On Tuesday, The Information reported, citing sources familiar with the matter, that Apple has engaged in internal discussions regarding the potential acquisition of French AI startup Mistral and Perplexity. Apple, widely regarded as having missed the generative AI revolution, has fallen significantly behind competitors in integrating AI features into its devices.
Reuters:
Perplexity, which is backed by Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, said it is unaware of any merger conversations including the company, aside from its own acquisitions.
Apple and Mistral did not immediately respond to Reuters‘ requests for comment.
Mistral, backed by Nvidia, was valued at more than $6 billion after its Series B funding round last year and the Financial Times reported this month that the French company was in talks to raise $1 billion at a valuation of $10 billion.
Executives at the iPhone maker have held internal talks about potentially bidding for Perplexity, Bloomberg News reported earlier this year.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s CEO blew it on both Netflix and Tesla, so the odds of him summoning up the courage to pull the trigger on a timely major acquisition (of any sort), despite sitting on a cash mountain of $133 billion, are slim.
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Consider XAI built one of the leading platforms in less then 2 years. They actually built one of the world’s largest superclusters “ Colossus” in 128 days. Apple can buy all the AI they want but without leadership to guide them they will quickly fall behind or create a subpar experience. Just look at Apple Siri for Apple’s track record with current leadership. I remember a few years back when AI first taking off and Tim said Apple will get into AI when it’s less “dangerous”. What he meant was Apple will get into AI when we can fully sterilize and control is use in regards to social governance. Just look at the hot mess culture blandness of Apple TV+. Apple lacks the vision and instincts to lead anything but supply chain operations.
I’d like someone to explain to me why Apple can’t make its own GPU’s. Could that be a play? Why do they need NVIDIA if they can press their own silicon?
Apple doesn’t press any silicon; they design custom chips — and those chips rely on licensed ARM architecture as the foundation.
Apple’s custom chips do have GPUs. However, unlike NVIDIA, Apple prioritizes power efficiency over performance. Apple’s GPUs fall far short of NVIDIA’s in terms of performance.