Welcome to the TechMeme right home for Monday, June 2nd, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today.

We know WWDC might be underwhelming this year, but to what degree?

Is Samsung about to pick perplexity as its horse in the AI race?

AI-based acquisition and wrap-ups continue to be the new hotness in VC investing,

and how DoorDash has quietly been killing it in the delivery space.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

Guess what a week from today is? It's WWDC next Monday. So what can we expect from Apple's

big event this year? Who do you think I'm going to turn to? Quoting Mark A. German,

people within the company believe that the conference may be a letdown from an AI standpoint.

Others familiar with the company's plan announcements worry they could make Apple's

shortcomings even more obvious. There are also signs the event will be smaller scale than the last two

WWDCs. The Vision Pro was announced in 2023 and Apple Intelligence was shown in 2024.

The company desires to make up for that next year at WWDC, 2026 when it hopes it can try to convince consumers

that it's an AI innovator. That's risky, though. Taking a gap year is hard to do when your

competitors are moving at light speed. The most significant AI announcement at WWDC will be

the opening of Apple's foundation models to third-party developers. This move will let app creators tap into the

company's on-device technology that it currently uses to handle lightweight tasks such as text

summarization. We're talking about large language models that have about three billion parameters,

a measure of their complexity and learning capacity, far less than the cloud-based ones used by

OpenAI and even Apple itself for its in-house

cloud-powered AI features. Developers will be able to use the foundation models to make custom app features,

marking an important but incremental step in Apple's AI journey. Sticking to the subject of AI,

...