<p>“Agentic AI” is the concept of the moment. Developers big and small are rushing to build apps to leapfrog the heavy lifting needed to employ generative AI in specific contexts… and investors are rushing to fund the most interesting of these.&nbsp; In one of the latest examples, a startup out of Israel called Perfect — [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Codeium, an AI-powered coding startup, is raising a new round of funding at a $2.85 billion valuation, including fresh capital, according to two sources with knowledge of the deal.&nbsp; The round is being led by returning investor Kleiner Perkins, the people said. The new round comes just six months after Silicon Valley-based Codeium announced that [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The U.S. government is leaning hard on tech companies to make more commitments to building their businesses in the country, and Big Tech is falling in line. On Monday, Apple laid out its own plans in that area: It will spend $500 billion over the next four years in areas like high-end manufacturing, engineering, and [&hellip;]</p>

<p>OpenAI said on Friday that it is rolling out Operator — its AI agent that can perform tasks on behalf of users — for ChatGPT Pro subscribers in Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the U.K., and more countries. OpenAI said Operator will be available in most places where ChatGPT is available, apart [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Google is launching a new experiment that uses AI to help people explore more career possibilities. The company announced in a blog post on Wednesday that a new &#8220;Career Dreamer&#8221; tool can find patterns between your experiences, educational background, skills, and interests to connect you with careers that might be a good fit. With Career [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Google is pulling its AI assistant Gemini from the main Google app for iOS devices. The move is meant to encourage users to download the standalone Gemini app instead, which would allow Google to more directly compete with other consumer-facing AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity. However, the change could also risk reducing Gemini&#8217;s [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Companies developing small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) have raised more than $1.5 billion in the past year, as tech companies hunger for power to train AI models and governments decide to commit to the industry. For example, X-Energy raised $700 million this month, and Paris-based Newcleo raised $151 million last year, and one would be [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter! We’re going on hiatus for a bit, but you can find all our AI coverage, including my columns, our daily analysis, and breaking news stories, at TechCrunch. If you want those stories and much more in your inbox every day, sign up for our daily newsletters here. This week, billionaire [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The demand for voice and speech recognition technologies is massive — and growing. An analysis by market research firm Markets and Markets found that the sector could be worth over $28.1 billion by 2027. There&#8217;s no shortage of vendors providing voice and speech recognition solutions, but some newer upstarts have managed to carve out niches. [&hellip;]</p>

<p>As anticipated, Apple revealed the long-awaited iPhone SE refresh Tuesday. The fourth-generation device arrives three years after the last major update to the budget-minded smartphone. This one arrives with a twist, however. The SE branding has been dropped to keep the device more in line with the company&#8217;s flagships. The new iPhone 16e starts at [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Elon Musk&#8217;s X is in talks to raise money from investors at a $44 billion valuation, Bloomberg News reports. Musk purchased X, formerly known as Twitter, for the same price back in 2022. The news comes as Fidelity Investments marked down its Twitter stake back in December by around 70% from the 2022 sale price [&hellip;]</p>

<p>OpenAI&#8217;s ChatGPT may be the world&#8217;s most popular chatbot app. But rival services are gaining, according to data from analytics firms Similarweb and Sensor Tower. Similarweb, which estimates traffic to websites, including chatbot web apps, has recorded healthy recent upticks in usage across bots like Google&#8217;s Gemini and Microsoft&#8217;s OpenAI-powered Copilot. Gemini&#8217;s web traffic grew [&hellip;]</p>

<p>It has been more than two years since ChatGPT burst on the scene. Shortly after that, it seemed like almost every email app integrated AI-powered email writing and summaries. Some also introduced AI-powered search for you to sift through your inbox quickly. Superhuman is now using AI to try and tackle one of the primary [&hellip;]</p>

<p>As companies like Nvidia and SoftBank focus on industrial robotics as key areas for future R&amp;D, a startup has raised funding today for another facet of how AI is being used on the factory room floor. Augury, which develops AI-based hardware to identify when machines need repairs and what is wrong with them, has raised [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Career product manager Amanda DeLuca has launched a parenting management app, Riley, born out of her experience with parental anxiety and feedback from other families. DeLuca, who previously worked at Google, NerdWallet, and Eventbrite, in addition to Etsy, became pregnant three years ago. At the time, she and her husband, who is also a product [&hellip;]</p>

<p>An employment tribunal case has placed Kuda Technologies, one of Africa’s fastest-growing digital banks, under scrutiny over allegations of workplace discrimination, harassment, and wrongful dismissal. Rosemary Hewat, Kuda’s former group chief people officer (CPO), filed a complaint accusing the company and its CEO, Babatunde Ogundeyi, of sex discrimination, victimization, and unfair dismissal. According to the [&hellip;]</p>

<p>CEO Tanay Kothari noted that the startup will soon achieve profitability at the current rate of growth. Initially, he didn&#8217;t want to raise money, but he worried that Big Tech players with a massive distribution advantage could be a risk to the company. He wanted to rapidly multiply the company&#8217;s revenue and reach and decided to take the investment.</p>

<p>The ruling isn&#8217;t a guarantee for how similar cases will proceed, but it lays the foundations for a precedent that would side with tech companies over creatives.</p>

<p>Google DeepMind has released a new language model called Gemini Robotics On-Device that can run tasks locally on robots without an internet connection. </p>

<p>Eventual&#8217;s data processing engine Daft was inspried by the founders&#8217; experience working on Lyft&#8217;s autonomous vehicle project. </p>