Weekly news and stories covering everything from the Fashion System, Investment, and AI to WEB3 and Crypto that truly matter in Metaverse Fashion.
THE DIGITAL FASHION WEEK FROM A METAVERSE PERSPECTIVE | [METAPHYSICS]
Alexis Beck for Metaverse Fashion MAGAZINE
💡 In addition to the main event held at Canvas 3.0 in the Westfield World Trade Center, New York, which saw a relatively modest turnout, Pixel Canvas—a Metaverse platform developed by the LA-based immersive experience company—provided a virtual portal showcasing the event. While we await official attendance figures, the Metaverse portal hints at a potential increase in overall participation.
🔗 Finding the link to the Metaverse streaming was a bit tricky. The official Digital Fashion Week website only provided access to the physical event, but after some LinkedIn exploration around the event page, I was able to locate the Metaverse link. Once approved, I immediately jumped into the experience.
🎮 Despite some initial lag, I quickly accessed the virtual environment, which unfolded as a beautifully rendered, immersive world. As I explored with my avatar, I appreciated the extensive customization options—from lavish winter jackets to vibrant, colorful haircuts. I chose a bold purple winter jacket and attempted to replicate my facial features. The gameplay was surprisingly smooth and user-friendly, which isn’t always the case with B2B Metaverse platforms. However, the camera control felt somewhat unintuitive, especially for those accustomed to third-person games. Nonetheless, the overall experience was promising, suggesting that Metaverse events could attract a wider audience in the future.
📢 “This year’s Digital Fashion Week came together at the last minute. Clare Tattersall and Epic Games London reached out, and we had just three weeks to make it happen. Pixel Canvas was already collaborating with Translucia to bring one of their concepts to life on our platform, as well as working with Xcyte Digital to develop the Metaverse portal." Joey Lee, founder of PixelCanvas explained.
👀 Now that the event has concluded, the Metaverse fashion industry is shifting focus to the upcoming London Digital Fashion Week, set for September 13th at the Epic Games Innovation Lab. Tickets are already available on lu.ma for £50.
👚 The official Digital Fashion Week website is still accepting applications, raising hopes that more designers and participants will reach a consensus in future events. However, Paris, previously listed as the third city on the site, has been removed from the main page, casting doubt on its inclusion this season.
FULL ARTICLE: https://metaversefashioncouncil.org/magazine/tpost/2ln4ejotk1-the-digital-fashion-week-new-york-from-a
[OP-ED] PHYGITAL FASHION: THE NEW FRONTIER IN THE TEXTILE INDUSTRY | [FASHION SYSTEM]
Ana Machado Silva for Metaverse Fashion MAGAZINE
👚 Fashion is, by nature, an ever-evolving industry, and in recent years, we havewitnessed the emergence of a new trend that is redefining the sector's future:phygital fashion. As a 3D designer and founder of Fia Machado, a phygital fashionbrand, which focuses on creating phygital clothing while collaborating with premiumand luxury brands to accelerate their digital transitions, I witness daily how thefusion of the physical and digital worlds opens doors to a new era of innovation,sustainability, and personalization. With a few years of experience in this field, it isclear to me that all textile brands, regardless of their size or market, must integratedigital fashion elements into their production processes to stay competitive andprepared for the future.
🦄 Phygital Fashion is the merging of physical garments with digital technologies, which can be translated through experiences such as augmenter reality (AR), and digital assets like NFTs. In today's environment, where the metaverse and the digital experiences are increasingly relevant, brands are exploring ways to make their pieces accessible in both physical and virtual spaces. An example of this is digital garments that consumers can wear on avatars in the Metaverse or through AR filters to try visually before purchasing the physical version.
👾 As a Gen Z, a generation already immersed in digital from an early age, I believe thisfusion is not only natural but essential. The way we consume fashion has changeddrastically, and newer generations want more than just clothes; they seek immersive,personalized, and sustainable experiences.
👻 In traditional fashion, the production cycle can be lengthy, involving multiple phases of sampling and adjustments. However, digital fashion allows many of these steps to be optimized and accelerated through 3D visualization. Instead of creating multiple physical samples, a designer can develop pieces virtually, test different design variations, and even make real-time adjustments based on consumer feedback, all in a digital environment.
🤖 I firmly believe that the future of fashion lies in the integration of digital processes at every stage of production and in the use of these technologies to create a more sustainable, inclusive, and personalized industry. Brands that adapt to this new reality will be well-positioned to lead the sector in the coming years. The era of phygital fashion has arrived, and all brands must embrace this revolution to secure their place in the future.
GOOGLE'S AI-POWERED ASK PHOTOS FEATURE BEGINS US ROLLOUT
TechCrunch
📌 First announced at Google’s I/O developer conference this May, Google Photos’ AI-powered search feature, “Ask Photos,” is rolling out to users starting Thursday. The feature, which allows users to ask the AI to find photos using more complex queries, will initially be available in “early access” to select customers in the U.S. before expanding to a wider user base.
