THINGS GOT WEIRD by Johan Ronnestam. Week 40

What a week...once again :D

Sweden built the fastest Swedish transcription on the planet and gave it away. Meta squeezed ten years of VR into 100 grams. Then put your AI on a keyring and handed it your wallet. Adidas moved world record tech onto a shelf you can reach. A humanoid clocked in at a car factory. And Bentley hired musicians to give a silent car a heartbeat.

Six stories. One pattern. The future is now.

We start at home, because Sweden did something world class this week and almost nobody noticed.

Let's get weird.

1. Klang Transcribes an Hour of Swedish in One Second and Gives It Away

Let me be proud for a second. Just a second.

A Swedish company called Klang released a model this week. Pianissimo. It listens to Swedish and writes it down. Dialects and all.

An hour of audio. One second. A 4.5 per cent error rate, and around 60 times faster than the best open Swedish option we had.

Then they gave it away. Weights open. Free. And it runs on Swedish servers that keep nothing.

Fastest in the world at Swedish. Price: zero.

Quick correction, because I have already seen this reported wrong. This is not a chatbot. It turns speech into text. Which is exactly why it matters. It is not a product. It is plumbing.

And plumbing is where sovereignty actually lives. Every company I talk to has something stuck because the recording was not allowed to leave the country. Customer calls nobody listens to. Board meetings nobody can search. Years of interviews in a drawer. All of it readable now, at home, faster than anywhere else on earth... so what have you left undone because the data was not allowed to travel?

Small news? Looks it. Big deal? Enormous.

What is sitting unsearchable in your company because nobody could transcribe it safely?

2. Meta Ships VR Glasses So Light the Computer Had to Move Out

I have written off a lot of headsets. This is the first one I would wear on a train.

Meta VR Glasses. 100 grams. A deck of cards on your face. A 5K screen inside, and the first VR device ever certified IMAX Enhanced. Cinema and live sport. Properly.

$1,299. Spring 2027.

How did they pull it off? They took the computer out. Chip, battery and storage now sit in a little puck in your pocket, on a thin optical cable.

Ten years of VR. The breakthrough was subtraction.

That beats any spec sheet. VR never failed on graphics. It failed because you looked ridiculous, your neck hurt, and nobody could wear it long enough to finish a film. At 100 grams it stops being a helmet. It becomes eyewear. Add cinema certification and this is the first version a normal person might actually want... so what happens to every screen you ever paid for when the best one is the one you wear?

Oh, and one more thing from the hands on. The reviewer put his hands flat on a table and a keyboard appeared under them. Meta calls it Surface Keyboard. Your kitchen table is now hardware.

Ready? Not until 2027. Convincing? For the first time, yes.

What would you build if every customer had a cinema on their face?

3. Meta Builds a Tamagotchi for Your AI, Then Hands It Your Wallet

I laughed. Then I stopped laughing.

Meta also showed the Muse Charm. Meta calls it "a delightful and fun device built for you to talk and interact with your Muse". What it actually is: a thing that hangs on your keyring. Tiny screen. Animated face. Microphone, speaker, and a fingerprint sensor on the side. December. No price yet.

Everybody reached for the same word within the hour. Tamagotchi.

Except this one shops. Muse is getting its own email address. Meta said it beautifully plainly: "it will naturally need its own email address." It can reach the whole Shopify catalogue and pay with Shop Pay.

And then Amazon slammed the door. A pop up appeared: "Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use."

A keyring pet. With a face, an inbox and a payment method. And the world's biggest shop already locked it out.

We spent twenty years making assistants invisible. Meta just gave one a face, a body and a pocket. That changes what loyalty means. You do not bond with a text box. You absolutely bond with a little character living on your keys... so if your customer's assistant has a personality, who is writing your brand's?

Silly? Looks it. Serious? Completely.

Would you let a customer's agent buy from you tomorrow, and who decides?

4. Adidas Puts Its World Record Technology in a Shoe You Can Buy

You will mostly find me in the deep forests. But when I give keynotes I occasionally jump into my On Cloudmonsters and head out on asphalt. Yes, that On. Last week's football story.

So this one caught my eye. Who knows, maybe it would speed up my sightseeing runs.

Adidas dropped the Adizero Adios Pro 5 this week. It carries ENERGYRIM from the extreme Evo line, where one single carbon frame replaces the separate rods they used before. 12 per cent lighter, 23 grams off, and 9 per cent more energy back than the Pro 4 before it. Straight from record attempt to shop floor.

Those numbers are Adidas' own, so weigh them accordingly.

The tech built to chase a world record now comes in your size.

What excites me is the shrinking gap. Elite lab to shop floor is down to about one product cycle. Which turns top athletes from a marketing channel into a development team. More expensive. Way more credible... so who is the most extreme user of your product, and why are they not in the room when you design it?

Marketing? Partly. Real? Also yes.

Who pushes your product harder than anyone, and when did you last call them?

5. Boston Dynamics Moves Atlas Into Hyundai's Factory, Not Its Lab

Robots have been demoing for a decade. This week one of them started a shift.

