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Comment by fakedang | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Not sure if Apple is able to pull off AI without spending billions.

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.

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.

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

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