PlayAI Purchase by Meta, Signaling M&A Not Slowing

AI Acquisition and Talent War - Meta's acquisition of Play AI signals a push into multimodal Large Language Models (LLM), acquiring both a team and models, unlike typical acqui-hires [16] - The AI sector is experiencing a talent war among private AI frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic [4] - Teams with research scientists, research engineering, and product engineering capabilities are highly sought after, leading to continuous acquisition hunts [5] Generative Media and Multimodality - Multimodal labs, incorporating video, audio, and images, are becoming increasingly important in AI development [6] - Generative media models, including video and image generation, are expected to have a significant societal and economic impact [6] - The ability to create generative media is crucial for portfolio companies [7] Perplexity and AI-Driven Search - Perplexity has established itself in the AI search space, attracting potential M&A interest [8] - Perplexity is evolving from providing answers to enabling actions through its new comet browser [10] - Perplexity's browser integrates knowledge, answers, and action-taking capabilities, allowing users to create Spotify playlists or research Robinhood portfolios [10] Data Centers and Hyperscalers - Investment in data centers is on the rise, with major hyperscalers like Amazon (Azure), Google (GCP), and Oracle expanding their data center networks [2] - Meta has one of the largest data center networks and is expected to be the largest buyer of GPUs over the next 18 months [3]