows. At the end of the day, they just want to keep you around to sell you more toilet paper.<\/p>\n

In Perplexity\u2019s case, aside from the assistant, they\u2019re also building pretty good products around e-commerce, sports, and finance, all of which naturally tie into search, which in turn ties into browsing. That\u2019s why they\u2019re also building Comet, and that\u2019s also why they\u2019re making it very clear<\/a> that if Google is forced to sell Chrome, they want to be first in line.<\/p>\n

But at an $18 billion valuation, it feels like Apple could get more bang for its buck by looking elsewhere. Ideally, from a company that\u2019s a better fit for its own ambitions and culture<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Could it be Mistral<\/a>, the $10 billion French startup behind Le Chat? Definitely.<\/p>\n

Mistral has its own foundation models, large models, small models, open-source models, consumer-facing products, developer tools, and a sprawling list of APIs: OCR, fine-tuning, speech, file handling, classification, coding, embeddings, agentic tasks, conversation workflows, you name it.<\/p>\n

Beyond that, Mistral is also pretty philosophically aligned with Apple\u2019s stance on privacy and responsible AI development. Stack that up against Perplexity\u2019s current valuation, and what Apple would actually get in return, and Mistral starts to look like a steal.<\/p>\n

Still in Europe, there\u2019s Aleph Alpha<\/a>. The Germany-based company doesn\u2019t have a public valuation figure, but it\u2019s raised close to $1 billion in funding. The problem is that their focus is on enterprise and public-sector AI (government, finance, and industrial clients), rather than consumer-facing AI.<\/p>\n

Of course, this wouldn\u2019t be an unprecedented pivot in Apple\u2019s history, as Siri\u2019s roots are famously in military-funded research. It\u2019s a different time and context, sure, but you get what I mean.<\/p>\n

But the bigger challenge here would probably be keeping the team motivated, if what they really care about is building AI for problems that are worlds away from consumer tech (And let\u2019s be honest: Apple hasn\u2019t exactly been crushing it when it comes to retaining AI talent lately).<\/p>\n

Beyond that, the list gets thinner<\/p>\n

There\u2019s Ai2<\/a>, which is doing fantastic work in open research and tooling, there\u2019s Beijing-based Kimi<\/a>, which is the lab behind the impressive K2 model, there\u2019s Cohere<\/a> (if you really want to push it), which leans more toward developer enterprise-facing products, and\u2026 that\u2019s pretty much it.<\/p>\n

I mean, there are dozens of small-scale AI companies that have been doing great work, but it feels like if Apple really wanted to acquire them, it would have already done so. And a smaller scale means smaller impact on Apple\u2019s bottom line, and that\u2019s not what they need right now.<\/p>\n

And then, of course, there\u2019s a new wave of companies making noise based purely on promise.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the case with Mira Murati\u2019s Thinking Machines Lab<\/a>, now valued at $12 billion, on the promise of building a platform that will help researchers and startups train and customize their own models.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also Safe Superintelligence<\/a>, Ilya Sutskever\u2019s startup, which is already valued north of $30 billion despite having no roadmap and no product beyond its stated goal of building a superintelligent system that\u2019s inherently safe.<\/p>\n

In the end, Apple\u2019s options are slim, and, given the skyrocketing valuation of frontier AI labs, they are getting slimmer by the day. Currently, I believe Mistral stands out not just as the best fit, but perhaps as Apple\u2019s last, best chance to course-correct before the gap grows even wider and harder to close.<\/p>\n

AirPods deals on Amazon<\/p>\n

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.<\/a><\/p>\n

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