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.