Apple executives have held internal talks about buying Perplexity

by JumpCrisscross on 6/21/2025, 6:06:24 AM with 30 comments

  • by tempodox on 6/21/2025, 6:26:07 AM

    https://web.archive.org/web/20250621062348/https://www.bloom...

  • by cpldcpu on 6/21/2025, 11:20:59 AM

    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.

  • by Alifatisk on 6/21/2025, 11:28:27 AM

    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.

  • by msgodel on 6/22/2025, 1:15:26 AM

    Apple's ML team is very good, they do amazing things with very little. There's no shortage of tech or talent, there's a shortage of vision in the leadership. This won't solve that.

  • by ben30 on 6/21/2025, 7:13:42 AM

    https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2025/03/23/ep-419

    They spoke through the options back in March.

  • by jedisct1 on 6/22/2025, 9:25:23 AM

    That would be a very smart thing for Apple to do.

  • by readthenotes1 on 6/21/2025, 6:32:17 AM

    As an acquihire? I'm not clear what distinguishes perplexity/sonar from the others. Wouldn't Anthropic be a better horse right now?

  • by ksec on 6/21/2025, 7:20:56 AM

    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.

  • by fakedang on 6/21/2025, 9:45:41 AM

    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.