Author: The Tech Guy

One year after emerging from stealth, Strella has raised $14 million in Series A funding to expand its AI-powered customer research platform, the company announced Thursday. The round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Decibel Partners, Bain Future Back Ventures, MVP Ventures and 645 Ventures, comes as enterprises increasingly turn to artificial intelligence to understand customers faster and more deeply than traditional methods allow.The investment marks a sharp acceleration for the startup founded by Lydia Hylton and Priya Krishnan, two former consultants and product managers who watched companies struggle with a customer research process that could take eight…

Artificial IntelligenceSelf-Improving Language Models Are Becoming Reality With MIT’s Updated SEAL TechniqueCarl Franzen | VentureBeat”Researchers at [MIT] are gaining renewed attention for developing and open sourcing a technique that allows large language models (LLMs)—like those underpinning ChatGPT and most modern AI chatbots—to improve themselves by generating synthetic data to fine-tune upon.”Biotechnology95% of Kids With ‘Bubble Boy’ Disease Cured by One-Time Gene TherapyPaul McClure | New Atlas”The researchers followed these patients for a median of 7.5 years, totaling 474 patient-years. …The study was the largest and longest follow-up of a gene therapy of this kind to date. Importantly, all 62 children…

Last week we asked you for your thoughts on how we should reconfigure our Phone Finder tool to make it easier to find foldable phones with the right dimensions. Here’s how the voting went. The majority of people prefer that only folded dimensions are used when filtering phones based on their thickness, width and height. People had a simple reason for voting this way – most of the time, the phones stay folded. You carry them closed, of course, but with the rapid improvement of cover displays (especially on flip foldables), you can get a lot done without opening the…

Among the most popular streaming platforms, Netflix was consistently my favorite to navigate. The size of the tiles, in addition to the number, is just enough that you aren’t presented with too many options or too few. This ratio was also extended to your watch list, but the keyword here is “was.” Now that Netflix has changed one of my favorite aspects of its UI, I’ve moved my watch list to Letterboxd. I needed a good reason to create an account, but now that I’m making headway on my watch list, I’m really glad I jumped over to Letterboxd. You…

Stephen Schenck / Android AuthorityAmazon rarely undercuts its own products, but when the company quietly slipped a caveat into the FAQ for its new Colorsoft Kindle, it made one thing abundantly clear: if you care about crisp, black-and-white reading, buy something else. As someone who still acts like they’ll earn a pizza party if they read enough books, I spend a lot of time with my Kindle. Amazon’s honest take doesn’t surprise me (and won’t surprise anyone who’s read on both types of e-reader), but it’s a rare day I find myself agreeing with the company about anything. Do you…

Vector databases (DBs), once specialist research instruments, have become widely used infrastructure in just a few years. They power today's semantic search, recommendation engines, anti-fraud measures and gen AI applications across industries. There are a deluge of options: PostgreSQL with pgvector, MySQL HeatWave, DuckDB VSS, SQLite VSS, Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus and several others.The riches of choices sound like a boon to companies. But just beneath, a growing problem looms: Stack instability. New vector DBs appear each quarter, with disparate APIs, indexing schemes and performance trade-offs. Today's ideal choice may look dated or limiting tomorrow.To business AI teams, volatility translates into…

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images As technical education goes, few American institutions can match the prestige and influence of MIT. Of course, not every graduate is destined for greatness, as two MIT alums made clear earlier this year when they got busted for allegedly pulling a lightning-fast crypto heist, making off with an estimated $25 million. The duo — two brothers named Anton and James Peraire-Bueno — were recently indicted in a federal court on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, and money laundering in what prosecutors call a “first-of-its-kind” financial crime, according to Business Insider. In…

Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test. PowerA Fusion Pro for Xbox: One-minute reviewIt brings me no pleasure to find that the PowerA Fusion Pro Wireless Controller for Xbox is the most disappointing product I’ve tested in the brand’s catalog to date. PowerA is admittedly a brand I’ve had mixed feelings about in the past. Sometimes it provides real winners, like the PowerA Enhanced Wireless Controller, which I consider a solid alternative to the official Nintendo…

At a time when startup hustle culture is back, when “locked in” tech founders have even embraced the “996” way of working — 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week — there is something dystopian about using an AI app to generate fake vacation photos of yourself. And yet, here we are. Product designer Laurent Del Rey, who recently joined Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, launched a side project called Endless Summer, a photobooth app for iPhone that creates AI-generated vacation photos starring you in locations around the world. Here you are exploring a beach town, or overlooking a European…

Taking notes is something many of us do throughout the day. I know I can’t get through mine without setting reminders or jotting down a few things to jog my memory. It’s like I’m still in school and note-taking is my saving grace before the next test — except instead of studying, I’m just trying not to forget something I need to do. Whether I’m in a meeting or researching a new topic for a story, I take notes as I go. I try to figure out what’s going on with a new program or make sense of a topic…