Telekom & Perplexity Unveil AI Phone

Welcome to another edition of AI PlanetX.

Telekom partners with Perplexity for AI phone; Anthropic secures $3.5B; Apple’s AI efforts on the brink.

• Hottest AI News

• Top AI & SaaS Tools

• Top AI & Tech News

• Interesting Uses of AI: Prompt to improve GPT-4.5’s output

• AI Video Tutorial

• Complimentary AI Course of the Day: Making Friends with ML

Hottest AI News

Deutsche Telekom AG

Telekom Partners With Perplexity to Launch AI Phone Under $1K

At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Deutsche Telekom revealed a partnership with Perplexity to create an "AI Phone" priced under $1,000, marking a strategic move in the evolving AI smartphone market.

Details:

• Deutsche Telekom's "AI Phone" will launch in Europe in 2026, featuring Perplexity's AI on the lock screen, along with AI from Google Cloud, ElevenLabs, and Picsart

• The company will also introduce "Magenta AI," an assistant app for its 300 million customers on Android and iOS

• Perplexity, valued at $9 billion, aims to evolve from an "answer machine" to an "action machine," enabling tasks like booking flights, making reservations, and sending emails

This partnership helps Deutsche Telekom compete with Apple and Google, boosting its AI credibility after mentioning the "AI Phone" at last year's MWC.

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Anthropic

Anthropic Lands $3.5 Billion in Funding With Lightspeed Venture Partners

Anthropic has raised $3.5 billion in a Series E round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, valuing the AI startup at $61.5 billion. The funds will support the development of its Claude AI models.

Details:

• Anthropic will use the funds to improve AI systems, expand computing, research alignment, and grow globally, aiming for AI collaboration

• This follows the launch of Claude 3.7 Sonnet, a hybrid model simplifying user experience and supporting a unified AI approach

• With a $1B revenue run rate (up 30% in 2025), Anthropic faces $3B in development costs and is diversifying with new tools, subscriptions, agents, and global offices

Founded in 2021 by ex-OpenAI execs, Anthropic focuses on AI safety. It strengthened ties with Amazon, which invested $4 billion in November, and is collaborating on AI chip optimization and enhancing Alexa+.

Apple

Do or Die Time for Apple Artificial Intelligence Programs

Apple is at a critical crossroads in AI development. Despite its innovation history, it lags behind competitors like Amazon, with Alexa+ highlighting its AI shortcomings, all amid other major company developments.

Details:

• Apple's early lead with Siri has faded, falling behind competitors. Apple Intelligence suite, including writing tools and Genmoji, has low user engagement. Even the Siri AI upgrade faces major engineering hurdles for its May release

• ChatGPT integration feels like an afterthought, and Apple Intelligence lacks the conversational abilities of competitors, with Visual Intelligence just a basic version of Google Lens. Some functions, like notification summaries, have been disabled after false alerts

• Tim Cook is managing complex trade relations and product transitions, with the iPad Air facing shortages and the M4 MacBook Air launch approaching

Apple has succeeded in late entries before, but in AI, it’s struggling to catch up, facing a critical moment as competitors advance quickly.

Top AI & SaaS Tools

• ContextMinds (Life-time Deal): Content creation platform that streamlines writing by integrating brainstorming, research, and drafting with a whiteboard, search engine, and GPT capabilities [80+ five-star reviews]

• Phi-4-mini: Microsoft's latest AI model, built on synthetic data, focuses on high-quality, reasoning-rich data and supports a 128K token context length [F-R-E-E]

• Octave: First LLM for text-to-speech that lets you design voices with prompts, control emotion through acting instructions & delivers human-like speech [F-R-E-E]

• Promptize: Enhance your prompts across AI tools for superior results without tedious manual adjustments [F-R-E-E]

• Highlight: Use AI across desktop activities like summarizing, translating, or analyzing text in any app, and capturing screen portions for immediate insights [F-R-E-E]

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Top AI & Tech News

• Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati is leading AI startup Thinking Machines Lab, nearing a $9B valuation as it seeks $1B in funding

• TSMC has announced a plan to invest at least $100 billion in chip manufacturing facilities in the U.S. over the next four years

• Microsoft merged Dragon Medical One and DAX Copilot into Dragon Copilot to ease healthcare documentation and enhance patient care

• Grok-3 overtook GPT-4.5 on the LM Arena leaderboard, claiming the top spot shortly after the OpenAI model rose to No. 1

• This is an excellent analysis of the websites thriving and struggling in the GenAI era

• Stability AI and Arm teamed up to launch Stable Audio Open on smartphones, enabling 30x faster on-device audio generation without internet

Interesting Uses of AI

AI Art Spotlight

Model: Midjourney

Prompt:

A photograph of an old white metal sign with the text "NO DRAMA LLAMA", a llama wearing pink sunglasses, against a pink background, in a clipart style, with a white border. --ar 85:128 --v 6.1

AI Prompt of the Day

Top AI Video Tutorial

8 AI Agent Use Cases in N8N! (Automate Anything)

Complimentary AI Course of the Day

Making Friends with Machine Learning

Cassie Kozyrkov, formerly Google's Chief Decision Scientist, has uploaded an entire beginner-friendly machine learning course on YouTube.