Samsung's AI phones, Databricks' $10 billion, and Palona's sales agent: This week's AI launches

Samsung introduced multimodal AI agents in its new Galaxy S25 smartphones series this week that it says are “setting a new standard as a true AI companion.” Galaxy AI is powered by a “first-of-its-kind customized Snapdragon 8 Elite Mobile Platform for Galaxy chipset,” the company said.

Samsung claimed the AI agent, powered by One UI 7, can understand a user’s needs and preferences to provide personalized AI features. The multimodal agents can interpret text, speech, image, and video.

Goldman Sachs (GS) said this week that it’s launching a generative AI assistant for its employees. The bank’s chief information officer Marco Argenti told CNBC that the program, called GS AI assistant, has been rolled out to 10,000 workers so far, and that the firm plans to give it to all bankers, traders, and asset managers by the end of the year.

The AI assistant will initially help employees with tasks such as summarizing and proofreading emails and translating code, Argenti told CNBC, and will initially generate responses based on the bank’s data that has been fed to OpenAI, Google (GOOGL), and Meta (META) AI models.

“Think about all the tasks that you might want to complete with regards to a variety of use cases for all those professions that can be now at your fingertips,” Argenti said. The program is a “very simple interface that allows you to have access to the latest and greatest models.”

Palona AI, a startup building AI solutions for direct-to-consumer and other consumer-facing companies, publicly launched this week. The startup, co-founded by former Meta and Google executives, also announced $10 million in seed funding from UpHonest Capital, Fusion Fund, Maynard Webb, NEO Investment Partners, and other investors.

The company aims to provide customers with AI features to help with branding, customer relationships, and sales. Palona combines its proprietary AI system of multi-agents and multi-modal models with an emotional intelligence language model to make AI that can learn about individual customers to meet their needs and take actions on their behalf.

Palona “trained another model to help in diagnosing which memories [of an AI model] are important and should be maintained forever,” Maria Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Palona, told Quartz in an interview. This improves customer experience and keeps them engaged, she added.

Data and AI company Databricks announced that it closed a $10 billion Series J funding round this week, valuing it at $62 billion. The new funding will go toward AI products, acquisitions, and expanding its international go-to-market operations, it said. Meta has also joined the company as a strategic advisor.

Additionally, Databricks closed a $5.25 billion credit facility led by JPMorgan Chase (JPM). Barclays (BCS), Citi (C), Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley (MS), and other financial institutions also participated.

“We received overwhelming interest in this round from both new and existing investors and strategic partners who believe in our vision and market impact,” Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks, said in a statement. “These partners are focused on the long-term success of Databricks and our rapidly growing customer base. Organizations are modernizing their data and AI infrastructure because they recognize the immense potential of generative AI. Data intelligence is critical to both unlocking this potential and to helping enterprises reach their business goals.”

Perplexity released an agentic mobile assistant for Android users this week. The AI agent connects to mobile apps, and it can attempt to use them to complete tasks. For example, a user can ask the AI agent to play a song, and it will open a music app to do so.

Android users can also use the AI agent to set reminders, book reservations, draft emails, and get directions, among other tasks. Perplexity’s AI agent supports 15 languages, including French, German, and Korean.