PLUS: Anthropic's massive $61.5B valuation
Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The smartphone revolution is entering its next phase — and T-Mobile's parent company is leading the charge.
With a new (Perplexity-powered!) phone that puts AI front and center, is this the mainstream device that could finally challenge the mobile status quo?
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Telekom’s Perplexity-powered 'AI Phone'
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Anthropic’s $3.5B raise at $61.5B valuation
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Speeding up research processes with AI
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Microsoft’s new healthcare AI assistant
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4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities
DEUTSCHE TELEKOM & PERPLEXITY
Image source: Deutsche Telekom
The Rundown: T-Mobile's parent company, Deutsche Telekom, just announced the development of an "AI Phone" in partnership with Perplexity, marking one of the first major carrier-led initiatives to build a smartphone optimized for AI experiences.
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The device will feature Perplexity Assistant as its centerpiece, accessible directly from the lock screen — eliminating the need to navigate between apps.
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Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas described the partnership as taking their tech from an “answer machine to an action machine" that can handle daily tasks.
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The phone will also integrate AI partners like Google Cloud AI for real-time translation, ElevenLabs for podcast creation, and Picsart for avatar generation.
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The device is slated for release later this year with an expected price under $1k, with DT also offering an app version of its Magenta AI starting this summer.
Why it matters: While tech giants have just begun to infuse AI into current phones (with mixed results), this feels like the first step toward shifting mobile experiences from app-centric interfaces to more proactive AI-powered assistants. It’s also a big win for Perplexity, which continues to establish a foothold in every area of the AI boom.
TOGETHER WITH RECALL
The Rundown: Recall is your own personal AI encyclopedia — helping you transform scattered content into an interconnected knowledge base that grows smarter the more you use it.
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High-quality content summaries
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Automatic categorization and smart linking
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Personalized review schedules
Also launching this month: Augmented Browsing, which surfaces related content from your knowledge base as you browse — turning stored knowledge into active intelligence.
ANTHROPIC
The Rundown: Mere days after releasing Claude 3.7 Sonnet with hybrid reasoning, Anthropic closed a massive $3.5B Series E funding round—tripling its valuation to $61.5B and solidifying its position as a leading competitor to OpenAI.
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The investment has been led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Salesorce Ventures, Cisco, Fidelity, Jane Street, and others.
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Anthropic said the funds will help expand computing resources for developing models, strengthen AI safety research, and accelerate international expansion.
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The company recently debuted Claude 3.7 Sonnet as its ‘most intelligent model to date,’ alongside a Claude Code agentic coding tool.
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The model will also help power Alexa+, Amazon’s upgraded voice assistant unveiled last week. Amazon previously invested $8B in Anthropic.
Why it matters: Anthropic was quiet for a stretch, but the floodgates are now open for both new models and dollars. This massive valuation shows that despite the panic that set over DeepSeek, money is still flowing heavily into top AI startups, with the big four — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI — still going unwavered.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Grok's DeepSearch feature to scan hundreds of websites and uncover the latest scientific breakthroughs or research frontiers in minutes.
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Access DeepSearch on Grok's platform (currently free).
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Craft a query using a structured format covering key aspects of emerging research in your industry (like breakthroughs or experimental technologies).
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Review the report and refine your exploration by requesting technical details about specific innovations or comparing different research approaches.
Pro tip: You can also ask DeepSearch to identify under-explored research areas within your field. The Rundown University members can access the top prompts here.
PRESENTED BY CONVEYOR
The Rundown: Meet Phil — Conveyor’s AI agent that automates your proposal process. From generating near-flawless responses to coordinating multiple teams, Phil helps you secure more wins with less hassle.
Phil, the AI agent for RFPs, can do all of this autonomously:
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Generate 95% accurate AI answers to proposals
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Maintain your source material and conduct RFP research
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Organize your project, collaborate with other teams, and update systems
MICROSOFT
The Rundown: Microsoft just introduced Dragon Copilot, a new voice-activated AI assistant that combines dictation capabilities with ambient listening to streamline clinical documentation and automate tasks for healthcare professionals.
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The system merges Microsoft’s Dragon Medical One voice dictation with DAX Copilot's listening features into a single assistant for clinical workflows.
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The assistant automatically generates documentation like clinical notes and referral letters while providing access to trusted medical information.
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Early testing shows clinicians save approximately five minutes per patient encounter and report reduced feelings of burnout and fatigue.
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The assistant will launch in the U.S. and Canada in May 2025, with availability via desktop, browser, or mobile app. More regions to follow soon.
Why it matters: Administrative burden is a massive challenge in healthcare and one that is ripe for AI to handle. Microsoft, Google, and other competitors are churning out AI tools that are quickly reshaping all aspects of medicine — from the treatments themselves to overall patient care and administration.
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🔎 ARI - A deep research agent for generating professional reports in minutes
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🤖 Copilot - Microsoft’s AI assistant, now available via MacOS
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👁️ SmolVLM2 - HuggingFace’s tiny multimodal models for video understanding
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🎧 Findaway Voices by Spotify - Create AI audiobooks and publish to Spotify
Chipmaking giant TSMC announced an additional $100B investment in the U.S., bringing its total commitment to $165B for five new plants in Arizona.
The latest version of Grok-3 moved to the top of the LM Arena leaderboard, dethroning GPT 4.5-Preview just hours after the OpenAI model took the No. 1 spot.
Stability AI partnered with Arm to deliver its Stable Audio Open on smartphones, achieving 30x faster on-device audio generation—without using the internet.
Google introduced Data Science Agent in its Colab coding environment, a tool that creates complete, working notebooks to automate data analysis tasks.
Podcastle unveiled Asyncflow v1.0, a text-to-speech AI model with over 450 voices and developer API access — with voice cloning requiring just seconds of audio input.
Google announced that its Project Astra live video and screen-sharing capabilities will be rolling out to Gemini Advanced subscribers on Android this month.
Join our next workshop this Friday at 3:30 PM EST with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. You'll learn how to use the latest AI tools to take your coding to the next level, and how we're leveraging AI-powered coding at The Rundown.
Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team
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