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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.

Have you used o3 with deep research? Do you listen to the number one business podcast? What I’m saying is basically just a harsher take on what many informed people are already saying. Apple is not a growth company anymore and is trading at a multiple based on fantasy.
 
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Is Perplexity the one that spoofed their scraper's user agent to steal from publishers? Or am I confusing them with a different AI grift?
 
Thanks for the reply.

That article is propaganda with near zero substance published by people who have financial interest in convincing investors to throw money at them.

Sorry to be so blunt, but there’s virtually no technical merit to what they wrote. They don’t even source any specific benchmarks, for good reason. They should be publishing academic research if they have real breakthroughs, not marketing blog posts.

Quantum computing will make strides in the next decade, but as far as GenAI is concerned I’m firmly of the belief that World Models are the frontier for the next ~5-7 years, and it’s why Meta is putting so much wood behind that arrow, so to speak.

I do agree a perplexity buyout is questionable given Apple’s brand focus, I dont see them running a search engine ever just because they can’t control the content well and their current leadership team doesn’t seem willing to compromise on that in any area of their business.
 
Nope, won’t be happening, this is a mirage. Neither QC hardware nor quantum algorithms are anywhere near that.
There have been breakthroughs (not by the company they referenced) very recently regarding error correction that point in the direction we’re finally going to see some forward momentum with Quantum by ~2030, but even if that does happen in implementation, and that’s a big IF, we’ll be lucky if Quantum processors can run Shor’s algorithm at any kind of real scale.

Absolutely no chance they’ll be training AI models. It’s hype on top of hype.
 
Well… sometimes it’s cheaper than tu build self a LLM. Usually it’s quicker to buy than to build. And the entire world is just waiting for a decent Siri and holding the breath.
 
i am thinking they want to buy perplexity employees because Apple employees seem incompetent when it comes to AI.
 
Well… sometimes it’s cheaper than tu build self a LLM. Usually it’s quicker to buy than to build. And the entire world is just waiting for a decent Siri and holding the breath.

perplexity is not an LLM. Its uses chatgpt in the background. Its more of a brand name.
 
maybe they should use the millions to fix macos instead, the UI and the other shortcomings.
macos still lack many basic elements, has shortcomings, bugs and many UI inconsistencies.

- still cannot chose my own font for the system (size , weight, and family)
- macos still lack support for many filesystems (ext4 and ntfs for example, for interoperability)
- macos still has no ability to set per app sound volume.
- window management, task switching and fullscreen handling is still archaic in macos
- macos UI has many inconsistencies (ex: edit finder toolbar, see preview mismatch with actual result )
- lacks own solution to clean ~/Library/ from the junk that accumulate over time
- lacks own solution to properly uninstall apps ( similar, linked to previous point )
- OS is fat and bloated (almost 100gb, in total for /System, /Library, /usr, and some elements in /private )
- still lack early boot UI ( to control basic system functions or booting options, like bios on PCs )
- macos still lacks having its own package manager ( thrid party needed, brew or macport for example )
- macos doesn't implement some industry standards, like vulkan and opengl. (if they want to go for metal only, then they should make a wrapper to fully map all vulkan and opengl calls to metal.. just like they did for directx to metal but directly for vulkan, and for an up to date opengl as well )

this is just to name a few.
i find macos is kind of regressing, release after release, it devolves.
the new UI themes since bigsur certainly feels like downgrades.
before, macos already had many of these problems but at least it looked pretty.
now, not only these problems are not yet solved but also they keep on increasing, getting bigger, more numerous, and the OS looks like fat clueless crap.

hey apple, stop adding new (often half-cooked) stuff and fix base functionalities of your OS, please.
 
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I got given a year's sub to Perplexity Pro. I've been making myself use it whenever I remember, but I don't get what all the fuss is about. It all looks good when I search about things I don't know, but whenever I search fields about which I DO know things, it's always just a little bit wrong, no matter which LLM I choose. You always have to check everything, make sure the sources cited are real, etc. I can see why people like it, but it's just not quite there yet.
 
honestly - I wish they would use their $3T mkt cap to buy OpenAI (estimated value $300-400B) in a stock deal.

It's be good value for Apple shareholders. Everything is being compared to OpenAI in this space.

