AI Daily: Meta’s Zuckerberg looked to acquire Thinking Machines Lab

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

ACQUISITION: The researcher who declined Meta (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s offer of a $1.5B+ package over six years is Thinking Machines co-founder and ex-Meta staffer Andrew Tulloch, The Wall Street Journal’s Berber Jin and Keach Hagey report. Zuckerberg offered to acquire Thinking Machines Lab and then attempted to recruit its employees, according to the report, which adds that after Tulloch declined, none of his colleagues left.

BUY PONY AI: UBS analyst Paul Gong initiated coverage of Pony AI (PONY) with a Buy rating and $20 price target, which implies 53% upside from current levels. Pony is best positioned for China’s robotaxi commercialization, the analyst tells investors in a research note. The firm says Pony is the only robotaxi company to start commercial fee-charging and driverless operations in all four tier one cities in China. Following test drives, UBS is impressed with the company’s ability to handle complicated road situations without human help. It forecasts annual sales growth of 96% through 2030 for Pony.

NEW TEAM: Apple (AAPL) has formed an Answers, Knowledge, and Information team to work on ChatGPT-like search experiences, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports. The AKI team is led by Robby Walker, a senior director reporting to AI head John Giannandrea, Gurman writes, adding that Walker previously oversaw Siri but lost control of it after engineering delays.

PERPLEXITY STEALTH BEHAVIOR: Cloudflare (NET) said in a blog post that it is observing stealth crawling behavior from Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine. “Although Perplexity initially crawls from their declared user agent, when they are presented with a network block, they appear to obscure their crawling identity in an attempt to circumvent the website’s preferences,” the blog post reads. “We see continued evidence that Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing their source ASNs to hide their crawling activity, as well as ignoring – or sometimes failing to even fetch – robots.txt files. The Internet as we have known it for the past three decades is rapidly changing, but one thing remains constant: it is built on trust. There are clear preferences that crawlers should be transparent, serve a clear purpose, perform a specific activity, and, most importantly, follow website directives and preferences. Based on Perplexity’s observed behavior, which is incompatible with those preferences, we have de-listed them as a verified bot and added heuristics to our managed rules that block this stealth crawling.”