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Apple Internally Discussing Whether to Bid to Acquire Perplexity AI
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Do you just write things without knowing and make things up? That is quite dangerous. Perplexity's growth has been astronomical, growth is over 50% over the last few months of this year alone. Heck, Perplexity has approximately 22 million monthly active users, up from 15 million earlier in the year. Moreover, the platform processed 780 million queries in May 2025, with a 20% month-over-month growth rate, handling around 30 million queries daily.
So yes, Apple would be boosted by closing in on Perplexity rather quickly. Now the news has gotten out and a bidding war will likely commence.
"while Perplexity said that it has "no knowledge of any current or future M&A discussions involving Perplexity."
Well who WOULD have such knowledge?!? Because I feel like it would really be YOU guys, wouldn't it?
I mean, either you're having them or you're not, but you should probably KNOW.
Well who WOULD have such knowledge?!? Because I feel like it would really be YOU guys, wouldn't it?
I mean, either you're having them or you're not, but you should probably KNOW.
Don’t they tend to just roll them into their first party products?
NeXT
Siri
AuthenTec
Beats
Intel’s Modem tech
Shazam
Workflow
Dark Sky
Texture
Primephonic
Chomp
Swell Radio
Face shift
Beddit
I just deleted Perplexity since it's duplicated in several other MUCH BETTER, AI solutions.
The fact that they’re even internally talking about this mean the new Apple Intelligence-powered Siri they’re working on is nowhere near good enough.
Even if it was good enough, they likely have no choice given the media and Wall Street narrative around Apple and AI. Say they could figure their way out of it by Spring with a solid implementation, that actually might not be enough to change the impression. An acquisition gives them much-needed breathing room and a welcome change of subject.
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Fact? You take a Gurman article as a fact? Really?
if this is true, and at an early stage, there are probably less than 10 people involved in the details and neither the execs nor the M&A folks would be "leaking" to Gurman ...
I have no idea why they would do this but as a complete admission they couldn't do it on their own.
Their track record on M&A isn't as bad as people think it is, but it is hit and miss.
Do they need to buy someone outright? Why not buy a 20% share in Claude at $20B or whatever? It is half their cash, but it might be worth it...
Their track record on M&A isn't as bad as people think it is, but it is hit and miss.
Do they need to buy someone outright? Why not buy a 20% share in Claude at $20B or whatever? It is half their cash, but it might be worth it...
A-Inc has acquired 131 companies since 1988
en.wikipedia.org
List of mergers and acquisitions by Apple - Wikipedia
They have also developed models of their own, based on Llama and DeepSeek.
Perplexity is building search functionality on top of LLMs — that's what Apple would be interested in, maybe even to run it on top of their own models.
And I would take "as good as ChatGPT" with a grain of salt, until they specify which model version they are talking about.
RAG to a model does not make it a new model. It just adding more data on top existing model. It can be add to practically any models out there. It's not like fine-tuning a model, which require massive amount of computing resources. I am not sure why Perplexity would even need to do that, since their services does not require them to do so.
Overall, I honestly don't even know how Perplexity worth that much, or how they generate revenue to match their valuation. It's not hard to do RAG, or to do what Perplexity services are doing. It just they are one of the first to do search GUI wrapper.
My guess is Apple somehow doesn't have enough resources / time in this field to figure out how to integrate LLM into Siri/Home. Since they got the money, they can simply just acquire a company to do it for them than doing it from scratch.
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Apple reportedly didn't pay anything for the ChatGPT integration (nor did OpenAI). The benefit for OpenAI is prominence within the Apple ecosystem.
I take all rumors with a grain of salt. But I take Gurman seriously the most. He was the first one who said iOS would be getting a redesign, and that iPadOS would be getting new features from the Mac. And he was the first one to even suggest the Apple Intelligence features would be delayed until 2026. Hell, he was the first to say Apple was renaming everything xOS 26! I’m sorry, but that’s too specific to just be a lucky guess.
My point is, they can run these models themselves, without having to rely on third-party LLM services.
Apple hardly ever does it on there own, they just buy other companies and poach hires experts from competing companies. Apple bought Intel for $1 Billion and poached hired all the modem experts from Qualcomm to accomplish there goal of having there own modem and they accomplished that goal, check mark ✅ Buying companies is pennies to Apple as there worth trillions 💰 Apple will outbid anyone for Perplexity AI.
I hope apple does. I love perplexity and wish it had a deeper integration with my Apple devices.
Apple executives have been discussing the possibility of the company making a bid to acquire Perplexity AI, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. Perplexity is one of the leading AI startups that has proven popular as an AI-infused web search engine.
Mergers and acquisitions chief Adrian Perica, services head Eddy Cue, and other executives overseeing Apple's AI efforts have been participating in the discussions, which Gurman says "are at an early stage and may not lead to an offer." Apple declined to comment, while Perplexity said that it has "no knowledge of any current or future M&A discussions involving Perplexity."
Whether or not Apple makes a bid for Perplexity may hinge on the outcome of the ongoing Google antitrust trial, as Apple's deal with the search engine giant to make Google the default search engine on Apple devices and which brings Apple roughly $20 billion per year could be nullified as part of a ruling against Google.
Perplexity's most recent funding round valued the company at $14 billion, so an outright acquisition by Apple would undoubtedly be by far the largest deal in the Cupertino company's history, topping its $3 billion purchase of Beats over a decade ago.
As an alternative to an acquisition, Apple could instead choose to partner with Perplexity to add its AI search capabilities to Safari and Siri, and the two companies have met multiple times in recent months to discuss Perplexity's technology. Perplexity is, however, said to be close to a far-reaching deal with Samsung to bringing its AI features to the phones of Apple's biggest rival, a move that could complicate any potential deal with Apple.
Article Link: Apple Internally Discussing Whether to Bid to Acquire Perplexity AI
Absolutely they should - emailed Tim to do so - stock is at 14-15 billion valuation… offer 20 billion and go away happy
I’d love to hear your technical explanation for this, in detail, because I think you may be throwing buzzwords around that go together like oil and water.
Error correction is a major issue that is at least 3-5 years away from being anywhere near solved, and distributing Qubits across systems is significant hurdle because they tend to lose entanglement (yes I saw the recent paper about microwaves possibly being a ‘95%’ solution but it is pure theory only).
If you’ve presumably read this literature enlighten us how exactly model development will be enhanced, in any way, by adding even more error prone vaporware technology to the mix.
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