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.
Wrapper companies are winning these days because using the AI services directly is literally dumb, due to poor privacy and explicitly anticompetitive legal terms. Using wrappers lets you isolate yourself from the noncompetes, ensure no model training on your content, and enjoy a significantly better user experience.
Maybe one day OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic will wake up to the fact their lame privacy takes (e.g.
- OpenAI hiding the opt out of model training for even when other people use your custom GPTs
- Gemini’s implicit human review of every conversation, Gemini breaking chat history when you opt out of brain rape,
- Anthropic’s impossible-to-logically-satisfy customer noncompete giving them an excuse to read everyone’s chats to verify they aren’t competing
) and customer noncompetes are retarded,
but until that happens, wrappers are crushing them and riding a tremendous wave of innovation without needing to waste money on the most expensive part which is training
Wrappers absolutely have value. The same as software on the OS has value. The same as workflow SaaS has value.
I do not follow your point on privacy. AFAIK all tokens that perplexity sends to the foundation model APIs are stored by those companies. For example OpenAI is under court order to store everything. Is your point that because perplexity can trim off the metadata of who their customer is, the body of the content is harder to identify?
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.
can only hope that if the buy happens, that they keep that 'free version' (aka not logged in mode) 1:1 as it is today, and competitive (or better) than others. otherwise i fear the big #RIP and soon we'll be using company level accounts to these LLMs.
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.
They could have at least built a better more useful Siri. The thing is outdated, so 10 years ago. People could have used it to call snd text from the car or search the Internet in a meaningful way.
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.
I don't think Apple has ever taken risks on new software.
MCP servers are very new, they may be starting to looking into it now (when it's clear that they are here to stay for a while and not just a buzz), no way they did it immediately
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.
Since it's Apple talking to Apple (and other iOS apps) it doesn't actually have to be MCP and they already have SiriKit. So I mean they already did build it in a weekend. SiriKit has broadly the same features as MCP exposing content (resources) and actions (tools) so their interest in Perplexity has got to be something else.
It's weird that Apple never opened it up to arbitrary tools. I guess until "Apple Intelligence" they couldn't support arbitrary tools.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250621062348/https://www.bloom...
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.
Wrapper companies are winning these days because using the AI services directly is literally dumb, due to poor privacy and explicitly anticompetitive legal terms. Using wrappers lets you isolate yourself from the noncompetes, ensure no model training on your content, and enjoy a significantly better user experience.
Maybe one day OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic will wake up to the fact their lame privacy takes (e.g.
- OpenAI hiding the opt out of model training for even when other people use your custom GPTs
- Gemini’s implicit human review of every conversation, Gemini breaking chat history when you opt out of brain rape,
- Anthropic’s impossible-to-logically-satisfy customer noncompete giving them an excuse to read everyone’s chats to verify they aren’t competing
) and customer noncompetes are retarded,
but until that happens, wrappers are crushing them and riding a tremendous wave of innovation without needing to waste money on the most expensive part which is training
Wrappers absolutely have value. The same as software on the OS has value. The same as workflow SaaS has value.
I do not follow your point on privacy. AFAIK all tokens that perplexity sends to the foundation model APIs are stored by those companies. For example OpenAI is under court order to store everything. Is your point that because perplexity can trim off the metadata of who their customer is, the body of the content is harder to identify?
I assume they have agreeable contracts with LLM vendors it may be difficult for Apple to obtain by other means.
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.
can only hope that if the buy happens, that they keep that 'free version' (aka not logged in mode) 1:1 as it is today, and competitive (or better) than others. otherwise i fear the big #RIP and soon we'll be using company level accounts to these LLMs.
i do fear a crappier outcome if they sell out
Apple took away DarkSky, no reason to think they wouldn't also do this to Perplexity.
M$ had all the means at their disposal to build such a tool but failed.
https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2025/03/23/ep-419
They spoke through the options back in March.
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.
They could have at least built a better more useful Siri. The thing is outdated, so 10 years ago. People could have used it to call snd text from the car or search the Internet in a meaningful way.
Apple has developed language models with the intention of doing this. It's the leadership not the tech.
As an acquihire? I'm not clear what distinguishes perplexity/sonar from the others. Wouldn't Anthropic be a better horse right now?
Apple should absolutely acquire anthropic.
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.
That would be a very smart thing for Apple to do.
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
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.
I don't think Apple has ever taken risks on new software.
MCP servers are very new, they may be starting to looking into it now (when it's clear that they are here to stay for a while and not just a buzz), no way they did it immediately
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.
Since it's Apple talking to Apple (and other iOS apps) it doesn't actually have to be MCP and they already have SiriKit. So I mean they already did build it in a weekend. SiriKit has broadly the same features as MCP exposing content (resources) and actions (tools) so their interest in Perplexity has got to be something else.
It's weird that Apple never opened it up to arbitrary tools. I guess until "Apple Intelligence" they couldn't support arbitrary tools.
Not sure if Apple is able to pull off AI without spending billions.