The first Mint Mobile deal mentioned here will get you any 3-month plan for just $15 per month ($45 in total). Naturally, since this deal applies to all plans, you’ll want to make sure you pick the priciest plan in the range – the unlimited plan.
This plan usually sets you back $30 per month on the cheapest rate so you’re essentially bagging a half-price deal here. Note that you can switch up your plan from the unlimited tier if you decide you’d prefer a cheaper option later on.
The second deal featured at Mint today is a super-rare buy-one-get-one-free promotion for new customers. This is the first time we’ve seen the carrier offer this kind of deal – although it’s specifically aimed at customers on the big rivals AT&T and Verizon. You have to be on one of those carriers to take advantage but it is stackable with the super-cheap 3-month deal that’s also available at Mint right now.
Today’s best Mint Mobile deals
Why switch to Mint Mobile?
(Image credit: Future)
Much cheaper plans than the big carriers
No contracts
5G data (but subject to deprioritization)
Mint Mobile currently offers some of the best prepaid plans on the market if you’re solely focused on value. In particular, its annual plans offer incredibly low prices (like $30/mo for the unlimited plan) but the carrier’s payment model does mean that you need to pay for a full year of service upfront for the best prices on average.
As a prepaid carrier, Mint Mobile is also subject to deprioritization, meaning the parent network T-Mobile may slow down network speeds if the local area is busy. This may or may not be an issue depending on where you live, but it’s something to be aware of if you’re going with Mint or any prepaid carrier.
Samsung is giving away a free 65-inch 4K TV right now when you pre-order a 2024 TV, and yes, you read that right. Pre-order a 2024 Samsung 4K, OLED or QLED display, and the retailer will throw in a 65-inch 4K TV for FREE, making this one of the best TV deals of 2024.
This is an incredible offer that only applies to Samsung’s newest flagship TVs, which include the Neo 4K and 8K models, the S95D OLED, and the 2024 The Frame TV. The free 65-inch TV that’s included in the pre-order deal is Samsung’s TU690T Crystal 4K smart TV, which currently retails for $449.99. While it’s an older model TV, you’re still getting Samsung’s ‘Crystal’ UHD 4K processor, an easy-to-use Tizen operating system, and full HDR support. That’s not all, though; Samsung is also offering a $100 discount on the 2024 TV, which will be applied to your cart.
This rare deal from Samsung is a limited-time offer that ends on April 11. It’s unprecedented for a retailer to give away a big-screen TV and discount a new 2024 display, which is why this offer could be the best TV deal of 2024.
The best TV deal of 2024: get a free 65-inch 4K TV
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has unveiled new plans to support AI startups, particularly those partnered with Y Combinator, by setting aside $500,000 in credits per startup for Amazon Bedrock.
Previously, AWS provided startups partnered with Activate Provider with $100,000 in free credits; however, the cloud giant’s latest initiative increases this fivefold for the more recent cohort of Y Combinator-funded startups.
Amazon isn’t the only tech giant to be offering startups an AI lifeline, but the latest credit announcement exceeds the $150,000 set aside by Microsoft Azure and $350,000 by Google Cloud.
AWS boosts its AI credit offering for eligible startups
Announcing the boost in credits, AWS says that experimenting is both vital and expensive for startups, hence its offer of free credits. Since launching AWS Activate, the company claims to have provided more than $6 billion in credits to help startups experiment on AWS cloud “with little-to-no upfront cost.”
With the announcement, AWS is allowing credit recipients to redeem their AWS currency against third-party models on Amazon Bedrock from companies including AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, and Stability AI.
The extension of free credits not only aims to help cash-strapped startups but also helps secure partners’ revenue streams. Notably, Anthropic recently received a significant $4 billion investment from AWS, the maker of the Claude LLM family.
Y Combinator Group Partner Michael Seibel commented: “With virtually every startup quickly becoming an AI startup, our partnership with AWS has never been more relevant to the companies getting into our program.”
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As well as spending credits on third-party FMs on Amazon Bedrock, the latest Y Combinator Cohort (January 2024) can use them for Amazon Trainium, AWS Inferentia, and a reserved capacity of up to 512 Nvidia H100 GPUs via Amazon EC2.
Looking for a cheap, reliable, and fast broadband deal that won’t break the bank? Then Shell Energy broadband’s latest broadband offer could be perfect.