🤖 Powered by Google’s Gemini AI model, Ask Photos lets users search their photos using natural language queries that leverage the AI’s understanding of their photo’s content and other metadata. Previously, Google Photos users could search for particular people, places or things in their photos, but the AI upgrade will allow them to ask a larger variety of questions, including those that require a deeper understanding of the photos.
👾 For example, as Google suggested during I/O, you could ask for the “best photo from each of the National Parks I visited.” The AI uses a variety of signals to determine what’s the “best” of a given set, including things like lighting, blurriness and lack of background distortion, among other things. It would then combine that with its understanding of the geolocation of the photos to find those taken at National Parks.
💥 Google said the feature could be used for more than just photo retrieval alone; users would also be able to ask questions to get helpful answers. For instance, a parent could ask Google Photos which themes they had used for their child’s last four birthdays. The AI would be able to analyze party photos and determine if a theme was involved, like “mermaid,” “princess,” “superhero” or anything else. It could then tell the parent when those themes were last used.
📱 To access Ask Photos, select U.S. users will be able to find the feature within Google Labs, as it’s still in the experimental phase. The company says the feature’s development is guided by its AI Principles, and the private data in Photos will never be used for ad targeting. However, Google employees may review users’ queries to help improve the AI over time. The AI’s answers will not be reviewed by humans, unless the user reaches out for support, to provide feedback, or to report abuse or harm.
ROBLOX AIMS FOR 10% OF $180 BILLION GAMING CONTENT MARKET
Bloomberg
📢 Roblox Corp. Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder David Baszucki announced a new goal for 10% of the global video-game content revenue to flow through the company’s popular gaming platform.
🤝 At the Roblox developer conference Friday, Baszucki said the company will do this by working with tech giants such as Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. Right now, the gaming market supports $180 billion in content revenue yearly, he said.
🎶 Roblox announced a new partnership with Shopify Inc. that will let users sell physical products through digital Roblox experiences. The company also revealed plans for a new program to price paid-access experiences on desktop versions in real currency, not just in Robux, that will give creators a higher share of the resulting revenue.
🎮 Roblox, one of the most popular gaming apps ever especially with kids, is accessible across consoles, smartphones, tablets and PCs. Every day, 79 million people log on to play its mix of user-created games. Over the last year, Roblox paid out over $800 million to its community of game developers, Baszucki said.
🎯 On Friday, Baszucki said he expects that Roblox will succeed at capturing 10% of gaming content revenue when it reaches 300 million daily active users. Baszucki has a long-held ambition for Roblox to reach 1 billion daily active users
GUCCI-OWNER KERING SLUMPS TO 2017 LOW ON CHINA DEMAND FEARS | [FASHION SYSTEM]
The Business of Fashion
📉 Kering SA’s stock plunged to a seven-year low on Monday, with analysts downgrading the Gucci owner amid concerns over weak demand in China, marking a sharp decline in the luxury sector.
👾 French fashion designer Kering SA slumped to a seven-year low on worries about demand in China, with the Gucci brand owner among the worst-hit stocks in the recent luxury-sector selloff. Kering fell as much as 4.3 percent on Monday, the most in about seven weeks, as analysts at Barclays Plc cut their recommendation on the stock to underweight from ‘equalweight.’
🗣 “Gucci appears particularly hard hit by the Chinese slowdown,” Barclays analysts including Carole Madjo wrote in a note to clients. Consumers in China are being more selective in the current economic environment, focusing on brands with even higher levels of desirability or exclusivity, they said.
💵 Kering’s stock has tumbled 43 percent this year, putting it on course for its worst annual return since the global financial crisis, as the company grapples to turn around the Gucci brand after appointing a new designer. The shares traded down 3.9 percent at €227.15 as of 1:45 PMin Paris, losing more than €1 billion in market value on Monday.
💥 Analysts at RBC Capital also downgraded their rating on Kering on Monday, cutting the stock to sector perform from outperform. Just six analysts now have buy-equivalent ratings, down from a peak of 23 buys in 2022, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. A further 21 analysts currently have hold ratings, while five view Kering as a sell.
APPLE PUNTS ON AI | [SINGULAIRTY]
TechCrunch
📱 It was reasonable to expect that Apple would do with AI what it has done before with so many features and apps: wait, take notes and then redefine. But though it has filed off some of the sharper edges of the controversial technology, the company seems to have hit the same wall as everyone else: Apple Intelligence, like other AIs, doesn’t really do anything.
🤖 Well, it does do something. A few things, in fact. But like other AI tools, it seems to be an incredibly computationally demanding shortcut for ordinary tasks. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially as inference — that is, performing the actual text analysis, generation, etc. — becomes efficient enough to move to the device itself.
