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.
I thought the snark was rather the hallmark, but i'll take it...
But, yes, they are a search engine. However it seems that all the other frontier LLM companies easily copied this as a feature, so one has to wonder which part is really differentiating.
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.
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.
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.
I hate to sound like one of those “I could build it in a weekend” types, but I really don’t get why Apple doesn’t just make/buy/license a decent general purpose multimodal LLM and then just create MCP servers for all their various integrations. Hey Siri, turn on the lights -> HomeKit MCP. Hey Siri, what’s the weather -> darksky MCP, and etc. Seems like most of the pieces are there already and they just need to glue it together in a way that works with their risk tolerance profile.
It could be the fact that Apple loves having its own standards, but when MCP came around, they realized how much they fucked up because of compatibility issues (must have been a PITA cost to rewrite Siri to adopt the MCP standards), so now they're deciding to acquire Perplexity and rebrand it as Siri 2.0.
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.
No its not a wrapper. It's a search engine. HN audience again shows how far behind the curve they are when it comes to actual new technology.
I thought the snark was rather the hallmark, but i'll take it...
But, yes, they are a search engine. However it seems that all the other frontier LLM companies easily copied this as a feature, so one has to wonder which part is really differentiating.
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.
https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2025/03/23/ep-419
They spoke through the options back in March.
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.
Seems like better value than ScaleAI then
https://web.archive.org/web/20250621062348/https://www.bloom...
As an acquihire? I'm not clear what distinguishes perplexity/sonar from the others. Wouldn't Anthropic be a better horse right now?
Isn’t Anthropic owned by Amazon? They likely won’t want to sell their horse in the AI race
Also Anthropic is on a roll at the moment, Apple would just kill it
> Isn’t Anthropic owned by Amazon?
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...
For starters, it's collaborative lol. Compared to Altman trying to pull a fast one on Nadella.
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.
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.
I hate to sound like one of those “I could build it in a weekend” types, but I really don’t get why Apple doesn’t just make/buy/license a decent general purpose multimodal LLM and then just create MCP servers for all their various integrations. Hey Siri, turn on the lights -> HomeKit MCP. Hey Siri, what’s the weather -> darksky MCP, and etc. Seems like most of the pieces are there already and they just need to glue it together in a way that works with their risk tolerance profile.
It could be the fact that Apple loves having its own standards, but when MCP came around, they realized how much they fucked up because of compatibility issues (must have been a PITA cost to rewrite Siri to adopt the MCP standards), so now they're deciding to acquire Perplexity and rebrand it as Siri 2.0.
Not sure if Apple is able to pull off AI without spending billions.