Report: Apple Discussed Buying Mistral AI and Perplexity

[turbineseaplane]

They should really just go ahead and buy a working LLM!

The other problem they have is the inability to retain any talent in this space.

That would be an issue to navigate with any acqui-hire also.

The superstars in this space routinely have shown a preference for applying their skills within organizations that are actually leading in this area. Apple has shown absolutely no such interest.

 

[SIGSEGV1]

Should have been spending time & money on more important things than the scuba mask vanity project for Tim Cook.

The Siri / AI situation is a total dumpster fire..

View attachment 2541073

Do you know how much you offended dumpster and fire?

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

they're so ****ing cheap , it's insane. for a company valued at 3T... I hope sales drop a lot to show them they can't get away with this **** .

and no wonder so many AI/llm devs left for meta. apple couldnt bother retaining them and offer a better deal

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

The other problem they have is the inability to retain any talent in this space.

That would be an issue to navigate with any acqui-hire also.

The superstars in this space routinely have shown a preference for applying their skills within organizations that are actually leading in this area. Apple has shown absolutely no such interest.

they both boil down to the same thing; apple being reluctant to spend and allocate money , in spite of ai being the future AND the hottest thing rn .

 

[wigby]

They would have botched it. Apple isn't a car company wouldn't be able to manage it properly.

I feel like the same could also be said of Musk.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Do you know how much you offended dumpster and fire?

lol! Touché

My sincere apologies to the flaming dumpster truck on fire. 🙏

 

[HouseLannister]

2023 is almost over, so now seems like the perfect time to… oh wait, what year is it?

 

[mxrider88]

Yeah well done Craig. SVP that takes notice of chat gpt 1.5 years after the release and told everyone that he found it interesting. What was he doing during that time? Can’t even say he was optimizing the software because it’s a pile of garbage with half baked features and more bugs than apps.


Until they do the largest stock buybacks in history, stall R&D, limit capex and pay low wages that only allows them to hire incompetent developers, nothing will change.

The few good minds they have/had are running out of the door as is the building was on fire.

The decline is very obvious and there is no Steve Jobs coming back to save the ship unfortunately this time around.

 

[Runaway Train]

Yes, tell Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia and all the ecosystem of companies who provide cloud services and rent huge data centres what b_ll sh_t it is.

The cloud is not BS, the « hype » most definitely is. That’s the crux of the matter. in 2000 + literally everyone and their grandmother « had to have » cloud in their leave behinds and web blurb. Most of those ended up in the dustbin of history. Same for AI. It’s real but the spin doctors and marketing geniuses are just parroting what happens to be today’s must have message. Most people don’t know what machine learning is so companies can blah blah about it. I had to present slides to clients with this nonsense on them, even though I didn’t believe it. That was B_ll Sh_t. Apple should just stick to what they do best. They’ll get there in due time with an AI or AI-like offer that’s right for theirs customers.

 

[xalea]

"Craig Federighi have reportedly been reluctant to acquire AI startups, believing that Apple can build its own AI technology in-house."

But they haven't. lol

Meanwhile, Google is building its own nuclear power plant to power Gemini.

 

[CEmajr]

At this point they can just shift the Google search contract to Google Gemini for AI. Apple won't be able to catch up in that space on their own.

 

[attohs]

Which is even further away from what Apple does. Apple doesn't make the machine that makes the machine - they outsource all of that to Foxconn in China.

Apple spends a ton of R&D on robotics.

 

[CyberGene]

I jumped on Perplexity mainly because I snagged a free Perplexity Pro account when I signed up for Revolut Premium—it was like a dream come true! I’ve totally ditched DuckDuckGo (or Google, or whatever search engine you’re into). The deep research feature in the Pro account is seriously amazing.

 

[macmac30]

consider if Apple had bought Tesla 5-6 years ago, making Tim Elon's boss 🤯 especially if Elon was let go entirely . consider how differently the current timeline would of played out -

We’d all be driving Tesapples, and experiencing Siri, in all of its glory: “Siri, take me to the grocery store”…”I turned off your bedroom lights, for more info, please view your iPhone…”

 

[kiranmk2]

This comment of yours has no relation with what I was replying to, which is about calling the "cloud" a b_ll sh_t.