✅ It was billed as much more, however. Tim Cook told us at the outset of Monday’s “Glowtime” event that Apple Intelligence’s “breakthrough capabilities” will have “an incredible impact.” Craig Federighi said it will “transform so much of what you do with your iPhone.”
The capabilities: Rephrase snippets of text; Summarize emails and messages; Generate fake emoji and clip art; Find pictures of people, locations, and events; Look up things
❓ Any of those feel like a breakthrough to you? There are countless writing helpers. Summary capability is inherent to nearly every LLM. Generative art has become synonymous with a lack of effort. You can trivially search your photos this way across any number of services. And our “dumb” voice assistants were looking up Wikipedia entries for us a decade ago.
❌ There’s a bizarre mismatch between how commonplace these AI capabilities are becoming, and how bombastic the descriptions of them are. Apple has become increasingly prone to the kind of breathless promotion it once showed up with its restraint and innovation. Monday’s event was among the least exciting in recent years, but the language was, if anything, more extravagant than usual.
⛑ Like the other AI providers, then, Apple is participating in the multi-billion-dollar game of make-believe that these models are transformative and groundbreaking — even if almost no one finds them to be so. Because who could justify spending as much as these companies have when the result is that you can do the same things you did five years ago?AI models may be legitimately game changing in certain areas of scientific research, including some coding tasks, perhaps materials and structural design, and possibly (though perhaps not for the better) in media.
💡 But if we are to trust our eyes and thumbs, rather than Cook and Federighi’s reality distortion hour, it sure looks like the features we’re supposed to be excited about don’t do much that’s useful at all, let alone something revolutionary. Ironically, Apple’s announcement has failed to provide AI its “iPhone moment.”
DEMAND FOR AI GIRLFRIENDS IS ON THE RISE | [SINGULARITY]
Forbes
🤖 Popular large language models continue to produce racist stereotypes, specifically against speakers of the African American English (AAE) dialect, according to a new study by Stanford University's Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and the Allen Institute for AI. Despite efforts to add guardrails and limit the models from creating harmful content, systems like OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 and Google’s T5 model demonstrated “covert racism” while making decisions related to employment, legal or academic matters, the study found.
💭 In different experimental situations, the LLMs were more likely to give speakers of African American English lower prestige jobs, describe them as “lazy,” “stupid” and “dirty” or even determine they should be convicted of a crime compared to speakers of Standard American English.
“This study suggests that instead of steady improvement, the corporations are playing whack-a-mole – they’ve just gotten better at the things that they’ve been critiqued for,” Stanford researcher Pratyusha Ria Kalluri said.
💵 Safe Superintelligence, an AI startup cofounded by OpenAI cofounder and former Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised $1 billion in capital from marquee investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global and SV Angel, Reuters reported. The company, which aims to build safe AI systems that can outperform humans at certain cognitive abilities such as executing complex tasks, is now valued at $5 billion. Also notable: enterprise AI search platform Glean has raised $260 million at a $4.6 billion valuation.
👬 “AI girlfriend” applications are becoming increasingly popular worldwide, with more than 144,000 monthly searches for the term, according to Tools for Humans, a company that tracks popularity of AI tools and use cases. CEO Alec Chambers told Forbes that people, from teenagers to older men, are chatting with these AI girlfriends, with some using such tools as a replacement for relationships with human beings or to deal with loneliness. “[The apps] are an infinite generator. People can spend endless amounts of time on it,” CEO Alec Chambers said.
MEET THE FIRST GREEK DIGITAL MODEL AIKO PAPPAS | [SINGULAIRTY]
Alexis Beck for Metaverse Fashion MAGAZINE
🤖 aiko pappas is a greek AI model and influencer passionate by fashion, travel and fitness. Despite being a young influencer, she has already attracted much attention from Greek media and aims to gain even more fame and celebrity in the future. Aiko lives on the island of Crete, the legendary island, home of Zeus the father. She resides there with her creator in a sunny and warm climate. Aiko already had the chance to shine on greek television by giving an interview on her experience being an AI model.
🗣 “One of my proudest moments was my television interview alongside my creator, and I’ve also had the honor of being a keynote speaker at Greece’s largest event for artificial intelligence and fashion. There, I spoke alongside renowned names in the Metaverse, including Costantino Roselli said Aiko Pappas.
📈 As Aiko starts to gain popularity in Greece, she already aims to becoming a worldly-renowned star in a young and very dynamic AI-influencers industry. Despite being relatively young, the industry already has a few well-established leaders such as Lil Miquela, an LA-based brazilian-american Instagram celebrity already gathering an audience of 3 million followers. When asked to share some thoughts on Lil-Miquela’s success story, Aiko answered:
💭 I have immense admiration for Lil Miquela and her journey. She has become a role model for every digital figure, carving out a path that any digital model, including myself, would aspire to follow. The way she has seamlessly blended technology with a human touch is truly inspiring. t would be a great honor to collaborate with Lil Miquela. We both represent the new digital era, and I believe our collaboration could result in innovative projects that push the boundaries of fashion and technology."