Boston Dynamics opened a training centre inside Hyundai's car plant in Georgia. Not a lab. A real floor, with real people on it. Atlas is learning logistics and parts sequencing, with assembly work planned by 2030. And Hyundai says it wants 25,000 of them across its plants.

The humanoid got an apprenticeship.

One eyebrow stays up. 25,000 is an intention, not a delivery note.

But look at what that factory now is. A place that makes cars, a pile of training data, and a school. All at once. Every move a worker makes is teaching material. So the question is not who builds the best robot... it is who owns the room where robots learn.

Early? Yes. Serious? Completely.

What does your company know how to do that nobody ever wrote down?

6. Bentley's First Electric Car Comes With a Viola Player Mimicking a V8

Bentley did this backwards. And I love it.

Back in July, two months before anyone had seen the car, they told us how it would sound. This week the car finally showed up.

The Bentley Torcal is the brand's first fully electric car. 888 horsepower. The most torque of any Bentley ever. 600 kilometres of range. Lovely numbers. Not the story.

The story is the noise. Bentley had musicians record real drums, a viola and a bass guitar to give a silent car the rhythm of a V8, tied to torque and speed. It is called Bentley Dynamic Symphony.

In Bentley's own words:

"From resting pulse to full-throttle acceleration, the Torcal's human-generated soundtrack provides aural feedback to the driver, underscoring the sense of connection and feedback, rather than simply imitating an engine note."

A 105 year old engine company answered silence by booking a string player.

And notice the order. Feeling first. Product second. That is how you launch something people worry will feel like nothing.

Can you switch it off? Of course you can. That is the smartest detail in the whole car. Because after all, didn't we go electric to go silent? Hmm. You decide.

Gimmick? Could have been. Beautiful? Genuinely.

And oh, on a side note. This is the first Bentley to carry the new Winged B, the biggest change to the logo in the brand's 100 year history, which Dezeen wrote about more than a year ago. Like it?

BONUS. SVENSKARNA OCH INTERNET 2026 LANDED THIS MORNING

Normally I only look at the week that just passed. But Internetstiftelsen released Svenskarna och internet 2026 this morning, the yearly report on how Sweden actually uses the internet, and it is too good to save for next week.

Seven things every Swedish boardroom should know before lunch.

• AI went mainstream in a single year. 62 per cent of Swedes now use AI services like ChatGPT. Last year it was 40. Before that it grew five points a year. This year, 22.
• One brand owns the category. ChatGPT 51 per cent. Copilot 19. Gemini 12. Meta AI 5. In Sweden, AI has a first name.
• Work is split in two. 71 per cent of white collar workers use AI on the job. 33 per cent of manual workers do. And 30 per cent do not know if their employer even allows it. That is a memo waiting to be written.
• Trust is the product. 76 per cent double check what AI tells them. Only 10 per cent trust it fully. The winners will be the ones who make checking easy.
• Google is losing its reflex. 14 per cent of Swedes google less than a year ago, and half of them say AI took over. Your website is no longer the front door.
• The kids are moving. Social media use among primary school children fell from 91 to 80 per cent in one year. AI use among 8 to 19 year olds rose to 68 per cent. And girls now lead, 72 against 65.
• Attention is tired. 80 per cent doomscroll. 44 per cent feel worse afterwards. Half are drawn to a digital detox. Among women aged 20 to 34, three in four feel worse. Whoever gives people their time back wins the decade.

And one for the Tamagotchi story above. 21 per cent of Swedish AI users already see their AI as a person or a friend. Some have named it. "Chattis." Meta is not inventing a behaviour. It is putting a face on one that is already here.

That was the six, plus a bonus. Now the ones that did not make the cut, but kept me reading.

THINGS NOT TOO WEIRD, BUT STILL WORTH READING

• Google straps four AI chips to a rocket next week to see if a data centre works in orbit. The hard part is not computing. It is cooling.
• Cornell built microscopic robots that feel heat, talk to each other and pump liquid with 54 tiny hairs moving in sync. First time the small ones changed their own world.
• McDonald's is selling ads on its drive thru menu boards and wants a billion dollars from it. Your own surfaces are inventory you never priced.
• Lexus handed two electric cars to MSCHF and let them be twisted into sculpture. Then posted it on the corporate newsroom.
• Aftershock built a PC with 70 titanium cherry blossoms that open when it heats up. No motors. The metal just responds. Waste heat as decoration.

Five questions to supercharge your Monday

• Somewhere in your company sits a drawer full of recordings nobody could use. This week that changed. What is in yours?
• Your customer is about to get a cinema on their face. What do you show them first?
• A customer's agent knocks on your checkout. What if you were the first brand in your category to say welcome in?
• Your most extreme user already knows what your next product should be. Have you bought them a coffee yet?
• Everything your best people know how to do can now teach a machine. Where do you put that second pair of hands first?

Last week the future signed a shareholder agreement, skipped the EU and learned to watch bread. This week it spoke perfect Swedish, put a cinema on your face, moved onto a keyring, clocked in for a shift and hired a string quartet. Next week it probably joins a gym.

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With love

Johan

ps. To get in touch or hire Johan for branding, innovation, product development or keynote events – Send me a message or an email (google Johan Ronnestam Creative Studio)