Hi all, hope everyone is doing great! I wanted to write about NVIDIA and their incredible market gains over the past year, but honestly, your feed will probably be full of it, so I want to save it for later! Two stories for you today :)

Gemini under public scrutiny!

Last week I praised Google for announcing an upgraded Long Context Window for Google Gemini 1.5 Pro, but a series of public scrutiny has made Google pause its artificial intelligence tool Gemini’s ability to generate images of people.
My X (I can’t fake this, it’s still Twitter for me!) feed was full of posts around this subject!

Users were asking Gemini to generate images of people in historical contexts, such as a German fighter in 1944 or the Pope - Gemini was consistently generating images that showed people of color in place of White people.

This is after Open AI’s Dall-E model was criticized for perpetuating harmful racial and ethnic stereotypes at scale. (read more)

Google’s solution to the problem seems to have backfired, ‘over-diversifying’ it’s image generation results.
Jack Krawczyk, Google’s lead product director for Gemini, reported that Google intentionally designs “image generation capabilities to reflect our global user base” and that the company “will continue to do this for open ended prompts (images of a person walking a dog are universal!).”

This is not the first time that Google has suffered with their Gemini product. In February, not long after introducing Bard (now Gemini), Google’s share price briefly dipped after a demo video of the tool showed it producing a factually inaccurate response to a question about the James Webb Space Telescope.

A look at the past: Entertainment in the sky

I am a young guy, but I still managed to catch the era where I’ve sat on a plan and thought ‘this is not right, my seat and everyone else’s is missing the little TV screen’… A couple seconds after, I would realize that I was stuck with one of those big overhead TVs for a 10 hour flight!
If you are lucky enough to have no clue what I am speaking about, this is it:

Nowadays the majority of planes (at least for long haul flights), have a personal screen, with hundreds of shows and movies to watch from, some even have Live TV. I watched the season opener Premier League game live whilst being in the clouds!

However, I look at those screens and think they are definitely outdated and small, the quality is sub optimal and normally you have to wear the headphones provided by the airline, which are nowhere as good as any half-decent ANC-enabled options.

The question becomes: what’s next?

A premium in-flight experience!

A small airlines from the Maldives wants to offer a new experience to it’s customers, the CEO, Tero Taskila said that ‘the inflight experience will build anticipation for passengers before they arrive in the Maldives’…
Who needs to build extra anticipation in a trip to the Maldives?!

Forget those small and low quality plane screens. It is all about having a full on personal cinema whilst up in the clouds… The company announced that they will be using the newly released Apple Vision Pro to create a premium entertainment experience for their customers.
Disney partners with Apple to deliver 3D movies

This is a small premium airline that doesn’t have hundreds of passengers in thousands of flights a day, it won’t be a huge financial burden to acquire 50 or 100 headsets. Scaling this up to a medium/large airline operation would be hard. However, I can definitely see Emirates doing this in their first class ‘suites’. They literally have showers in a plane.
That being said, we will start to see more and more Spatial Computing devices (AVP, Quest3, XReal, etc) in planes as the devices become more mainstream and form factors shrink, passengers will start bringing their own devices!

If I was a business traveler taking flights every week, why would I not want to invest in a personal entertainment device for my flights?

See you next week,
Davi, MetaVisions