A new report surfaced regarding the upcoming budget iPhones. As a reminder, we’ve recently found out that the phone will launch early next year. And now, some spec info surfaced. The iPhone SE 4 will have the same cameras as the iPhone 15, and the Apple A18 SoC.

The iPhone SE 4 will come with Apple’s very own 5G modem & Apple A18 SoC

That’s not all, however. This report also mentions that Apple’s first 5G modem will finally be ready, and used in this smartphone. That was the original plan, but the iPhone SE 4 launch rumors were all over the place.

The phone itself will look similar to the iPhone 14 but include a single camera on the back. Flat sides will be used, and an OLED display will be placed on the front, complete with a notch. The display resolution will be 2532 x 1170, which is the same as the 6.1-inch iPhone 14 offers.

This also means that the iPhone SE 4 will be the first ‘SE’ model to offer Face ID and the very first model to not have a home key below the display. The past two models used the iPhone 8 design, which is quite dated at this point.

It’s a bit odd that this phone will revert back to a notch, considering that the Dynamic Island has completely taken over. It is what it is, though. Apple probably started working on the device quite some time ago, so… the notch is what we’ll get.

The main and selfie cameras will be identical to the ones on the iPhone 15

In addition to the Apple A18 SoC, this phone will offer 8GB of RAM, it seems. A 48-megapixel main camera will be combined with a 12-megapixel snapper on the front. The cameras will be completely identical to the ones the iPhone 15 offers.

In regards to Apple’s very own model. Some of you probably recall that Apple acquired Intel’s modem division back in 2019. The company wanted to create its own modems to stop being dependent on Qualcomm. Well, after some failures along the way, it seems like one is finally ready.

This new modem is said to “drastically reduce battery consumption”. It remains to be seen how accurate that info is.

Bloomberg recently reported that Apple is close to releasing an updated iPhone SE, which will be its first update to the low-end model since 2022. According to 9to5Mac, Apple is also planning to use the phone as a launching pad for its in-house 5G modems. The company purchased the majority of Intel’s smartphone modem business for $1 billion back in 2019 after taking steps to be more self-reliant and aggressively recruiting staff to make that happen. But it has yet to release devices that use the modems designed by its internal team.

Apple and Qualcomm have somewhat of a complicated history. Qualcomm sued Apple in 2017, accusing it of violating its patents related to its phones’ ability to quickly connect to the internet after they’re switched on, as well as patents related to battery efficiency, graphics processing and apps’ capability to download data faster. They eventually settled their patent dispute after Apple agreed to pay Qualcomm royalties and to enter a six-year licensing deal, as well as a multi-year wireless chipset supply deal.

At the moment, Apple still equips its devices with Qualcomm-made 5G modems. Qualcomm also announced last year that it will continue providing modems to Apple until 2026. It’s possible that Apple wants to put its in-house modem to the test with just one iPhone first before it puts its technology in more devices.

The iPhone SE 4 will look similar to the iPhone 14 (pictured above), 9to5Mac says, and will be powered by an A18 chip with 8GB of RAM that will make it possible for it to have some Apple Intelligence features. It will reportedly feature Face ID and will no longer have a home button like previous iPhone SEs, and the device will apparently have the iPhone 15’s 48MP wide camera and 12MP front cam. The iPhone SE 4 is expected to be unveiled next year, possibly sometime in the spring.

AI tends to make things up. That’s unappealing to just about anyone who uses it on a regular basis, but especially to businesses, for which fallacious results could hurt the bottom line. Half of workers responding to a recent survey from Salesforce say they worry answers from their company’s generative AI-powered systems are inaccurate.

While no technique can solve these “hallucinations,” some can help. For example, retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, pairs an AI model with a knowledge base to provide the model supplemental info before it answers, serving as a sort of fact-checking mechanism.

Entire businesses have been built on RAG, thanks to the sky-high demand for more reliable AI. Voyage AI is one of these. Founded by Stanford professor Tengyu Ma in 2023, Voyage powers RAG systems for companies including Harvey, Vanta, Replit, and SK Telecom.

“Voyage is on a mission to enhance search and retrieval accuracy and efficiency in enterprise AI,” Ma told TechCrunch in an interview. “Voyage solutions [are] tailored to specific domains, such as coding, finance, legal, and multilingual applications, and tailored to a company’s data.”

To spin up RAG systems, Voyage trains AI models to convert text, documents, PDFs, and other forms of data into numerical representations called vector embeddings. Embeddings capture the meaning and relationships between different data points in a compact format, making them useful for search-related applications, like RAG.

Voyage uses a particular type of embedding called contextual embedding, which captures not only the semantic meaning of data but the context in which the data appears. For example, given the word “bank” in the sentences “I sat on the bank of the river” and “I deposited money in the bank,” Voyage’s embedding models would generate different vectors for each instance of “bank” — reflecting the different meanings implied by the context.

Voyage hosts and licenses its models for on-premises, private cloud, or public cloud use, and fine-tunes its models for clients that opt to pay for this service. The company isn’t unique in that regard — OpenAI, too, has a tailorable embedding service — but Ma claims that Voyage’s models deliver better performance at lower costs.

“In RAG, given a question or query, we first retrieve relevant info from an unstructured knowledge base — like a librarian searching books from a library,” he explained. “Conventional RAG methods often struggle with context loss during information encoding, leading to failures in retrieving relevant information. Voyage’s embedding models have best-in-class retrieval accuracy, which translates to the end-to-end response quality of RAG systems.”

Lending weight to those bold claims is an endorsement from OpenAI chief rival Anthropic; an Anthropic support doc describes Voyage’s models as “state of the art.”

“Voyage’s approach uses vector embeddings trained on the company’s data to provide context-aware retrievals,” Ma said, “which significantly improves retrieval accuracy.”

Ma says that Palo Alto-based Voyage has just over 250 customers. He declined to answer questions about revenue.

In September, Voyage, which has around a dozen employees, closed a $20 million Series A round led by CRV with participation from Wing VC, Conviction, Snowflake, and Databricks. Ma says that the cash infusion, which brings Voyage’s total raised to $28 million, will support the launch of new embedding models and will let the company double its size.