I've mapped ChatGPT to my iPhone action button and it's my new Siri than can actually do stuff and answer questions.

I think the biggest reason why is because in order to "win" the AI race you need to harvest a ton of new data. This would go against Apple's views on privacy and be backwards on their promotion that privacy is a basic human right.

If Apple were to buy ChatGPT, implement a privacy first mindset, competitors would be far ahead very quickly. It's a big reason why Siri isn't as competitive as the competitors. The data just isn't refined.
 
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Apple bought Siri when it was state of the art, and let it devolve into trash. If Apple buys Perplexity, there's no guarantee that the same won't happen again. Apple needs to change its culture if a Perplexity acquisition is going to make sense... but then again if Apple changes its culture there may be no need to buy Perplexity.
 
Doesn't perplexity rely on ChatGPT/Gemini/Grok? lmao all they're buying is some GUI and some logic for searching the web.
I think they have trained their own models including Chinese model derived from deepseek.

I like perplexity. I think it is a good move!
 
I'd be cautious if I were Tim Apple due to the liability issues they'd be inheriting. A company with deep pockets will have the lawyers going into lawsuit overdrive.
 
Beats was a phenomenally good investment for Apple. It allowed them to quickly enter the music streaming business and stop Spotify from gaining a truly insurmountable market share. (There are tons of parallels to Apple's place in AI right now and where they were with music at the time of the Beats acquisition.) And it gave them a profitable, cross-platform hardware business that's still generating income.
You’re telling me that Apple being in the music business with iTunes for years would not know how to do a streaming service without spending $3 billion to buy Beats?
 
I got given a year's sub to Perplexity Pro. I've been making myself use it whenever I remember, but I don't get what all the fuss is about. It all looks good when I search about things I don't know, but whenever I search fields about which I DO know things, it's always just a little bit wrong, no matter which LLM I choose. You always have to check everything, make sure the sources cited are real, etc. I can see why people like it, but it's just not quite there yet.
I have to 100% agree with you here! It’s not a trustworthy source.
 
Yes perplexity is just some wrapper that adds ads to your AI experience. It’s like the windows start menu for AI. If Apple buys this it’s a huge mistake
Oof. That is pathetic if they need another company to get the wrapper right…
 
I'm perplexed why they would want to acquire them since Gurman also reported they've got an AI working internally they deem as good as ChatGPT — but has resisted taking further because some executives fear it will hallucinate?
Meanwhile, they have a Siri that's mostly incompetent.

I don't get why Apple tried to create a version of Siri that was half old Siri and half new Siri for more advanced tasks.

Don't they realise that regular Siri doesn't work most of the time?
 
I'd be very surprised if they do buy Perplexity.

'Why join the navy when you could be a pirate?', as Steve Jobs once said.

Would someone who is talented in GenAI risk spending their best years in the GenAI boom - and potentially the dawn of AGI - at Apple?

Would they risk seeing their work sit on the shelf, as Apple prevaricates about launching new Siri features, which may hallucinate?

(As opposed to the current Siri which is reliably incompetent).

But if you forsee AGI taking a scythe to tech jobs - hey, most jobs - maybe pocketing a sizeable amount of Apple's billions is a smart thing to do...
 
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Think Apple will definitely partner with Perplexity to improve Siri. Thought there would have been some kind of announcement at WWDC. Waiting to hear more about this.
 
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Doesn't perplexity rely on ChatGPT/Gemini/Grok? lmao all they're buying is some GUI and some logic for searching the web.
Perplexity is way more than just a GUI front-end to other LLMs + RAG. It provides real-time search, has the best deep research capability, and is probably the best implementation of multi-LLM orchestration currently available as evidenced by perplexity labs which pulls together all of the above to enable building complex, interactive dashboards on demand. Anyone who’s tried to build complex LLM based systems understand that perplexity is an extraordinary platform. Apple certainly knows this and is justifiable in due-diligence exploring both partnership and acquisition. Perplexity is probably the best acquisition option: it would bring tremendous talent, proven products, solid platform and big user base with growing # of paying users.
 
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Apple should just wait it out and let all these LLMs crash and burn once they run out of investor funding.
This is a very interesting take. There will definitely be some crashing and consolidation of some LLM players but Perplexity is 10X better than most of their cohorts and backed by Amazon — so they’re less likely to have a fire sale.
 
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