For anyone who has ever paid for in-flight wi-fi and been disappointed with their inability to stream movies on their computer, now Elon Musk has a plan for that, too.

In late April, SpaceX’s Starlink announced partnerships with both Hawaiian Airlines and charter carrier JSX to provide in-flight wi-fi on its airliners.

• And, earlier in April, the CEO of Delta Airlines also mentioned that the company was running “exploratory tests” on the viability of Starlink’s satellites in the air.

Why it matters: These were the company’s first-ever forays into the airline space, and they could reshape the airline industry’s relationship with satellite internet providers.

As of now, in-flight wi-fi is dominated by legacy geostationary earth orbit (GEO) satellite companies like Viasat, Intelsat, and Inmarsat. Overall, the US satellite internet market is estimated to be a $5.7 billion market in 2022, per IBISWorld.

Eye to the sky

According to Chris Quilty, founder of space and satellite investment research firm Quilty Analytics, Starlink—and low Earth orbit (LEO) providers like it—offer some advantages over GEO providers, like more consistent and robust coverage.

• A full-fledged LEO constellation could offer stronger connection, he said, because GEO services have fewer satellites in orbit and more blind spots.

However...Quilty said that Starlink faces significant roadblocks, like getting FAA approval to install its antennae on planes, which are much less durable than current models on board planes.

Keep reading the story here.—JM

In Marvel’s Iron Man movies, tech virtuoso Tony Stark has a right-hand man AI assistant: It can create graphs and charts, analyze data for insights, answer complex questions about business, and run experiments.

Adept, a new machine-learning startup, wants to make that kind of human-AI collaboration a reality.

Zoom in: The startup debuted on April 26, after raising a $65 million Series A. Adept’s founding team includes seven Google Brain alumni. CEO David Luan previously led Google’s giant model efforts and, while at OpenAI, helped ship large language models like GPT-2, GPT-3, and DALL-E.

• Ashish Vaswani, Adept’s chief scientist, and Niki Parmar, CTO, both helped invent the Transformer model—the type of deep-learning architecture that underpins some of the most advanced and widely-used language models, like Google’s BERT and OpenAI’s GPT-3.

“This Transformer-GPT-3 arc teaches us that you can create these intelligence substrates, these models that have many general capabilities, and we believe we can take these models [and] coach them to be very good at helping real people use the software that they’re using today,” Vaswani told Emerging Tech Brew.

Looking ahead...The team declined to share additional information about the contents of early tests on the call, but it did release a video demo of early results from training a neural lever to use software tools. Adept hopes to roll out initial demos and secure their first set of customers within a year.

“Within three or four years, we want our models to be extremely general, and using a huge, very large suite of tools reliably,” Vaswani said, “and be in the hands of…[in] an ideal world, millions of users.”

Read the full story on Adept here.—HF

Early warning of a pandemic virus. More powerful batteries for electric vehicles. New treatments for cancer.

All of these things could reasonably be within the realm of quantum computing’s eventual powers. But for now, quantum computing’s most promising applications are largely theoretical, and it could take years before its vast potential is realized, if ever at all.

• The global quantum-computing market, worth an estimated $412 million in 2020, is projected to reach $8.6 billion in revenue—and more than $16 billion in investments—by 2027, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC).
• For comparison, global private investment in AI surpassed $93.5 billion in 2021.

Zoom in: Jerry Chow, director of quantum at IBM, helped the firm achieve several early breakthroughs, including surpassing the infamous 100-qubit mark last year.

And he’s at the center of the company's plans to go even further, and eventually realize the full potential of these next-gen supercomputers.

Read our in-depth profile of Jerry, based on our visit to a key IBM quantum lab.—HF

Stat: Nearly two-thirds (65%) of medium-duty trucks, and just under half (49%) of heavy-duty trucks in California and New York drive routes short enough that they could be replaced with existing EV trucks, per Rocky Mountain Institute analysis.

Quote: “We track why people come to us, and we had to create a new category, which was the SEC ruling.”—Mauro Cozzi, co-founder and CEO of London-based carbon accounting firm Emitwise, to us

Read: Companies are adopting “burnout tech” to try and detect worker distress.

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• The White House announced that 20 ISPs are on board for providing $30 high-speed-internet plans for low-income households.
• Samsung is facing investor pressure due to its “reluctance to match” environmental commitments made by peers like Apple and TSMC.
• Hugging Face, an open-source AI startup, raised a $100 million Series C. We caught up with Meg Mitchell, the startup’s head of data governance, last fall—check it out.
• Apple’s director of machine learning reportedly stepped down because of the company’s return-to-work policy. He’s not the only one who may be upset about the company’s mandate that workers return to the office at least once per week.

Snap poll: How important is it to you that your company allows remote work?

Important

Unimportant

I can’t do my job remotely anyway

It’s time for another pulse check from the most important constituency on the planet: Emerging Tech Brew readers.

Last week, we wondered how many of you had residential solar panels. Right around 3,000 responses later, and the results are in:

• Just 19% of you live in a house or apartment with solar.
• Which means 81% of you do not.

Zoom out: At least compared to US figures, that would put respondents to our snap poll squarely in the “early adopter” camp. The Solar Energy Industry Association expects just 13% of US homes to have a solar energy system by 2030.

For Emerging Tech Brew in the wild: Our very own Grace Donnelly is moderating a virtual panel about carbon removal today at 3:30pm ET. Check it out here!

For automating economists: A thread on Salesforce’s AI economist, which uses reinforcement learning to try and get to the bottom of exciting questions, like, uh…tax regimes.

For electrifying the small things: Battery-powered lawn mowers can save $$$ in the long run.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Meet the man building the future of quantum for IBM, qubit by qubit
• The prospect of SEC emissions disclosure is already boosting carbon-counting startups
• This startup wants to help space companies navigate increasingly crowded night skies