HOW AI IS POWERING ON-DEMAND FASHION | [FASHION SYSTEM]
WWD
🤖 Artificial intelligence’s takeover of fashion seems undeniable, with algorithms and bots driving supply chains, demand forecasting, product design, marketing, customer service chats and more. And yet, one of the most exciting aspects of AI isn’t what it can do, but how it elevates other technologies and experiences. Like finally making on-demand fashion feasible. In fact, the new Resonance One platform, which just debuted this month, couldn’t have happened without AI, cofounders Lawrence Lenihan and Christian Gheorghe told WWD.
🗣 “The entirety of the AI that’s weaved through the entire platform is now being used to help the brand,” Gheorghe explained. “The tutorial now allows them to ask the One AI to walk them through the various things that they can do in the platform. “It exposes things, like ‘create your first style’ or the new products, integrate your Shopify store. You can also use the interactive aspect to ask questions and be guided on what you can do next.”
🤖 The other stand-out aspect of Resonance One is its blend of advanced technology in the design process with a novel production method that can print textures, colors and more directly onto the fabrics.But make no mistake: This is no T-shirt screen-printing situation. In a demonstration shown to WWD, Resonance One’s technology created a car coat. From the sewing and trims to the print quality, the physical item accurately reflected the colors and textures chosen.
🦄 In a demonstration shown to WWD, Resonance One’s technology created a car coat. From the sewing and trims to the print quality, the physical item accurately reflected the colors and textures chosen. Whether that’s true for all pieces remains to be seen, but if it can maintain that level of quality, it’s easy to see how brands may flock to this type of tool.
🏭 More than 30 brands have been trying out this new iteration of the platform in a closed testing phase that included Rebecca Minkoff, The Kit., JCRT, Tucker, MaisonPrivee, Freedom Ecowear, Nothing2Wear and others, including several designers from the company’s Amplify accelerator program. Their feedback appears evident in the initial design and editing feature itself.
👨🔬 The interface wasn’t geared for engineers, but real-world designers, with a step-by-step process similar to a WYSIWYG — or “what you see is what you get” — interface. This allows the user to see their creation as it takes shape. The AI factors in here too, accurately reflecting the impact of the choices, as well as helping brands understand how well their designs do in the marketplace and how each design decision impacts cost, offering a heightened level of transparency.
OPRAH JUST HAD AN AI SPECIAL WITH SAM ALTMAN AND BILL GATES - HERE ARE THE HIGHLIGHTS | [SINGULAIRTY]
TechCrunch
🗣 Oprah noted in prepared remarks that the AI genie is out of the bottle, for better or worse, and that humanity will have to learn to live with the consequences. “AI is still beyond our control and to a great extent…our understanding,” she said. “But it is here, and we’re going to be living with technology that can be our ally as well as our rival … We are this planet’s most adaptable creatures. We will adapt again. But keep your eyes on what’s real. The stakes could not be higher.”
💥 Altman, Oprah’s first interview of the night, made the questionable case that today’s AI is learning concepts within the data it’s trained on. “We are showing the system a thousand words in a sequence and asking it to predict what comes next,” he told Oprah. “The system learns to predict, and then in there, it learns the underlying concepts.” Many experts would disagree. AI systems like ChatGPT and o1, which OpenAI introduced on Thursday, do indeed predict the likeliest next words in a sentence. But they’re simply statistical machines — they learn data patterns.
🤖 As was bound to happen in a special about AI, the subject of deepfakes came up. To demonstrate how convincing synthetic media is becoming, Brownlee compared sample footage from Sora, OpenAI’s AI-powered video generator, to AI-generated footage from a months-old AI system. The Sora sample was miles ahead — illustrating the field’s rapid progress. “Now, you can still kind of look at pieces of this and tell something’s not quite right,” Brownlee said of the Sora footage. Oprah said it looked real to her. The deepfakes showcase served as a segue to an interview with Wray, who recounted the moment when he first became familiar with AI deepfake tech.
💭 For a techno-optimistic change of pace, Oprah interviewed Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who expressed a hope that AI will supercharge the fields of education and medicine. “AI is like a third person sitting in [a medical appointment,] doing a transcript, suggesting a prescription,” Gates said. “And so instead of the doctor facing a computer screen, they’re engaging with you, and the software is making sure there’s a really good transcript.”
One recent study demonstrated that speech recognition systems from leading tech companies were twice as likely to incorrectly transcribe audio from Black speakers as opposed to white speakers. Other research has shown that AI systems reinforce long-held, untrue beliefs that there are biological differences between Black and white people — untruths that lead clinicians to misdiagnose health problems.