The cloud is not a "bubble", it's not a speculation based on projected gains. Cloud computing services are well-established, constantly growing and replacing on-premise deployments at pace. They are used by large and small companies alike, which depend on them. Amazon, Microsoft and Google are making profits from the "cloud", so it's not a b_llsh_t as stated in the previous comment.



So it's an "if" or a "when"? In the long run, every invention will eventually be replaced by a new one. If everything is a "bubble" because eventually will end, then the word "bubble" means nothing.

Note that the most recent and infamous "bubble" (the dot-com bubble) actually realized and exceeded its expectations. Sure, there were a lot of losers when it bursted, but other survived and recovered, new players emerged and thrived in the "dot-com economy".

In other words, betting that Internet was becoming one of the most important technological revolutions was the right thing to do. Forecasting who would have gained from it, deciding where to invest money and getting the timeline right is entirely another thing, much more difficult.

The cloud is actually facing a bit of a backlash - there's a growing trend in the commercial organisations to decloud their data

The cloud backlash has begun: Why big data is pulling compute back on premises | TechCrunch

Cloud-first strategies may be hitting the limits of their efficacy, and in many cases, ROIs are diminishing, triggering a major cloud backlash.

techcrunch.com

Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation

Major organizations like 37signals and GEICO highlight the economic and strategic reasons to reconsider cloud infrastructure.

thenewstack.io

Why some companies are backing away from the public cloud

Many business leaders are taking a clear-eyed view of the cloud's benefits and drawbacks. Technical debt may be at the root of many repatriation decisions.

www.zdnet.com

It's if/when because I don't know how the bubble is going to end. AI is definitely in a hype cycle and is at the point where everyone is throwing money at it (at Nvidia to provide GPU hardware and at the new generation of AI startups). I have no doubt that things will not keep increasing - either because some companies will fail if their products get outcompeted, AI hits a brickwall (or progress slows dramatically), the market shifts to focus on doing the same level of AI in a more efficient manner, or people start to doubt that AI is as world changing as it was promised. However, whether it is a full on bubble burst, throwing the industry into the drough of disillusionment, or just tapering off to a steady state is not clear yet. I'm not an expert in the field, but looking around, I think the ridiculous power demands (an Nvidia B100 board draws 1000 W and requires liquid cooling), the growing decrying of "AI slop" appearing and AI progress seeming to slow with the ambivalent reaction to GPT5 is going to cause public hype to falter, even if the current level of AI will change industry/commercial practices forever.

 

[shansoft]

I do not understand why would anyone bother with Perplexity? That company is heavily overvalued and provides no benefits or innovation to the existing technology, especially you can easily have a LLM+Web Search on your computer with only a few click. Langflow + Qwen3 + DDG MCP get you the entire setup for free. Some 1 click installer like Ollama or LM Studio even includes the search function within now as well. Not to mention with Perpexlity's recent bad business practice by ignoring the robots.txt on purpose.

Pretty much the company worth nothing to begin with.

 

[GeezGlitch]

Eddie is probably sitting there with Tim Apple, saying, "IF only you had listened to me and bought Netflix and Tesla... instead, we wasted billions in R&D trying to make a car and Apple TV is nowhere near what Netflix is."

 

[Corefile]

Sounds like they’re scrambling rather than strategising.

This is what I was thinking. Desperation and panic when you don't know what to do but must be seen to be doing something. It's something that Apple has been excelling at recently.

 

[neotint]

Glad they're not going with Perplexity, it's fancy betaware with bad design, riddled with false low quality and nerfed information parsing. Anyone who's scratched the surface and compared it to other options knows how bad it is. Kagi would be a far better choice in terms of practical quality in finding things, but they're indie, and even their results' citations are occasionally wrong but not as bad as Perplexity. Apple really needs to find tech and teams that are more aligned with them ethically and in terms of design quality.

 

[aapl owner]

Seems like Tim needs to listen to Eddie.

 

[Telemakhos]

they both boil down to the same thing; apple being reluctant to spend and allocate money , in spite of ai being the future AND the hottest thing rn .