Shell Energy Broadband’s popular Superfast Fibre Plus tariff is available for just £25.99 per month. Plus, as well as being affordable, this particular broadband package comes with a £50 gift card that can be redeemed on Amazon. You’ll get this once your connection is online and the validation period has passed.
To be eligible to receive this deal, you’ll need to take out an 18-month contract and pay an upfront fee of £10.55.
With this broadband package, you’ll be able to make the most of average download speeds of 67Mbps and you get the company’s new ‘Wi-Fi 6 hub’ included. For this reason, we think it’s a great choice for small to medium households that want to download, stream in HD and casually browse across multiple devices.
However, there are a couple of things to be aware of if you want to take out this deal. Firstly, Shell Energy’s broadband customers have recently been purchased by TalkTalk. As a result, you’ll be automatically transferred to TalkTalk at some point during the duration of your contract (this will be free and all you’ll need to do is pay your bill as normal). Secondly, this broadband deal expires at midnight on 17th April.
This week’s best Shell Energy Broadband deal
Why choose Shell Energy for your broadband?
You may know Shell Energy better as an energy supplier, but for the past few years, the company has also been one of the country’s most popular broadband providers. It’s easy to see why this has been the case, too. After all, the company regularly offers fast download speeds at affordable prices. Thanks to this, Shell Energy broadband has won several industry awards, including a ‘great value’ award from Good Housekeeping in 2023.
However, as popular as Shell Energy broadband has been over the past few years, Shell Energy UK was recently bought by Octopus, with the incoming energy company selling Shell Energy UK’s broadband customers to TalkTalk.
As a result, in the coming months, all Shell Energy broadband customers will be moved over to TalkTalk free of charge. There’s no need to be worried though, your existing contract will remain valid and you’ll just need to keep paying your bill as usual. You’ll then be notified when it’s time to be transferred to TalkTalk. At this point, the move will happen automatically and you don’t need to do anything. In fact, Shell Energy uses some of TalkTalk’s technology behind the scenes, so the transfer process should be seamless.
Unsure whether this deal is right for you or would you like to compare it to others on the market? Check out our guide to the best broadband deals or enter your postcode into the widget below. We can then show you all the best deals available at your address.
Earlier this year at CES, Samsung announced its 2024 TV model lineup, which includes screens with Mini LED displays, quantum-dot-enabled OLEDs, and other, more affordable TVs. We like what we’ve seen so far, which makes Samsung’s current TV promotion pretty exciting if a new TV is in your budget for this year.
By no means will the free model be as nice as your preordered screen. The TU690T usually hovers around $500, and it doesn’t have modern features like local dimming, which helps make blacks appear darker and whites look brighter, and improves the contrast of the screen. But a free 65-inch TV can be a fantastic way to upgrade a friend or loved one’s aging TV set, or you can put it in a spare bedroom, work area, garage, or any other space where you might’ve wanted a screen but didn’t want to spend the money for it.
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The Nitty Gritty
Photograph: Samsung
How is Samsung able to give away free TV sets as a part of this promotion? We reached out to Samsung for comment but it hasn’t given us an answer yet. But hey, free TV! Here are the 2024 TV models that qualify for the deal:
If you’ve been following the somewhat curious tale of the global launch of the RX 7900 GRE – the ‘Golden Rabbit Edition’ graphics card that was initially exclusive to China – you may recall it was artificially limited to 2.3GHz for the memory clock speed by a bug, as confirmed by AMD. Apparently, this was an issue with an incorrect memory tuning limit.
Well, that glitch has now been remedied with AMD’s new Adrenalin Edition 24.3.1 driver. As Team Red says in the release notes, there’s a fix for the “maximum memory tuning limit [being] incorrectly reported on AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics products.”
VideoCardz noticed this development and reports that with the new driver, Tech Powerup has found it can ramp up the memory clock by 300MHz, giving a sizeable leap in performance. Running at 2.6GHz rather than 2.3GHz results in a 15% boost in 3DMark (Time Spy).
Note that this is the memory clock, which is distinct from the GPU clock speed, and not to be confused with that. The GPU chip is also limited for overclocking as our previous report highlighted, but AMD hasn’t taken action on that front.
Analysis: Going GREat guns
This is just one synthetic test, so we need to be a bit cautious, but other benchmarking online from Hardware Unboxed shows similarly impressive results (in gaming tests, and a host of them, too).
However, we should point out that other reports online suggest that RX 7900 GRE owners are far from guaranteed to be able to run a VRAM overclock as ambitious as 2.6GHz, or even get past 2.5GHz (for that matter, cresting 2.4GHz is proving challenging for some graphics cards anecdotally).
