The Prompt is a weekly rundown of AIs buzziest startups, biggest breakthroughs, and business deals. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here.Welcome back to The Prompt,One consequence of the current AI investment frenzy is that founders of startups are seeing their ownership being chipped away as they raise enormous funding rounds at towering valuations. But AI training startup Invisible Technologies is going in the opposite direction: its taking out loans to buy out its VC investors and awarding stakes to its employees. In 2020, CEO Francis Pedraza revived the floundering business after a well-timed call from DoorDash, which needed help with importing menus. Now, the startup helps wrangle data dilemmas for large language model providers like OpenAI and Cohere.Now lets get into the headlines.BIG PLAYS While Chinese company DeepSeek caused an uproar last week for its capable and cost-efficient AI models, some industry insiders remain unimpressed. I spoke to founders whove been hard at work building similarly cheaper-to-train AI models and think the market reaction (Nvidia has lost about $600 billion in market cap since DeepSeeks announcement) has been misguided and misinformed. In response to the DeepSeek freakout, OpenAI made its o3-mini model, which is largely better than DeepSeeks, available for free. Over the weekend, it also released Deep Research, an AI agent that will process a prompt for up to 30 minutes to browse the web and generate detailed analysis and reports. Notably, Chief Research Officer Mark Chen claimed such research capabilities, which typically cost more time and money, justify OpenAIs move to invest billions of dollars into AI infrastructure. CEO Sam Altman posted on X: 50 cents of compute for 500 dollars of value.And OpenAI has seemingly flipped the Chinese AI companys arrival into more money for the company. Its reportedly in talks to raise $40 billion at a $340 billion valuation, CNBC reported.HUMANS OF AIA Nepali startup called SecurityPal is using AI to tackle the long-drawn process of security compliance for big tech players, a necessary nuisance as my former colleague Alex Konrad puts it. The niche company has over a hundred employees in the city of Kathmandu, who have answered millions of mundane questions for companies like OpenAI and Figma when they onboard new customers. But CEO Pukar Hamal has a more ambitious goal: to transform Kathmandu into a new startup hub, which he likes to call Silicon Peaks. AI DEAL OF THE WEEKElevenLabs, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to generate and clone voices, has raised $180 million in a round that values it at $3.3 billion, triple from what it was a year ago. Users have used its AI audio abilities to generate 1,000 years worth of content, the company told Forbes.Elsewhere, Protex AI, whose AI software helps companies like Amazon and Tesla monitor worker safety in factories and warehouses, has raised $36 million.DEEP DIVEAnswering Machine CEO Jake Jolis is building an AI phone receptionist that can answer calls from customers while home services business owners like plumbers and electricians are busy.Jake JolisNot all accidents are unfortunate. Jake Jolis would know.Years ago, Jolis mistakenly put his personal phone number in an SEC filing for his previous startup, an online language learning company called Verbling. His phone number had ended up on Google, and he was soon inundated with scam calls and people looking for Verbling customer support long after hed left the company to become a venture capitalist at San Francisco-based investment firm Matrix, where he wrote checks to AI startups.I'm just investing in AI here and on the other side Im getting these weird voicemails, and then eventually something starts to click, Jolis tells Forbes. That got him thinking: What if someone could pick up those calls? While Verbling wasnt big enough to have a call center of its own with humans on the other line, an AI receptionist could potentially intercept the inquiries and do the job, he said.In June 2024, Jolis started working on Answering Machine, a startup which uses an artificial intelligence to answer calls for small business owners when theyre busy. The bootstrapped company has already done thousands of calls for home services businesses like plumbers, electricians and snow removal companies. Our goal is to bring AI to Main Street, Jolis told Forbes. Answering Machine is a mobile application that uses a medley of AI models under the hood, including ElevenLabs audio generation models and OpenAIs large language models, that have been trained on public information from the businesses websites as well as any additional information the customer provides. During the call, the AI receptionist collects basic details from the customer like their name, address, phone number and the service theyre requesting. It then sends an AI-generated summary as a push notification to the small business owners phone.Jolis said the AI receptionist is meant to act as a stand-in for when the business owner is unavailable to take the call. For our customers, missed calls means missed revenue opportunities For example, the plumber is still answering their own calls when they find it convenient, and then when they have half an arm down a toilet fixing some plumbing problem and a call comes in, we take those calls.WEEKLY DEMO AI: One, Jailbreaks: Zero. AI giant Anthropic has released new research on ways to prevent AI models from producing harmful content and defend them from jailbreaks methods for breaking an AI models safety guardrails to generate content it shouldnt.MODEL BEHAVIORAI-generated books are making their way into public libraries through digital catalogues, 404 Media reported. But what makes this migration even more challenging is that as AI models get better at creating text, its become more difficult to distinguish real from fake. AI-generated low-quality content is already infiltrating almost every online platform, from Amazon to Ebay. One possible solution? The Authors Guild is introducing certification for books guaranteeing that they are human-written.