Weekly news and stories covering everything from the Fashion System, Investment, and AI to WEB3 and Crypto that truly matter in Metaverse Fashion.
THE DIGITAL FASHION WEEK FROM A METAVERSE PERSPECTIVE | [METAPHYSICS]
Alexis Beck for Metaverse Fashion MAGAZINE
💡 In addition to the main event held at Canvas 3.0 in the Westfield World Trade Center, New York, which saw a relatively modest turnout, Pixel Canvas—a Metaverse platform developed by the LA-based immersive experience company—provided a virtual portal showcasing the event. While we await official attendance figures, the Metaverse portal hints at a potential increase in overall participation.
🔗 Finding the link to the Metaverse streaming was a bit tricky. The official Digital Fashion Week website only provided access to the physical event, but after some LinkedIn exploration around the event page, I was able to locate the Metaverse link. Once approved, I immediately jumped into the experience.
🎮 Despite some initial lag, I quickly accessed the virtual environment, which unfolded as a beautifully rendered, immersive world. As I explored with my avatar, I appreciated the extensive customization options—from lavish winter jackets to vibrant, colorful haircuts. I chose a bold purple winter jacket and attempted to replicate my facial features. The gameplay was surprisingly smooth and user-friendly, which isn’t always the case with B2B Metaverse platforms. However, the camera control felt somewhat unintuitive, especially for those accustomed to third-person games. Nonetheless, the overall experience was promising, suggesting that Metaverse events could attract a wider audience in the future.
📢 “This year’s Digital Fashion Week came together at the last minute. Clare Tattersall and Epic Games London reached out, and we had just three weeks to make it happen. Pixel Canvas was already collaborating with Translucia to bring one of their concepts to life on our platform, as well as working with Xcyte Digital to develop the Metaverse portal." Joey Lee, founder of PixelCanvas explained.
👀 Now that the event has concluded, the Metaverse fashion industry is shifting focus to the upcoming London Digital Fashion Week, set for September 13th at the Epic Games Innovation Lab. Tickets are already available on lu.ma for £50.
👚 The official Digital Fashion Week website is still accepting applications, raising hopes that more designers and participants will reach a consensus in future events. However, Paris, previously listed as the third city on the site, has been removed from the main page, casting doubt on its inclusion this season.
FULL ARTICLE: https://metaversefashioncouncil.org/magazine/tpost/2ln4ejotk1-the-digital-fashion-week-new-york-from-a
[OP-ED] PHYGITAL FASHION: THE NEW FRONTIER IN THE TEXTILE INDUSTRY | [FASHION SYSTEM]
Ana Machado Silva for Metaverse Fashion MAGAZINE
👚 Fashion is, by nature, an ever-evolving industry, and in recent years, we havewitnessed the emergence of a new trend that is redefining the sector's future:phygital fashion. As a 3D designer and founder of Fia Machado, a phygital fashionbrand, which focuses on creating phygital clothing while collaborating with premiumand luxury brands to accelerate their digital transitions, I witness daily how thefusion of the physical and digital worlds opens doors to a new era of innovation,sustainability, and personalization. With a few years of experience in this field, it isclear to me that all textile brands, regardless of their size or market, must integratedigital fashion elements into their production processes to stay competitive andprepared for the future.
🦄 Phygital Fashion is the merging of physical garments with digital technologies, which can be translated through experiences such as augmenter reality (AR), and digital assets like NFTs. In today's environment, where the metaverse and the digital experiences are increasingly relevant, brands are exploring ways to make their pieces accessible in both physical and virtual spaces. An example of this is digital garments that consumers can wear on avatars in the Metaverse or through AR filters to try visually before purchasing the physical version.
👾 As a Gen Z, a generation already immersed in digital from an early age, I believe thisfusion is not only natural but essential. The way we consume fashion has changeddrastically, and newer generations want more than just clothes; they seek immersive,personalized, and sustainable experiences.
👻 In traditional fashion, the production cycle can be lengthy, involving multiple phases of sampling and adjustments. However, digital fashion allows many of these steps to be optimized and accelerated through 3D visualization. Instead of creating multiple physical samples, a designer can develop pieces virtually, test different design variations, and even make real-time adjustments based on consumer feedback, all in a digital environment.
🤖 I firmly believe that the future of fashion lies in the integration of digital processes at every stage of production and in the use of these technologies to create a more sustainable, inclusive, and personalized industry. Brands that adapt to this new reality will be well-positioned to lead the sector in the coming years. The era of phygital fashion has arrived, and all brands must embrace this revolution to secure their place in the future.
GOOGLE'S AI-POWERED ASK PHOTOS FEATURE BEGINS US ROLLOUT
TechCrunch
📌 First announced at Google’s I/O developer conference this May, Google Photos’ AI-powered search feature, “Ask Photos,” is rolling out to users starting Thursday. The feature, which allows users to ask the AI to find photos using more complex queries, will initially be available in “early access” to select customers in the U.S. before expanding to a wider user base.