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As ever with any chip, the mileage you’ll get out of your video memory will be different from others – but even so, everyone should be able to realize a worthwhile performance benefit here. If not 10-15%, there should still be some decent headroom now AMD has fixed this bug, and many folks are reporting around a 5% boost or close to that at the very least.
With this extra chunk of frame rates under its belt, the 7900 GRE is now looking an even more tempting proposition. Assuming, of course, that you’re confident enough with PC hardware to engage in overclocking shenanigans – not everyone will want to do so.
The RX 7900 GRE was already a great mid-range performer before this happened, anyway, and at its current price, this seems to be the best GPU in this price bracket now, for those willing to push it with an overclock, certainly. It’s looking better than the rival RTX 4070 Super with this new AMD driver, and the RX 7900 GRE is about 7% cheaper than Team Green’s graphics card going by current pricing on Newegg in the US (for the cheapest models in stock).
Relative pricing may be a different story in your region, but you get the point. Also, with the 7900 GRE being within 10% of the performance of the much pricier 7900 XT now, as Hardware Unboxed points out, it’s a possible alternative to the latter.
We’d be remiss to mention that with the Nvidia RTX 4070 Super comparison, you are losing out on the ray tracing and DLSS 3 front, of course – but for pure rasterization it’s the 7900 GRE all the way as pricing stands, with this extra driver boost. Nvidia and its partners may need to respond here…
Today marks the end of the Amazon Big Spring Sale and there are still a few tech deals still worth checking out, including this bundle of an Echo Show 8 paired with an Amazon Basics smart bulb. If you bought them at full price and separately, you’d pay $163, but now the set is down to $100. That amounts to a 38 percent discount. If you want the smart display on its own, it’s the same $100. That’s about $10 more than its record low price and a 33 percent savings.
Amazon
The Amazon Big Spring Sale is taking 38 percent off the latest Echo Show 8 smart display and throwing in a free Amazon smart bulb.
If you’re just starting on the path towards smart home grandeur, you can think of the set as a starter kit, as the Echo Show gives you voice and routine control over your new bulb. We named the previous generation of the Echo Show 8 the best Amazon display in our guide. It strikes a good balance between not taking up too much space and offering a sizable enough viewing area with its 8-inch screen. We also liked how adept it is at handling video calls.
We were able to get a look at this latest version of the display at a demo during Amazon’s hardware event last fall. It has a new edge-to-edge glass front and a more refined design overall. But perhaps the most interesting update is the introduction of the adaptive content feature. Depending on where you are in the room, the display will show different content: large-font time and weather info when you’re far away, and more personalized calendar and news articles when you get closer.
The bulb lets you change its brightness and color just by talking to your smart display. You can also use the Alexa app to set up routines that will, for example, turn off the light when you say “goodnight” or turn it on an hour before sunset.
We’re nearing the end of Amazon’s Big Spring Sale, and we’ve just spotted what might possibly be the best deal from the six-day event. The retailer is giving away a free Samsung 65-inch 4K TV when you pre-order a 2024 Samsung TV, and if you’re a Prime member, you can save an additional $100 – an incredible deal.
Samsung’s newest flagship TVs include the Neo 4K and 8K models, the S95D OLED, and the 2024 The Frame TV. The free TV is Samsung’s TU690T Crystal 4K display, which currently retails for $447.99. While it’s an older model TV, you’re still getting Samsung’s solid ‘Crystal’ UHD 4K processor, an easy-to-use Tizen operating system, and full HDR support.
So why is this the best deal from Amazon’s Big Spring Sale? We’ve never seen a retailer give away a big-screen 4K TV when you pre-order another TV. Plus, Amazon’s offer includes an additional $100 discount if you’re a Prime member. Amazon’s Big Spring Sale ends tomorrow at midnight, and the additional discount on the Samsung TV expires on April 11.
Without an efficient way to squeeze additional computing power from existing infrastructure, organizations are often forced to purchase additional hardware or delay projects. This can lead to longer wait times for results and potentially losing out to competitors. This problem is compounded by the rise of AI workloads which require a high GPU compute load.
ClearML has come up with what it thinks is the perfect solution to this problem – fractional GPU capability for open source users, making it possible to “split” a single GPU so it can run multiple AI tasks simultaneously.
This move recalls the early days of computing when mainframes could be shared among individuals and organizations, giving them the ability to utilize computing power without needing to buy additional hardware.
