According to The Information, Cue is championing the idea of gobbling up AI outfits like Mistral and Perplexity, in a bid to drag Job’s Mob’s offerings into the AI age without having to build everything from scratch.

The feeling is that Apple is so far behind in the AI race, the other runners have finished, had a shower and gone home for tea and biscuits. 

Part of Cue's problems is that Apple's software guru Craig Federighi is poo-pooing acquisitions in favour of rolling out Apple’s own slow-moving, over-designed code. So far he has not managed to get any software out the door that is close to what rivals are offering.

One target  mentioned is Mistral AI which is a French outfit that’s barely two years old but already banging on about open-weight models that are nippy, light and still somehow clever enough to do reasoning and coding. It markets itself as the EU’s answer to OpenAI and Anthropic, without the annoying US techbro baggage.

Other name is US-based Perplexity which is trying to unseat Google with a search engine that uses LLMs to dish up conversational answers with source links. This sort of approach is against Apple’s usual walled garden antics.

Problem is, these startups come with price tags Apple’s famously tight-fisted board isn’t used to seeing. Job’s Mob rarely splurges more than pocket change. Beats cost it $3 billion and Intel's modem business at $1 billion were massive outliers in a sea of hundred-million-dollar micro-deals.

Now there’s added pressure: if a US court pulls the plug on Apple’s cosy $20 billion deal with Alphabet that keeps Google as the default search engine, Cook might be forced to actually do something proactive. Losing that deal would leave a gaping, Google-sized hole in iPhones everywhere.