THINGS GOT WEIRD by Johan Ronnestam. Week 41

Things Got Weird is a weekly newsletter that helps you stay ahead of the future. Weird news. Real consequences. Every Monday.

Racing towards the singularity. Wow. Makes you dizzy.

So I went to the mountains. Hiking. Fly fishing. Few fish in the streams. Even fewer headlines in AI.

Well. Except OpenAI's DevDay. That one went off. Hello Dots!

For once, we can keep up. Enjoy it. The abundant future is back next week.

Let's get weird.

1. OpenAI Launches More Than Twenty Things at DevDay and a Cartoon Bubble Steals the Show

Hmm. A cartoon bubble that works while you sleep. I like it... I think!

OpenAI's DevDay, its big yearly event for developers, was a firework. Cheaper models. Faster models. ChatGPT rebuilt as a shared office for people and agents. A fitting room too. But the star was Dots. Agents with their own computer that keep working on your goal while you sleep. Unless you are a Pro user in Europe. Then you wait.

A chatbot answers. A dot keeps going.

If you read my Future Impact #2, you saw this coming. Now it has a name. And a face.

For twenty years we designed for people who click. Now we design for agents that act. Your next visitor might not have eyes. It has a goal, a budget and zero patience. Sam calls it a new Renaissance. I call it a new customer.

Exciting? Absolutely. Fair to Europe? Not yet.

What will your customer's agent find out about your brand today?

2. Starship Finally Reaches Orbit and Google Turns Space Into a Server Room

Rockets. With fire. And a server room.

Starship reached orbit for the first time this week, and all 26 satellites it carried got in touch with the network the same day. A few days later Google sent four AI chips into orbit. The plan: think for about fifteen minutes at a time, then cool down.

Same, Google. Same.

Oh, and a few engines quit along the way. That's the deal. If you want true innovation, you have to budget for mishaps.

Ten years ago this was science fiction. Today it is a launch schedule. Aim higher. Prototype the future. Too early? Probably. Too early to ignore? Definitely not.

Question: What if? Think thirty years ahead. The answer might be your next revolutionary mission.

3. Meta Lets Anyone Build Its AI Agent Into a Gadget

Pure maker energy.

Meta released free, open tools so anyone can build its AI agent, Muse, into a gadget. A screen. A TV stick. Whatever is on your workbench. To get people started, Meta made 5,000 small Home Link devices that connect Muse to the speakers and TVs at home. Free for Muse subscribers. In the US only. Europe, once again, gets to watch.

OpenAI gives its agent a desk. Meta gives it a body > Meta Gadgets.

Apple builds walls. Meta just handed out bricks. When anyone can put an assistant inside anything, the best product ideas might not come from your R&D team. They come from your fans. At night. With a soldering iron.

Which of your customers love you enough to improve your product, and have you ever asked them?

4. Boston Dynamics Builds a Better Hand and Decides We Were Born With One Finger Too Many

Count your fingers. Five. Boston Dynamics says one too many.

Atlas got a new hand with four fingers, built for drills and nail guns. Not for handshakes. And the company is aiming for a payback time under two years.

Nature gave us five. Engineering says four will do. Cartoons knew it all along.

That is the whole robot debate in one hand. Stop copying humans. Start copying the job. And "under two years" is a sentence a CFO understands. The robot conversation just moved from the lab to the budget meeting.

Creepy? A little. Clever? Very.

Which process in your company still looks the way it does only because it always has?

5. Shopify Lets You Build Your Store by Talking to It and Makes the Web Agency Nervous

Three weeks for a homepage change. Remember that?

Shopify launched Canvas. Talk to it and your store changes while you watch.

The brief is the build.

When a change costs one sentence, the bottleneck is no longer tech. It is taste. And decisions. The teams that know what they want will ship ten ideas before lunch. Everyone else will still be in the kick off meeting.

Ready for Europe? Not yet, no translations so far. Ready to change how you work? Yes.

Which change to your website has waited the longest, and who is actually blocking it?

6. ElevenLabs Ships a Voice That Laughs on Cue and Drops Its Accent in Translation

A voice that laughs when you tell it to. Slightly creepy. Very useful.

ElevenLabs' new voice model clones a voice and lets it speak another language. Without the accent.

Your CEO now speaks fluent Japanese. In her own voice.

Your logo has rules. Your typeface has rules. Your voice? Probably not. That just became a problem. One voice, every market, every channel, live. Somebody needs to decide what your brand actually sounds like. Before a machine does.

Uncanny? A bit. Unavoidable? Completely.

Who in your company decides what your brand sounds like?

7. Figure Melts Its Old Robots in Finland and Gets Arnold to Say Goodbye

I laughed at this one.

Figure retired its old robots by lowering them into molten steel at a Finnish foundry. Thumbs up all the way down. Terminator 2 style. Arnold posted: "Hasta la vista, F.02."

Most companies hide the end of a product. Figure made it the trailer.

Every company kills products. Quietly. In a footnote. Figure turned scrap into a film people actually wanted to watch. The end of something can be a story. Maybe your best one.

What are you retiring this year that deserves a better goodbye?

THINGS NOT TOO WEIRD, BUT STILL WORTH READING

• Stockholm's Mojang and Merlin are building the world's first Minecraft hotel and Minecraft rollercoaster outside London. Opens 2027.
• Audible now lets you talk to the characters in the middle of the book. Start with Dracula's servant.
• Acne Studios turned thirty and put the Vasa, the Swedish warship that sank on its first trip in 1628, on a Paris runway. Bold birthday.
• ANREALAGE sent six dresses down a Paris runway that change colour on command.
• BMW made its electric 3 Series cheaper than the petrol flagship.
• Helsingborg's Öresundskraft is building carbon capture and will ship the CO2 to permanent storage under the North Sea. A first for a waste plant in the EU.

Seven ways to supercharge your Monday

• Ask ChatGPT, or your favourite AI, what it knows about your brand. Then imagine an agent buying from you based only on that answer.
• Pick one task your team does every week. Picture it done by AI for almost nothing. What would your people do instead?
• Call one of your most loyal customers. Ask what they would change if they could build it themselves.
• List three processes nobody has questioned in years. Kill one.
• Find the website change that has waited the longest. Make it happen this week.
• Write three sentences about how your brand should sound. If you can't, that's your answer.
• Pick something you are shutting down this year. Plan a goodbye worth sharing.

This week the future went fishing. Next week it is back at full speed.

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With love Johan

Johan Ronnestam is a Swedish futurist, entrepreneur and keynote speaker. He helps leaders and brands grow in an AI-shaped world. ronnestam.com