🤖 Powered by Google’s Gemini AI model, Ask Photos lets users search their photos using natural language queries that leverage the AI’s understanding of their photo’s content and other metadata. Previously, Google Photos users could search for particular people, places or things in their photos, but the AI upgrade will allow them to ask a larger variety of questions, including those that require a deeper understanding of the photos.
👾 For example, as Google suggested during I/O, you could ask for the “best photo from each of the National Parks I visited.” The AI uses a variety of signals to determine what’s the “best” of a given set, including things like lighting, blurriness and lack of background distortion, among other things. It would then combine that with its understanding of the geolocation of the photos to find those taken at National Parks.
💥 Google said the feature could be used for more than just photo retrieval alone; users would also be able to ask questions to get helpful answers. For instance, a parent could ask Google Photos which themes they had used for their child’s last four birthdays. The AI would be able to analyze party photos and determine if a theme was involved, like “mermaid,” “princess,” “superhero” or anything else. It could then tell the parent when those themes were last used.
📱 To access Ask Photos, select U.S. users will be able to find the feature within Google Labs, as it’s still in the experimental phase. The company says the feature’s development is guided by its AI Principles, and the private data in Photos will never be used for ad targeting. However, Google employees may review users’ queries to help improve the AI over time. The AI’s answers will not be reviewed by humans, unless the user reaches out for support, to provide feedback, or to report abuse or harm.
ROBLOX AIMS FOR 10% OF $180 BILLION GAMING CONTENT MARKET
Bloomberg
📢 Roblox Corp. Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder David Baszucki announced a new goal for 10% of the global video-game content revenue to flow through the company’s popular gaming platform.
🤝 At the Roblox developer conference Friday, Baszucki said the company will do this by working with tech giants such as Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. Right now, the gaming market supports $180 billion in content revenue yearly, he said.
🎶 Roblox announced a new partnership with Shopify Inc. that will let users sell physical products through digital Roblox experiences. The company also revealed plans for a new program to price paid-access experiences on desktop versions in real currency, not just in Robux, that will give creators a higher share of the resulting revenue.
🎮 Roblox, one of the most popular gaming apps ever especially with kids, is accessible across consoles, smartphones, tablets and PCs. Every day, 79 million people log on to play its mix of user-created games. Over the last year, Roblox paid out over $800 million to its community of game developers, Baszucki said.
🎯 On Friday, Baszucki said he expects that Roblox will succeed at capturing 10% of gaming content revenue when it reaches 300 million daily active users. Baszucki has a long-held ambition for Roblox to reach 1 billion daily active users
GUCCI-OWNER KERING SLUMPS TO 2017 LOW ON CHINA DEMAND FEARS | [FASHION SYSTEM]
The Business of Fashion
📉 Kering SA’s stock plunged to a seven-year low on Monday, with analysts downgrading the Gucci owner amid concerns over weak demand in China, marking a sharp decline in the luxury sector.
👾 French fashion designer Kering SA slumped to a seven-year low on worries about demand in China, with the Gucci brand owner among the worst-hit stocks in the recent luxury-sector selloff. Kering fell as much as 4.3 percent on Monday, the most in about seven weeks, as analysts at Barclays Plc cut their recommendation on the stock to underweight from ‘equalweight.’
🗣 “Gucci appears particularly hard hit by the Chinese slowdown,” Barclays analysts including Carole Madjo wrote in a note to clients. Consumers in China are being more selective in the current economic environment, focusing on brands with even higher levels of desirability or exclusivity, they said.
💵 Kering’s stock has tumbled 43 percent this year, putting it on course for its worst annual return since the global financial crisis, as the company grapples to turn around the Gucci brand after appointing a new designer. The shares traded down 3.9 percent at €227.15 as of 1:45 PMin Paris, losing more than €1 billion in market value on Monday.
💥 Analysts at RBC Capital also downgraded their rating on Kering on Monday, cutting the stock to sector perform from outperform. Just six analysts now have buy-equivalent ratings, down from a peak of 23 buys in 2022, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. A further 21 analysts currently have hold ratings, while five view Kering as a sell.
APPLE PUNTS ON AI | [SINGULAIRTY]
TechCrunch
📱 It was reasonable to expect that Apple would do with AI what it has done before with so many features and apps: wait, take notes and then redefine. But though it has filed off some of the sharper edges of the controversial technology, the company seems to have hit the same wall as everyone else: Apple Intelligence, like other AIs, doesn’t really do anything.
🤖 Well, it does do something. A few things, in fact. But like other AI tools, it seems to be an incredibly computationally demanding shortcut for ordinary tasks. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially as inference — that is, performing the actual text analysis, generation, etc. — becomes efficient enough to move to the device itself.
