Telekom, Perplexity debut ‘AI Phone’

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The smartphone revolution is entering its next phase — and T-Mobile’s parent company is leading the charge.

With a brand new (Perplexity-powered!) phone that puts AI front and center, is that this the mainstream device that would finally challenge the mobile established order?

In today’s AI rundown:

• Telekom’s Perplexity-powered ‘AI Phone’

• Anthropic’s $3.5B raise at $61.5B valuation

• Speeding up research processes with AI

• Microsoft’s recent healthcare AI assistant

• 4 recent AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

DEUTSCHE TELEKOM & PERPLEXITY

📱 Telekom’s Perplexity-powered ‘AI Phone’

The Rundown: T-Mobile’s parent company, Deutsche Telekom, just announced the event of an “AI Phone” in partnership with Perplexity, marking one in all the primary major carrier-led initiatives to construct a smartphone optimized for AI experiences.

The small print:

• The device will feature Perplexity Assistant as its centerpiece, accessible directly from the lock screen — eliminating the necessity to navigate between apps.

• Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas described the partnership as taking their tech from an “answer machine to an motion machine” that may handle day by day tasks.

• The phone will even integrate AI partners like Google Cloud AI for real-time translation, ElevenLabs for podcast creation, and Picsart for avatar generation.

• The device is slated for release later this yr 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 appears like step one toward shifting mobile experiences from app-centric interfaces to more proactive AI-powered assistants. It’s also a giant win for Perplexity, which continues to ascertain a foothold in every area of the AI boom.

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Features include:

• High-quality content summaries

• Automatic categorization and smart linking

• Personalized review schedules

Also launching this month: Augmented Browsing, which surfaces related content out of your knowledge base as you browse — turning stored knowledge into energetic intelligence.

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ANTHROPIC

💰 Anthropic’s $3.5B raise at $61.5B valuation

The Rundown: Mere days after releasing Claude 3.7 Sonnet with hybrid reasoning, Anthropic closed an enormous $3.5B Series E funding round—tripling its valuation to $61.5B and solidifying its position as a number one competitor to OpenAI.

The small print:

• The investment has been led by Lightspeed Enterprise Partners, with participation from Salesorce Ventures, Cisco, Fidelity, Jane Street, and others.

• Anthropic said the funds will help expand computing resources for developing models, strengthen AI safety research, and speed up international expansion.

• The corporate recently debuted Claude 3.7 Sonnet as its ‘most intelligent model so far,’ alongside a Claude Code agentic coding tool.

• The model will even 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, however the floodgates are actually open for each recent models and dollars. This massive valuation shows that despite the panic that set over DeepSeek, money continues to be flowing heavily into top AI startups, with the massive 4 — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI — still going unwavered.

AI TRAINING

🔬 Speeding up research processes with AI

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn learn how to use Grok’s DeepSearch feature to scan a whole lot of internet sites and uncover the newest scientific breakthroughs or research frontiers in minutes.

Step-by-step:

1. Access DeepSearch on Grok’s platform (currently free).

2. Craft a question using a structured format covering key elements of emerging research in your industry (like breakthroughs or experimental technologies).

3. Review the report and refine your exploration by requesting technical details about specific innovations or comparing different research approaches.

Pro tip: You can too ask DeepSearch to discover under-explored research areas inside your field. The Rundown University members can access the highest prompts here.

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• Generate 95% accurate AI answers to proposals

• Maintain your source material and conduct RFP research

• Organize your project, collaborate with other teams, and update systems

Join for early access and upgrade your proposal process with Phil. 

MICROSOFT

🏥 Microsoft’s recent healthcare AI assistant

The Rundown: Microsoft just introduced Dragon Copilot, a brand new voice-activated AI assistant that mixes dictation capabilities with ambient listening to streamline clinical documentation and automate tasks for healthcare professionals.

The small print:

• The system merges Microsoft’s Dragon Medical One voice dictation with DAX Copilot’s listening features right into a single assistant for clinical workflows.

• The assistant robotically generates documentation like clinical notes and referral letters while providing access to trusted medical information.

• Early testing shows clinicians save roughly five minutes per patient encounter and report reduced feelings of burnout and fatigue.

• The assistant will launch within 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 an enormous challenge in healthcare and one which is ripe for AI to handle. Microsoft, Google, and other competitors are churning out AI tools which might be quickly reshaping all elements of medication — from the treatments themselves to overall patient care and administration.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🔎 ARI – A deep research agent for generating skilled reports in minutes

• 🤖 Copilot – Microsoft’s AI assistant, now available via MacOS

• 👁️ SmolVLM2 – HuggingFace’s tiny multimodal models for video understanding

• 🎧 Findaway Voices by Spotify – Create AI audiobooks and publish to Spotify

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🖥️ Deepmind – Software Engineer, GenAI

• 🚀 Shield AI – Principal Systems Engineering Lead

• 🎯 Descript – Product Marketing Director

• 🤝 Abridge – Partner Success Manager, Industrial Accounts

📰 Every part else in AI today

Chipmaking giant TSMC announced a further $100B investment within the U.S., bringing its total commitment to $165B for five recent plants in Arizona.

The most recent version of Grok-3 moved to the highest 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 web.

Google introduced Data Science Agent in its Colab coding environment, a tool that creates complete, working notebooks to automate data evaluation 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 can be rolling out to Gemini Advanced subscribers on Android this month.

COMMUNITY

🎥 Join our next live workshop

Join our next workshop this Friday at 3:30 PM EST with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. You will learn learn how to use the newest AI tools to take your coding to the following level, and the way we’re leveraging AI-powered coding at The Rundown.

RSVP here. Not a member? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team