Will Apple announce intentions to acquire an AI company like Mistral or Perplexity to accelerate its AI capabilities? Resolution based on official announcements from Apple or acquired company confirming a beginning an acquisition.
Resolves positive even if blocked by regulators. Must be over $500 million
References:
Update 2025-07-02 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): An announced acquisition of a stake in an AI company will count for a YES resolution, provided the value of the stake is over $500M.
Update 2025-07-02 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): In response to a user question about “technically-not-an-acquisition” deals, the creator has confirmed a scenario that will resolve to YES:
Apple pays over $500M for a license to an AI company's technology.
AND Apple hires the CEO of that company.
This deal must be officially announced.
1,000
3.00Apple has less cash than it has at any time since 2015 and Perplexity is valued at 14Billion, which would be 4x bigger than Apple's biggest acquisition ever. Apple knows Siri is behind but they just replaced the Siri team lead. I think this market is way overcorrected on the Gurman report that Apple is considering buying Perplexity. I'm considering buying a Ski Doo but it's not going to happen.
@MatthiasPortzel I truly have no real knowledge of Apple or this situation other than a vague idea they're behind on AI, thanks for sharing!
4x bigger than Apple's biggest acquisition ever
Do we have any idea if Apple considers "being behind on AI" to be an critical risk to their long-term viability? If they just continue to be 'behind' indefinitely, maybe it doesn't really matter how big an acquisition would be.
2025 is a short timeframe for this market, but if they wait much longer than that, an acquisition would probably be too little, too late anyway. If they just changed the Siri leadership and the new leadership doesn't secure an acquisition within a few months, they probably aren't trying for it?
@Eliza Apple just released a paper showing that even the most advanced LLMs have serious problems with basic reasoning and long chain of thought work. So maybe they are making a strategic decision to stay out of the arms race.
@MatthiasPortzel Does the acquisition necessarily need to be paid in cash? Stock deals are thing I think. They can just create new shares.
@JimAusman that paper was... Not convincing. I enjoyed this response https://arxiv.org/html/2506.09250v1
Apple is, for all its faults, is still a product company at its core. They don't care about looking like they're leading an AI arms race. But they are in a huge pickle, because they promised AI Siri features at WWDC 2024 (over a year ago now) that they still haven't shipped. That's what Apple's panicking about.
So the question becomes does buying Perplexity or another large startup help them ship that feature? I don't think so. I suspect that the issues they're having are with product/engineering/implementation, not with the model quality itself.
But this is where I could be wrong—if they have everything built and the model quality is just bad then perhaps the new Siri team leadership will push to buy a company with better models and drop them in in time for iOS 19, exactly as @Eliza says.
My target for this is 20-30%; I think >50% is way too high.
@MatthiasPortzel Good points!
That also reminded me of another angle, not sure how to weight it:
Apple from what I understand is absolutely obsessed (over-reliant?) on "services" revenue. There seem to be various forces across the world pressing on them in ways that could harm the growth of their services revenue......Tacking on a brand new AI product at this time could be the boost they need.
Someone, somewhere in their org chart, is envisioning $20 or $50 or whatever a month from a zillion people sold an AI subscription as their key to a big promotion. It kinda seems like one of those things where they would give you a free tier and then big users would be expected to pay a subscription?
Still not quite clear if Apple would consider 'owning' such a model part of their core offerings, or if they only want something "good enough for handling basic stuff". Are there any markets on Apple adding a paid AI feature instead of just piggybacking off of other vendors?
@ookina_inu they announce they’ll acquire a stake worth over 500M in an ai company (like meta/scale ai), I’ll count that. I’m not sure what other kind of deal would be comparable.
@DavidFWatson I think the most salient aspect of these deals tends to be “acquirer hires the target’s CEO,” not “acquirer buys a big stake in target” (which sometimes doesn’t happen). My understanding is that there is a category of deal that goes like this:
- acquiring company hires the CEO and some other key people from the target company
- acquiring company pays something close to the valuation of the target company for a commercial license to their technology
- some of the money from above gets paid out to equity holders as a dividend, giving them their “exit”
- acquirer does not actually buy a stake in the company to avoid antitrust concerns and M&A scrutiny
- target company continues to exist with a new figurehead CEO and skeleton crew, but (depending on the nature of the transaction) may no longer be a de facto going concern
IIRC this is what happened with both (Microsoft, Inflection) and (Google, character.ai). I don’t believe either deal involved any large equity transactions.
@ookina_inu I think I’ll count it if they dump over 500M for a license and hire the CEO (and announce it)
Perplexity feels like it would be a surprising acquisition - are their models worth buying rather than just improving the LLM models apple has in-house?
Instinctively I would guess a partnership with a model provider seems more obvious, especially given the existing ChatGPT/openai partnership they have for Siri
@hectohenry I kinda had the feeling Apple was 'bad' at partnerships.
However, I can't really see that acquiring an AI company fixes their issues anyway. I would have guessed they would be close enough on overall scale of their AI systems and mainly missing the ways to glue their stuff together?
Apple is hopelessly behind in AI and from what I heard they were trying to make something in-house for a number of years. Maybe they are far enough behind now that an acquisition would make sense. My understanding is they have unbelievable amounts of money, could come in useful. I bought some Yes shares to follow along.
@DavidFWatson if you update the title to something that makes it more clear this resolves on an announcement, I will apply a boost.
@DavidFWatson alright, great. And the deal doesn't need to fully complete in 2025 because it resolves on the announcement, hopefully this has a low chance of unforeseen complications.