Fractional capabilities for Nvidia GPUs
ClearML says the new feature allows DevOps professionals and AI Infrastructure leaders to partition their Nvidia GTX, RTX, and data center-grade, MIG-enabled GPUs into smaller units to support multiple AI and HPC workloads, enabling users to switch between small R&D jobs and larger, more demanding training jobs.
The approach supports multi-tenancy, offering secure and confidential computing with hard memory limitation. ClearML says stakeholders can run isolated parallel workloads on a single shared compute resource, increasing efficiency and reducing costs.
“With our new free offering now supporting fractional capabilities for the broadest range of Nvidia GPUs than any other company, ClearML is democratizing access to compute as part of our commitment to help our community build better AI at any scale, faster,” says Moses Guttmann, CEO and Co-founder of ClearML. “We hope that organizations that might have a mixture of infrastructure are able to use ClearML and get more out of the compute and resources they already have.”
The new open source fractional GPU functionality is available for free on ClearML’s GitHub page.
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Since ChatGPT burst onto the scene in November 2022 we’ve seen generative AI make some some startlingly human-like artistic creations – and the latest tool to go viral is Suno, an AI-powered song generator.
We’ve seen AI music generators before, from Adobe’s Project Music GenAI to YouTube’s Dream Track and Voicify AI (now Jammable). But the difference with Suno is that it can create everything, from song lyrics to vocals and instrumentation, from a simple prompt. You can even steer it towards the precise genre you want, from Delta Blues to electronic chillwave.
(Image credit: Suno)
In Suno’s new V3 model, you can now create full two-minute songs with a free account. The results can be varied, depending on which genre you choose, but Suno is capable of some seriously impressive results.
But how exactly does Suno work, who actually owns the rights to its generated music, and how can you start making your own robo-rock? We’ve answered all of this and more so you can stage-dive into the strange world of AI-generated music…
What is Suno?
Suno is a web-based, text-to-music generator that can whip up full songs in seconds from a simple text prompt. For example, tell it to make a ‘psychedelic UK garage song about a friend with a Nokia obsession’, and you’ll get a couple of two-minute songs complete with vocals, instrumentation, lyrics, a song title and even artwork.
This is all possible with the free version of Suno, although those accounts naturally come with limitations. You get a maximum of 50 credits per day, which is enough for ten songs. You also can’t use the songs commercially with a free account, so it’s very much for dabbling and or writing songs for your dog.
(Image credit: Suno)
Shell out for the Pro plan ($8 a month, around £6.30 / AU$12.20) and you get enough credits to generate 500 songs a day. You can also use the songs commercially, for example on YouTube or even uploading them to Spotify or Apple Music.
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The Premier Plan ($24 a month, around £20 / AU$38) bumps your limit up to 2,000 songs a day, which makes Bob Dylan look positively lazy. But whichever plan you’re on, you get access to all of Suno’s tools – including a ‘custom’ mode where you write your own lyrics and an ‘instrumental’ mode for crafting some new work music.
How does Suno work?
Like most generative AI tools, the precise mechanics of how Suno works are a little hazy. It isn’t yet clear what data or music the tool has been trained on – we asked Suno for clarification on this and are yet to hear back.
But more broadly, Suno works in a similar way to large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. Lots of training data (which in Suno’s case, includes recordings of speech) help it construct original songs and lyrics based on your prompts. With text, LLMs typically work by predicting what words are most likely to come next in a given sequence, but this is far more challenging for music.
(Image credit: Suno)
This is why Suno also uses so-called diffusion models (which power the likes of Midjourney) alongside transformer models. In an interview with Lightspeed Venture Partners Suno’s CEO and Co-Founder, Mikey Shulman, said: “Not all audio is done with transformers, there’s a lot of audio that’s done with diffusion – and these two methods have pros and cons”.
Whatever the algorithmic rumblings that are going on under Suno’s hood, it’s one of the best AI music generating engines we’ve seen (or heard) so far. Sure, the results are heavily compressed and it’s stronger at aping some genres than others, but it’s also the perfect project for a rainy weekend afternoon…
How do you use Suno?
Suno is ridiculously easy to use – perhaps worryingly so, if you currently make your money from music. Just go to the Suno website, make a free account and head to the ‘Create’ section to get started.