Apple has a well-known position paper on this: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking

Apple does not think that LLMs or LRMs are the future of AI, because they don't actually think. Models that are being called "AI" today are not good, but resemble what is good well enough to fool some people. Apple seems to believe that they cannot fool enough people to be worth risking Apple's reputation. If you're Apple, and you make a deal with an "AI" company to use their LLM, and it starts telling your users something obviously wrong, then Apple loses reputation. Apple doesn't like being wrong: it would rather be a good hardware company than be wrong.

 

[LoveToMacRumors]

Development Timelines & Costs​

Company	Start Year	Launch / End Year	Development Duration	Estimated Development Cost
Xiaomi	2021	SU7 launch March 2024	~3 years	Over 10 billion yuan (~US $1.4 billion) on R&D alone; part of a planned 10-year EV investment totalling US $10 billion AutoTech NewsWikipedia+1Financial Times
Apple	~2014	Project Titan canceled February 2024	~10 years	Estimated US $10 billion spent over the decade; additional external costs (chips, sensors, software teams) added hundreds of millions more per year AppleInsiderWikipediaMacDailyNewsMotor1.comSupercar BlondieThe Guardian

 

[ZipZilla]

Apple has a history of wasting billions developing their own version of something and falling short. At this point, Siri is embarrassing. Just license Gemini and ship a working Siri.

 

[Macaholic868]

Didn’t buy Tesla. When is the Apple car’s release date? What’s that? It’s been canceled and they wasted billions? Didn’t buy Netflix. How many billions did AppleTV+ lose last year? Won’t buy any third party AI companies? I guess in-house Siri is awesome. It’s so awesome they are actively pursuing to license technology from OpenAI or Google because their in-house version of Siri blows and Siri has always blown with the exception of the first year or two when they first acquired the company that made the Siri app and integrated it into the OS. Back when they actually did acquisitions for gardening products. Under Steve Jobs.

Noticing a pattern here? They can’t innovate and are too cheap to acquire a company that has what they need so their C-Level executive compensation can stay as high as possible to the detriment of medium term and long term profitability because they don’t want to book the costs of an acquisition resulting in a quarter or two of less than stellar results meaning their pay checks might take a slight cut.

I used to think Cook was good for the company. He had been for shareholders but at some point their market cap will take a huge hit when people no longer upgrade their iPhones on a regular basis. Why buy an iPhone 17 if you have a 15 Pro? For Apple Intelligence? LOL. Now if they ever made Siri into a decent chat bot capable of actually doing things in the Apple Apps or in 3rd party apps with parenting with a company that doesn’t respect your privacy then I’d upgrade immediately. But they refuse to do it and would rather parter with a provider then spend billions on an acquisition so they could actually catch up with them with in-house technology at some point.

Innovation at Apple appears to be dead. They haven’t created a decent new product since the Apple Watch. That’s been a decade now. AI is where it’s at in the short term, AR glasses is where it’s at medium / long term but for smart AR glasses to function well the chat bot interface you will have to use to interact with it better be able to do what you ask it to do and Siri can’t, so good luck with “Apple Glasses”. Google is best positioned for the AI and the hardware but Meta has a head start in the hardware department as they have “smart glasses” today and have st least shown their next generation product in that category. Google won’t be far behind, and their AI engine to power it all will be the key to driving sales.

Meanwhile Tim Cook will be breaking wind and touting 5 year old tech (folding smart phones) as some new innovation that you have to spend $2,500 or more to get. Thanks, but no thanks.

Apple is out of gas under Tim Cook and by the time the board has to face reality he’ll be retiring to a golden parachute and so will most of the board members. Shareholders who don’t sell will be left holding the bag.

Apple has a few more years of profits before their lack of innovation starts hurting sales, which will be when Apple is seen as over-priced, expensive garbage and is no longer regarded as a status symbol. That’s coming if they can’t innovate in the AI space in the short term leading to AR glasses in the medium or long term.

 

[Tagbert]

consider if Apple had bought Tesla 5-6 years ago, making Tim Elon's boss 🤯 especially if Elon was let go entirely . consider how differently the current timeline would of played out -

More likely that Elon would have gained too much control at Apple and totally effed that up, too.