Apple executives have held internal talks about doubtlessly bidding for synthetic intelligence startup Perplexity, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing folks with information of the matter.
The discussions are at an early stage and should not result in a proposal, the report mentioned, including that the tech behemoth’s executives haven’t mentioned a bid with Perplexity’s administration.
Apple and Perplexity didn’t instantly reply to Reuters’ requests for remark.
Big tech firms are doubling down investments to reinforce AI capabilities and assist rising demand for AI-powered companies to keep up aggressive management within the quickly evolving tech panorama.
Bloomberg News reported earlier on Friday that Meta Platforms tried to purchase Perplexity earlier this yr.
Meta introduced a $14.8 billion funding in Scale AI final week and employed Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang to guide its new superintelligence unit.
Adrian Perica, Apple’s head of mergers and acquisitions, has weighed the thought with companies chief Eddy Cue and high AI decision-makers, as per the report.
The iPhone maker reportedly plans to combine AI-driven search capabilities- resembling Perplexity AI- into its Safari browser, doubtlessly transferring away from its longstanding partnership with Alphabet’s Google.
Banning Google from paying firms to be the default search engine is among the many treatments that the U.S. Justice Department has proposed to interrupt up its dominance in on-line search.
While conventional engines like google resembling Google nonetheless dominate world market share, AI-powered search choices together with Perplexity and ChatGPT are quickly gaining prominence this yr and seeing rising consumer adoption, particularly amongst youthful generations.
Perplexity not too long ago accomplished a funding spherical that valued it at $14 billion, in accordance with the Bloomberg News report on Friday. A deal near that worth could be the biggest acquisition for Apple until date.
The Nvidia-backed startup supplies synthetic intelligence search instruments that ship info summaries to customers, just like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
