Sherwood News

Apple is behind in AI — maybe it can buy its way to the top?

Hey Siri, ask Perplexity whether this is a good idea.

6/23/25 10:21AM

Apple hasn’t taken AI as seriously as some of its peers, and now, it seems that the company’s top brass are considering writing a very large check to catch up in the space.

Though the company is yet to formally discuss a deal with Perplexity, some of Apple’s top decision-makers, including head of mergers and acquisitions Adrian Perica and Services chief Eddy Cue, have reportedly held internal discussions about making a bid for search engine Perplexity AI, according to Bloomberg News on Friday.

The consideration comes as the tech giant awaits the final ruling for Google’s antitrust trial, which will decide if Apple’s long-standing search partnership with Google — which was revealed to be worth $20 billion in 2022 — will be allowed to continue in any form.

Amid a recent series of Apple Intelligence failures and delays in Siri upgrades, the company is clearly keen to explore all options on the table, and Perplexity, which received 780 million queries in May, is growing at light speed. (It’s also racking up lawsuits at a pretty remarkable clip.)

But any potential deal would represent a major change to Apple’s M&A strategy. Unlike some of its more acquisitive peers, like Alphabet, Apple has typically preferred to make smaller acquisitions and grow products and teams organically. The company has made only three publicly reported transactions worth more than a billion dollars in its history.

With Perplexity recently completing a funding round that valued it at $14 billion — a figure that would likely only be a floor for any price negotiations — Apple would have to be willing to splurge. Of course, if any company can afford it, it’s Apple: the iPhone maker spent nearly $50 billion buying back its own stock over the past two quarters.

Note: A previous version of this article stated that Apple had spent nearly $50 billion buying back its own stock in the last quarter. This has been corrected. We regret the error.

Jon Keegan

11h

Altman: We do “weird” things like building massive data centers so there will be “universal prosperity”

OpenAI’s CEO spelled out the company’s principles for AGI in a blog post.

12th Breakthrough Prize Ceremony - Arrivals

Rani Molla

Let Tim Cook

16h

Apple is on its way to becoming the biggest smartphone seller in China

The memory crunch has made iPhones a more popular alternative as competitors’ prices rise.

Jon Keegan17h

Microsoft loses exclusive access to OpenAI’s models and tools while ending revenue-sharing deal with ChatGPT maker

Microsoft shares dropped as it announced a revised agreement with OpenAI.

The amended agreement ends revenue-sharing payments from Microsoft to OpenAI, and also ends Microsoft’s exclusive access to OpenAI’s intellectual property (i.e. models and products).

OpenAI’s revenue sharing with Microsoft will end in 2030, is subject to a total cap, and is no longer dependent on its achieving artificial general intelligence.

Amazon, a likely beneficiary of this lack of exclusivity, initially popped on the news but erased those gains.

This is a developing story.

The next phase of the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership - The Official Microsoft Blog

Rani Molla18h

China just blew up one of Meta’s key AI bets

China has ordered Meta to unwind its $2 billion acquisition of Manus, a Chinese startup (since relocated to Singapore) that makes AI agents and was central to Meta’s push to turn its massive AI investments into a real business. The move is part of the Chinese government’s effort to stop US firms from gaining access to Chinese talent and intellectual property, as Washington continues to restrict sales of advanced AI chips to Chinese companies.

Unlike its tech peers, which can sell AI through cloud services, Meta mainly uses AI to improve its existing ad business rather than as a stand-alone revenue driver. The decision strips away one of Meta’s clearest paths to monetizing AI — leaving it spending like a hyperscaler, without a hyperscaler business model.

China blocks Meta's $2 billion acquisition of AI startup Manus

Jon Keegan4/24/26

DeepSeek releases new V4 series models highlighting efficiency and long context

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has released a major new version of its eponymous open-source AI models that are nipping at the heels of leading frontier models in some areas.

The most significant DeepSeek-V4 Pro and DeepSeek-V4 Flash both have a 1 million-token context — the amount of information the model can actively work with in a single session — which is a crucial feature for complex, long-running coding tasks.

DeepSeek rebuilt how the models process information under the hood, making them substantially more efficient — and that efficiency is what makes the large context window actually usable.

Also, the new models’ coding skills have closed the gap with the major frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.

The authors of the model acknowledge some of V4’s shortcomings, such as its lower scores on reasoning benchmarks, saying that V4 “trails state-of-the-art frontier models by approximately 3 to 6 months.”

As open-weight models, V4 can be run on any user’s own hardware, making the V4 models among the top-performing open-source models out there. V4’s large context and token efficiency are especially significant among open-source models.

But like with earlier DeepSeek models, don’t ask it about Tiananmen Square.

DeepSeek Unveils Flagship AI Model a Year After Breakthrough