Here you’ll find a small box to write the description for your song. The main thing to remember is to describe the style of the music you want (in other words, the genre) plus the topic you want the song to be about. You can’t ask Suno to write something in the style of a particular artist – which is understandable, as Suno doesn’t (yet) have any licenses with labels.
We asked Suno to write a TechRadar theme song celebrating gadgets and technology in the genre of electronic chillwave – you can listen to the resulting ‘Future frequencies’ song below (or by opening the song on Suno, where you can also read its lyrics).
Not bad for a first try. It won’t win any Grammys, with its generic EDM synth sound and echoes of The Weeknd, but it’s also one of the few times where Suno pronounced the TechRadar name correctly.
Challenging Suno with more stripped-down genres produces slightly more mixed results. Our attempt at making a solo acoustic song about a ‘sad AI that yearns to be human’ sounds like a robot Phoebe Bridgers who’s been forced to write a Eurovision ballad. Suno also really struggled to write a birthday song for our friend in the style of psychedelic 90s rock.
But we have also heard some surprisingly impressive results with blues music – Rolling Stone magazine, for example, managed to whip up a delta blues track called ‘Soul of the Machine’ (below) that’s got nearly 40,000 plays on Soundcloud and sounds very much like a lo-fi recording from the Deep South.
One of the touted benefits of Suno’s latest V3 model, which was launched on March 21, is “more styles and genres”, so its versatility should start to improve over time.
It’s also possible to polish Suno’s results using other applications, like Band in a Box, to help improve the sound quality and instrumentation. Just go to the three dots in your song title, then go to ‘download’ then ‘audio’ to get the file. To extend a song, choose ‘Continue from this clip’, generate a new section, then select ‘Get whole song’ to stitch it all together.
You obviously can’t monetize the results unless you’re on one of the paid plans and you need to attribute the song to Suno as well. Of course, this opens up a bigger discussion about copyright and ownership…
Who owns the songs made with Suno?
The short answer is that you own the songs generated using Suno, as long as you’re shelling out for its Pro or Premier plans. If you’re a free user, Suno says it retains ownership of the songs you generate.
But this is different from copyright ownership. As Suno’s FAQ section says: “the availability and scope of copyright protection for content generated (in whole or in part) using artificial intelligence is a complex and dynamic area of law, which is rapidly evolving and varies among countries”.
In the US, for example, creative works that are made by AI without human involvement currently can’t be copyrighted. Text-to-music tools like Suno muddy these waters, though, which is why Suno recommends consulting an attorney if you really need the latest legal guidance on your AI-generated masterpieces.
(Image credit: Suno)
There’s also a wider debate around AI-generated content looming in the background right now. For example, the New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft because it claims ChatGPT was trained on millions of its articles without its permission. Is training an AI model on someone else’s content infringing on its copyright? That’s the big unanswered question.
You may also remember the viral ‘Heart on my sleeve’ in May 2023, which was supposedly made by Drake and The Weeknd and racked up nine million views on TikTok, before it was revealed that it’d been made using AI by a user called Ghostwriter977. Cue a takedown notice from the artists’ record label, Universal Music Group, and a copyright debate that’s still rumbling on.
This is why Suno understandably doesn’t let you ask it to generate songs in the style of specific artists or use real artists’ voices. According to a Rolling Stone, Suno’s backers are aware that music labels and publishers could one day sue them, but the labels are currently staying quiet on the matter. In other words, this area is very much a case of ‘watch this space’ (while wearing a large pair of noise-cancelling headphones, if you’re Suno).
What’s next for Suno?
A glimpse of where Suno could be going is Google‘s Dream Track (below), which has collaborated with artists to allow its small number of early users to generate AI soundtracks for their YouTube Shorts.
If Suno gets the music labels on board, it could use your favorite artist as a spark to create a new AI-generated track in their style. As Suno’s CEO Mikey Shulman said in an interview with Lightspeed Venture Partners: “Let’s fast forward a few years to where the licensing climate is a little less uncertain, maybe we can let you prompt the model with a Taylor Swift song.”
The idea would be for you to pay an artist in a similar way to how sampling works now – only you’d instead be using their music as a template for a new AI-generated track.
But it’s still very early days – and with those licensing issues a long way from being ironed out, Suno is currently more a fun way to create an original birthday song for your friend rather than a fully-blown robot musician.
It also has plenty of competition from the likes of Google, Adobe and OpenAI. For now, though, Suno is one of the best tools we’ve tried for making full-blown songs, and with V4 on the horizon, we’re looking forward to seeing how it evolves.
