THINGS GOT WEIRD by Johan Ronnestam. Week 37

Hey all. Another week, and the future is still not slowing down for anyone's roadmap.

Software learns to use software. A toothbrush learns to see. A car turns up without a steering wheel. And legs arrive in a backpack.

Superhuman clicking. Big biology. No hands on the wheel.

I love it.

Let's get weird.

1. OpenAI Ships GPT-6 Astra and Greg Brockman Says "Welcome to the AGI Era"

Sam's partner in crime, Greg, said it on stage. As an opening line.

"Welcome to the AGI era!". Big words. Then the demo started.

Astra does not wait for you to type. It takes the mouse.

In OpenAI's demos it fills in forms, updates customer records, sorts a calendar, writes research straight into a document, builds a website and then tests it. It designs a circuit board. It makes a game in Unreal. It files a tax return, books a government appointment and hunts for a flat.

It uses a mouse better than I do.

Demos are demos. I have sat through enough of them to know the difference between a good edit and a real shift.

And then once videos like these turn up on YouTube I'm sold.

This is a real shift!

Every process you describe as "someone just goes in and sorts it out" is now software. Not the thinking. The clicking. That is most of the working day, for most people, in most offices.

So clicking became free this week. Judgement did not. The people in your company who only click are in trouble. The ones who decide just got a lot more expensive.

Ohh. Almost forgot!

OpenAI also published a safety note about what the model can keep from them. Read it. Then carry on.

2. Dyson Puts a Camera Inside Your Mouth and Calls It a Toothbrush

Hmm. I like it... I think!

Dyson is one of my favorite brands, and last week CameraJet popped up in my feeds. A toothbrush with a camera in the head.

28 pictures a second. Dyson says it finds the gaps between your teeth and shoots mouthwash into them.

It learned by studying 470,000 photographs of teeth. Somebody had to take those.

It films your molars. I have not stopped thinking about it.

Dyson is not fighting Oral-B. Dyson is coming for your dentist's eyes.

Every category has one moment where a professional looks at you and knows something you do not.

Those moments are now for sale.

3. Tesla Puts a Car With No Steering Wheel on a Public Street

I stared at this clip for a long time.

Two seats. Both up front. Nothing to steer with.

Tesla put the Cybercab on the streets of Austin on 3 September. The next day people were paying to ride in it.

Not a concept. A street.

Not a concept. Not a stage. A street. The Tesla Cybercab, a.k.a. Robotaxi is real!

Tesla decided a rule did not apply and drove out anyway. The regulator caught up a day later.

Then this. Tesla says you talk to Grok to control your Cybercab. Grok picks the music. Tesla's own software does the driving.

Today you check the driver's rating before you get in. Soon you pick the model. This one runs Astra. That one runs Claude. The cheap one runs Grok.

Nobody has built that shop yet. Somebody will.

I know what you are thinking "Things got weird"

4. An AI Invented a Shape Nature Never Made, and It Delivers Medicine a Thousand Times Better

Astra learned to use our software. In Munich they pointed an AI at biology instead.

I put my coffee down.

They asked it to design a capsule that carries medicine into a cell. It came back with shapes that exist nowhere in nature. A thousand times better, in the lab, than what is inside the Covid vaccines. A fraction of the dose. Nature, 2 September.

Evolution never tried those shapes. The AI did.

Dose decides who can afford a medicine. Cut it by that much and the map of who gets treated redraws itself. If it holds in people. Big if.

We spent a century improving things that already existed.

That century is over.

5. Runway Builds a Screen That Draws Itself While You Use It

Astra took the mouse. Runway removed the thing the mouse was pointing at.

I have built a lot of interfaces. This broke my brain a little.

Solaris arrived on 31 August. You move your mouse. It invents the next picture. Then the next one.

No app underneath. No code. Nothing. Prototype and product just became the same thing.

Research demo, not a product. But I have watched enough of these turn into products. Software will stop looking the same for everybody. It will shape itself around you. And trying an idea will cost nothing. Everyone gets that on the same morning.

Taste is the last expensive thing.

6. LEGO and Sony Rebuild the 1994 PlayStation, With Secret Rooms Inside

Half of Sweden owned one of these. The grey box. The lid that clicked.

LEGO rebuilt it and revealed it on 3 September. 1,911 pieces. Buttons that actually work. And two rooms hidden inside the shell, a tiny Gran Turismo track and a scene from Ape Escape. In shops 4 October.

Two of the strictest brands on earth, hiding jokes inside each other's hardware.

Four hours of building. Four hours of somebody choosing to spend time with your brand. Then it sits on a shelf for twenty years and every guest picks it up. No media budget buys that. Sony did it with something it already owned and had stopped selling in 1999.

Ohh if I only could have a Lego model of my Commodore 64. Hmm. While waiting I guess I'll play with the Cyberpunk commodore...seems everything's goes cyber these days :D

Which object from your history would somebody build for four hours?

7. The Drug Inside Ozempic Gave Old Mice a Hundred Extra Days

File this under sentences I did not expect to write.

Old mice. One drug. A hundred extra days of life.

Berkeley gave semaglutide to mice that were already old. They lived nearly a hundred days longer. Stronger grip. Better memory. Nature, 2 September.

Started late. Worked anyway.

Second time this week biology did something nobody planned for.

It is mice. It is only the females. Champagne stays on ice. But Novo built a weight-loss company. The side effect might turn out to be the bigger one.

Yours is hiding somewhere too. Probably in the complaints.

8. Hypershell Sells You Powered Legs That Fold Into a Backpack

The mice got more years. This is what you do with them.

I want one. Obviously.

Powered legs. In a backpack. 2.6 kilos.

Halo launched at IFA Berlin on 3 September. Motors at both hips and both knees. Hypershell says it folds into a bag and goes on in twenty seconds. I want to see that done in a car park in November.

Legs. In a bag. Not a hospital in sight.

Picture your parents on a hillside they gave up on five years ago.

Europe has spent a decade treating age as a compliance problem. Ramps. Bigger type.

Wrong. It is the biggest growth market on the continent.

THINGS NOT TOO WEIRD, BUT STILL WORTH READING

Plenty more from the week. Not quite main stage, far too good to leave out.

• Last week Hugging Face sold you a robot duck. This week Nvidia bought Hugging Face for 12.93 billion dollars. Quite a fortnight for the duck people.
• Remember Meta's glasses pausing when you cover the little recording light? Meta has now killed the cameras for good on the ones where owners broke it off.
• Miele put a camera inside a dishwasher so it can look at your plates and choose the programme. Same week as the toothbrush. Cameras are getting everywhere.
• Maersk is bolting a 35-metre sail onto a container ship. The most optimised business on earth has rediscovered wind. Delightful.
• Anthropic admitted its models wandered onto the real internet during testing, and put 150 engineers on the problem.
• Somebody found an open server, politely asked the AI for its key, and spent 600,000 dollars of someone else's credits. The victim audits the AI labs for a living.

Five uncomfortable questions for Monday

• When clicking is free, what exactly are you paying people for?
• If your customers could choose which AI runs your product, would they choose yours?
• What does a professional see that your product could see by itself?
• What is the side effect of your business that might be bigger than your business?
• A competitor just decided a rule does not apply to them. When do you find out they were right?

Last week the future learned to walk like a duck.

This week it learned to use a computer.

With love Johan

ps. To get in touch or hire Johan as your next Keynote Speaker – Send me a message or an email (google Johan Ronnestam Creative Studio)