Today, we dig into the recent flurry of enterprise M&A for clues on who’s buying, why, and whether startups should stay the course or cash their checks.
Last week, we wrote about AI’s pre-product investment frenzy and the AI talent wars.
While the average knowledge worker isn’t commanding eight-digit salaries, the AI race is already changing hiring, firing, and the outlook for career trajectories:
- A Lightcast report discovered “Salaries for postings that mention AI skills are 28% higher than postings that do not, representing roughly $18,000 more per year.”
- Handshake research showed “The number of employers referencing ‘AI’ in job descriptions has surged by 400% over the past two years.”
- However, the same period saw at least 27,000 job cuts directly attributed to AI, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas
At the top end, the battle likewise continues, with Musk and Altman at it again: Elon declared Apple’s App Store is favoring ChatGPT (at the expense, of course, of Grok), while Sam is taking on Neuralink as the latest co-founder of Merge Labs, a new brain-to-computer interface startup focused far less on medical applications and far more on a sci-fi-esque vision of a human-AI symbiosis — one he described as a gradual merge, rather than a moment of singularity.
From changing job boards to warring boardrooms, how far are we willing to go to stay ahead?
Sky-high bids are one such way. Just this week, Perplexity placed a $34.5 billion all-cash offer for Google’s Chrome browser in an effort to beat out competition in AI-powered search. Timelines are collapsing, and it’s evident Big Tech can’t afford to build from scratch anymore.
This latest shopping spree can clue us into how the AI race will continue playing out. Today, we dig into the recent flurry of M&A to determine who’s buying, why, and whether startups should stay the course to scale on their own… or cash the checks?
—The Editors
