Apple's Possible Acquisitions in the AI Sector
Rumors have been circulating for a few days about a possible acquisition of Perplexity AI. According to Mark Gurman, a well-known Bloomberg journalist, Apple could abandon its conservative approach and acquire a startup to reduce the distance from the competition in the artificial intelligence sector.
Perplexity AI, Mistral, Cohere and other startupsApple's largest acquisition was Beats ($3 billion in 2014), which boosted hardware sales. Smaller acquisitions, such as Intel's modem division ($1 billion), were not very profitable.
Over the years, shareholders have suggested major acquisitions, including Netflix, Tesla, and Spotify . The topic has now returned to the forefront because Apple is failing to develop AI technologies on par with its competitors. ChatGPT is used for some features. According to Gurman, the Cupertino company should take a more aggressive approach, considering it has over $130 billion available.
OpenAI is over budget, as it is valued at $300 billion. Anthropic ($60 billion) is more accessible, but receives funding from Amazon and Google. The most likely acquisition is Perplexity AI for several reasons: it costs only $14 billion, has only 250 employees, develops excellent AI models, and would allow its AI search engine to be integrated into Safari, Siri, and Spotlight.
Other potential low-cost acquisitions include Mistral AI, Cohere, Sierra AI, and Databricks . Mistral AI, in particular, develops efficient and fast models that can run on-device. Apple’s current on-device model has only 3 billion parameters, while its cloud-based model has 33 billion, a size much smaller than OpenAI and Google’s models.
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