✅ It was billed as much more, however. Tim Cook told us at the outset of Monday’s “Glowtime” event that Apple Intelligence’s “breakthrough capabilities” will have “an incredible impact.” Craig Federighi said it will “transform so much of what you do with your iPhone.”
The capabilities: Rephrase snippets of text; Summarize emails and messages; Generate fake emoji and clip art; Find pictures of people, locations, and events; Look up things
❓ Any of those feel like a breakthrough to you? There are countless writing helpers. Summary capability is inherent to nearly every LLM. Generative art has become synonymous with a lack of effort. You can trivially search your photos this way across any number of services. And our “dumb” voice assistants were looking up Wikipedia entries for us a decade ago.
❌ There’s a bizarre mismatch between how commonplace these AI capabilities are becoming, and how bombastic the descriptions of them are. Apple has become increasingly prone to the kind of breathless promotion it once showed up with its restraint and innovation. Monday’s event was among the least exciting in recent years, but the language was, if anything, more extravagant than usual.
⛑ Like the other AI providers, then, Apple is participating in the multi-billion-dollar game of make-believe that these models are transformative and groundbreaking — even if almost no one finds them to be so. Because who could justify spending as much as these companies have when the result is that you can do the same things you did five years ago?AI models may be legitimately game changing in certain areas of scientific research, including some coding tasks, perhaps materials and structural design, and possibly (though perhaps not for the better) in media.
💡 But if we are to trust our eyes and thumbs, rather than Cook and Federighi’s reality distortion hour, it sure looks like the features we’re supposed to be excited about don’t do much that’s useful at all, let alone something revolutionary. Ironically, Apple’s announcement has failed to provide AI its “iPhone moment.”
DEMAND FOR AI GIRLFRIENDS IS ON THE RISE | [SINGULARITY]
Forbes
🤖 Popular large language models continue to produce racist stereotypes, specifically against speakers of the African American English (AAE) dialect, according to a new study by Stanford University's Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and the Allen Institute for AI. Despite efforts to add guardrails and limit the models from creating harmful content, systems like OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 and Google’s T5 model demonstrated “covert racism” while making decisions related to employment, legal or academic matters, the study found.
💭 In different experimental situations, the LLMs were more likely to give speakers of African American English lower prestige jobs, describe them as “lazy,” “stupid” and “dirty” or even determine they should be convicted of a crime compared to speakers of Standard American English.
“This study suggests that instead of steady improvement, the corporations are playing whack-a-mole – they’ve just gotten better at the things that they’ve been critiqued for,” Stanford researcher Pratyusha Ria Kalluri said.
💵 Safe Superintelligence, an AI startup cofounded by OpenAI cofounder and former Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised $1 billion in capital from marquee investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global and SV Angel, Reuters reported. The company, which aims to build safe AI systems that can outperform humans at certain cognitive abilities such as executing complex tasks, is now valued at $5 billion. Also notable: enterprise AI search platform Glean has raised $260 million at a $4.6 billion valuation.
👬 “AI girlfriend” applications are becoming increasingly popular worldwide, with more than 144,000 monthly searches for the term, according to Tools for Humans, a company that tracks popularity of AI tools and use cases. CEO Alec Chambers told Forbes that people, from teenagers to older men, are chatting with these AI girlfriends, with some using such tools as a replacement for relationships with human beings or to deal with loneliness. “[The apps] are an infinite generator. People can spend endless amounts of time on it,” CEO Alec Chambers said.
MEET THE FIRST GREEK DIGITAL MODEL AIKO PAPPAS | [SINGULAIRTY]
Alexis Beck for Metaverse Fashion MAGAZINE
🤖 aiko pappas is a greek AI model and influencer passionate by fashion, travel and fitness. Despite being a young influencer, she has already attracted much attention from Greek media and aims to gain even more fame and celebrity in the future. Aiko lives on the island of Crete, the legendary island, home of Zeus the father. She resides there with her creator in a sunny and warm climate. Aiko already had the chance to shine on greek television by giving an interview on her experience being an AI model.
🗣 “One of my proudest moments was my television interview alongside my creator, and I’ve also had the honor of being a keynote speaker at Greece’s largest event for artificial intelligence and fashion. There, I spoke alongside renowned names in the Metaverse, including Costantino Roselli said Aiko Pappas.
📈 As Aiko starts to gain popularity in Greece, she already aims to becoming a worldly-renowned star in a young and very dynamic AI-influencers industry. Despite being relatively young, the industry already has a few well-established leaders such as Lil Miquela, an LA-based brazilian-american Instagram celebrity already gathering an audience of 3 million followers. When asked to share some thoughts on Lil-Miquela’s success story, Aiko answered:
💭 I have immense admiration for Lil Miquela and her journey. She has become a role model for every digital figure, carving out a path that any digital model, including myself, would aspire to follow. The way she has seamlessly blended technology with a human touch is truly inspiring. t would be a great honor to collaborate with Lil Miquela. We both represent the new digital era, and I believe our collaboration could result in innovative projects that push the boundaries of fashion and technology."
