Isn't perplexity rather a "wrapper" company? Wouldn't acquiring a UX focused company bring enormous difficulties in integration, to retain Apples look and feel?
What seems to be missing for Apple is access to competitive foundation models. Perplexity has published a few finetuned models (https://openrouter.ai/provider/perplexity), but their focus does not seem to be own creating their own foundation models.
Furthermore, the entire angle on multimodality is also lacking, which is needed for true AI assistants.
Alifatisk · 2h ago
I heavily use the free version of Perplexity app on all my devices (mobile, laptop and pc). I don't know any alternatives to Perplexity if Apple would buy them and revamp the product.
Perplexity is currently valued at $15B, would be fun to see Apple go through with this because Apple, under Steve Jobs era and influence dont do big acquisition.
For starters, it's collaborative lol. Compared to Altman trying to pull a fast one on Nadella.
fakedang · 3h ago
Perplexity to Apple brings obvious synergistic benefits techwise, and resembles previous Apple app acquisitions, but I really don't see how Apple can pay a huge premium for a miniscule userbase (effectively 1000 USD per user at current valuations), especially given that a large portion of the userbase are actually free users who were offered it via their telecom provider or something.
dlachausse · 5m ago
Apple doesn’t need or care about Perplexity’s user base, they already have their own. This would be all about bringing Siri up to the level that Google’s AI assistant is at and possibly even surpassing it.
What seems to be missing for Apple is access to competitive foundation models. Perplexity has published a few finetuned models (https://openrouter.ai/provider/perplexity), but their focus does not seem to be own creating their own foundation models.
Furthermore, the entire angle on multimodality is also lacking, which is needed for true AI assistants.
They spoke through the options back in March.
Also Anthropic is on a roll at the moment, Apple would just kill it
No. Amazon’s relationship with Anthropic [1] is a less-extreme version of OpenAI’s with Microsoft.
[1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-anthrop...