This week saw major moves in AI agent startups worldwide. Chinese tech giant Alibaba released Qwen2, a free AI model helping startups build cost-effective AI agents. Rival DeepSeek upgraded its AI to better understand pictures and text, challenging OpenAI.

Meta shared plans to bring Agentic AI to millions of businesses for automating tasks. OpenAI grabbed headlines with a $40 billion investment from SoftBank - the biggest tech funding ever.

New startup Butterfly Effect wowed some experts with Manus AI, claiming it can build websites and screen job applications alone. However, others found it buggy during tests. Accounting software AvidXchange launched new AI agents to automate bill payments and approvals.

Voice AI saw big updates too. Groq teamed with PlayAI for faster multilingual voice tech, while Krisp added accent-changing tools for clearer work calls.