HOW AI IS POWERING ON-DEMAND FASHION | [FASHION SYSTEM]
WWD
🤖 Artificial intelligence’s takeover of fashion seems undeniable, with algorithms and bots driving supply chains, demand forecasting, product design, marketing, customer service chats and more. And yet, one of the most exciting aspects of AI isn’t what it can do, but how it elevates other technologies and experiences. Like finally making on-demand fashion feasible. In fact, the new Resonance One platform, which just debuted this month, couldn’t have happened without AI, cofounders Lawrence Lenihan and Christian Gheorghe told WWD.
🗣 “The entirety of the AI that’s weaved through the entire platform is now being used to help the brand,” Gheorghe explained. “The tutorial now allows them to ask the One AI to walk them through the various things that they can do in the platform. “It exposes things, like ‘create your first style’ or the new products, integrate your Shopify store. You can also use the interactive aspect to ask questions and be guided on what you can do next.”
🤖 The other stand-out aspect of Resonance One is its blend of advanced technology in the design process with a novel production method that can print textures, colors and more directly onto the fabrics.But make no mistake: This is no T-shirt screen-printing situation. In a demonstration shown to WWD, Resonance One’s technology created a car coat. From the sewing and trims to the print quality, the physical item accurately reflected the colors and textures chosen.
🦄 In a demonstration shown to WWD, Resonance One’s technology created a car coat. From the sewing and trims to the print quality, the physical item accurately reflected the colors and textures chosen. Whether that’s true for all pieces remains to be seen, but if it can maintain that level of quality, it’s easy to see how brands may flock to this type of tool.
🏭 More than 30 brands have been trying out this new iteration of the platform in a closed testing phase that included Rebecca Minkoff, The Kit., JCRT, Tucker, MaisonPrivee, Freedom Ecowear, Nothing2Wear and others, including several designers from the company’s Amplify accelerator program. Their feedback appears evident in the initial design and editing feature itself.
👨🔬 The interface wasn’t geared for engineers, but real-world designers, with a step-by-step process similar to a WYSIWYG — or “what you see is what you get” — interface. This allows the user to see their creation as it takes shape. The AI factors in here too, accurately reflecting the impact of the choices, as well as helping brands understand how well their designs do in the marketplace and how each design decision impacts cost, offering a heightened level of transparency.
OPRAH JUST HAD AN AI SPECIAL WITH SAM ALTMAN AND BILL GATES - HERE ARE THE HIGHLIGHTS | [SINGULAIRTY]
TechCrunch
🗣 Oprah noted in prepared remarks that the AI genie is out of the bottle, for better or worse, and that humanity will have to learn to live with the consequences. “AI is still beyond our control and to a great extent…our understanding,” she said. “But it is here, and we’re going to be living with technology that can be our ally as well as our rival … We are this planet’s most adaptable creatures. We will adapt again. But keep your eyes on what’s real. The stakes could not be higher.”
💥 Altman, Oprah’s first interview of the night, made the questionable case that today’s AI is learning concepts within the data it’s trained on. “We are showing the system a thousand words in a sequence and asking it to predict what comes next,” he told Oprah. “The system learns to predict, and then in there, it learns the underlying concepts.” Many experts would disagree. AI systems like ChatGPT and o1, which OpenAI introduced on Thursday, do indeed predict the likeliest next words in a sentence. But they’re simply statistical machines — they learn data patterns.
🤖 As was bound to happen in a special about AI, the subject of deepfakes came up. To demonstrate how convincing synthetic media is becoming, Brownlee compared sample footage from Sora, OpenAI’s AI-powered video generator, to AI-generated footage from a months-old AI system. The Sora sample was miles ahead — illustrating the field’s rapid progress. “Now, you can still kind of look at pieces of this and tell something’s not quite right,” Brownlee said of the Sora footage. Oprah said it looked real to her. The deepfakes showcase served as a segue to an interview with Wray, who recounted the moment when he first became familiar with AI deepfake tech.
💭 For a techno-optimistic change of pace, Oprah interviewed Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who expressed a hope that AI will supercharge the fields of education and medicine. “AI is like a third person sitting in [a medical appointment,] doing a transcript, suggesting a prescription,” Gates said. “And so instead of the doctor facing a computer screen, they’re engaging with you, and the software is making sure there’s a really good transcript.”
One recent study demonstrated that speech recognition systems from leading tech companies were twice as likely to incorrectly transcribe audio from Black speakers as opposed to white speakers. Other research has shown that AI systems reinforce long-held, untrue beliefs that there are biological differences between Black and white people — untruths that lead clinicians to misdiagnose health problems.
Weekly news and stories covering everything from the Fashion System, Investment, and AI to WEB3 and Crypto that truly matter in Metaverse Fashion.