Apple's top brass is reportedly in discussions to buy out AI startup Perplexity to add to its own talent pool and help launch an AI-driven search engine, Bloomberg reports. Adrian Perica, Apple's M&A chief, has pitched the idea to SVP Eddy Cue and other AI leaders, but no formal offer has been made so far. Apple is also considering an alternative partnership rather than a total acquisition. Regardless of the route taken, though, the plan is to embed Perplexity's technology into Siri and Safari, with many seeing this as a preemptive step by Apple if regulators put an end to its lucrative Google search deal.
Thinking Machines Lab, a rather secretive AI research lab founded by ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, has recently bagged $2 billion in seed funding, with the round led by Andreessen Horowitz, reports The Financial Times. Despite being barely 6 months old, the startup is now valued at $10 billion and ready to "make AI systems more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable," though it remains unclear what exactly that entails. Murati was joined by many of her former co-workers at OpenAI, including TML co-founder John Schulman, following concerns about CEO Sam Altman's leadership in 2023.
Harvey AI, a generative AI legal-tech pioneer, has secured another $300 million in a Series E round at a $5 billion valuation, just four months after it hit the $3 billion mark and bringing its total money raised to $800 million. According to company CEO Winston Weinberg himself, the funds will fuel international expansion and support its customers beyond the 53 countries it currently operates in. Weinberg also highlighted "tons of product investments into supporting law firms and large global corporates," citing Verizon, the KKR investment fund, and major banks as examples of clients.
After its US-exclusive debut back in May, Google's experimental Q&A-like search tool, AI Mode, was launched in India earlier this week via the Search Labs opt-in. Powered by a custom Gemini 2.5 variant, AI Mode lets users ask multi-part queries in English that can then be followed up on for more refined results. India's rollout also includes voice and image search support, while early testers ask for 2-3x longer queries. With India's colossal 870 million internet users, Google's move likely looks to keep users from migrating to chat-based search tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Co-founder of Databricks and Perplexity, Andy Konwinski, is launching what he calls the Laude Institute with a personal first pledge of $100 million to back new and prospective AI researchers. Its first "flagship" grant, a roughly $3 million annual commitment for the next five years, will establish UC Berkeley's new AI Systems Lab under Ion Stoica, current director of the Sky Computing Lab, which is set to open in 2027. The Laude Institute will structure its funding into "Slingshots" and "Moonshots," the former for early-stage research grants and the latter for "long-horizon labs tackling species-level challenges."
