THINGS GOT WEIRD by Johan Ronnestam. Week 42

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

Hey all. Quick question.

Did you get more done this week than in all of last year?

You read it right. More in a week than in a year. That is the new world.

Me?

Client projects. Hitpin Golf projects. Agents to manage. Golf apps, plus the tools to build them. Goat Audit. A keynote for the other side of the planet. And psst... my latest venture > a new AI agent, launching soon.

Oh, and golf, surf paddle and trail running. Handicap going down.

If your answer was no, this issue is for you. If yes, it is probably still for you.

Let’s get weird.

(Oh, and if you think we are still talking about AI, you are wrong. Trump’s Justice Department now calls it super intelligence. Good luck with that. Ask the Gulf of America.)

1. Google Turns One Sentence Into a Game You Can Actually Play

Okay. This is properly cool.

Google launched Playground, an experimental platform where you create, play and share your own games. Describe a game in a chat. Play it in the browser. No coding. Change the gravity. Swap the hero. Send it to a friend.

A short prompt. A working game. What world are we living in? WOW.

Everyone just became a game maker. Everyone.

Well. Not us here in Europe. Yet.

Playground is US only for now. Meta’s Muse is not here either. And OpenAI’s Dots skipped Europe too. That is a trend I do not like.

Please Europe. Get moving.

2. ChatGPT Stops Answering and Starts Building the Thing You Asked About

Wow. This one is bigger than it looks.

OpenAI rolled out GPT-6 and Intelligent UI to every ChatGPT tier. Ask a question and you get a working tool back. A map. A calculator. A bill splitter. Built on the spot. For you.

The app now lasts exactly as long as the question does.

So your most valuable asset is no longer your website. It is your data. Prices, stock, rules. The parts an AI can build with. We spent twenty years designing pages. Now we supply PARTS.

Exciting? Hugely. Comfortable? Not if your product data is a mess.

If an AI had to build your customer experience from your data alone, what would it find?

3. Claude Builds You a Live Dashboard and Shows You Its Own Homework

I tried it. Wow. Simple. Clear. And not boring at all.

Anthropic launched Claude Dashboards and Claude Motion, both in beta. Ask a question about your company’s data in plain language and get a live dashboard back, with the exact question it asked your data next to every chart. Then let Motion turn your text and charts into a short animated explainer. No AI generated people. Just your own content, moving.

From spreadsheet to movie. In one conversation.

Most people in a company never touch the data. Too hard. Too slow. Too boring. Now anyone can ask it, see it and share it as something people actually watch. That is not a feature. That is data for EVERYONE.

Finished? No, both are in beta. Exciting? Very.

"Hey Claude. Drop offs in the Hitpin customer journey? Show, animate and implement.”

That is my question. What is yours?

4. Natura Puts Five AI Agents on Your Finger and Leaves the Screen at Home

How small...ehh...cool is this?

Natura showed Interface, a 99 dollar ring with a button and a microphone. Press it, say what you need, pick the agent. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and more. No screen. No feed. Preorders open next month.

Five AIs. On your finger. Wow.

For me, that is the real news. A computer filled a room. Then a desk. Then a pocket. Now a finger. Soon...a finger print.

And I bet we will see something like this from Oura soon. They already bought a Finnish startup that reads hand gestures. Go Europe!

Will I miss the screen? Probably. I would likely pair a ring with Even Realities glasses. A tiny screen in the lens. No camera.

So what’s next? Screens in your contact lenses? It has been done. Back in 2022, the boss of Mojo Vision wore a contact lens with a built in screen. The project was shelved a year later. Somebody, please pick it up again.

Smaller? Every year. Smarter? Every week.

5. Mistral Ships a Giant AI From European Soil and Promises to Give It Away

Europe. Finally.

Mistral released Mistral Large 4, nicknamed Le Chonk. A giant model, running on Mistral’s own servers in Europe. In preview now, free to download by the end of the month. And in their own test it comes second of five. They published that themselves. I love the honesty.

A European AI, running in Europe, proudly publishing a test it does not win.

Next time legal asks where your data lives, there is a European answer. Sovereignty stops being a slide. It becomes a purchase decision.

Proud? Yes. Done? Not yet.

If you had to move your AI onto European servers within six months, what would break?

6. Stockholm Hands Out Three Nobels and Every One of Them Is a Tool

I love Nobel week. Every single year.

Three science prizes in three days. Medicine went to a molecular switch for nerve cells, using light to turn single brain cells on and off. Physics went to the IceCube neutrino observatory, a telescope made of a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice. Chemistry went to a tiny chemical imbalance that copies itself, probably the reason life is built the way it is.

Light. Ice. Mirror images. Three ways to get a grip on reality.

Not one of them won for a theory. They won for building a tool that sees what nobody could see. Same in business. The company that builds the instrument takes the market. The company with the best opinion takes a meeting.

What can you not measure in your business today?

7. Norway Moves to Keep AI Glasses Out of Playgrounds and Changing Rooms

Ah, Norway. Someone had to go first.

Norway’s government wants a temporary ban on AI glasses in certain public places. Think schools, playgrounds and changing rooms. Not just filming. Recording sound counts too. It is a proposal, not a law. And not a total ban.

My take? Playgrounds and changing rooms. Yes. Good call.

But let’s not panic. One step too far and the fear spreads. Suddenly they are banned everywhere. That would be a shame. AI glasses can translate a conversation as it happens. Guide you through a city. Help someone who cannot see well read a menu. That is the good stuff, and there is a LOT of it.

And remember the ring? Tech keeps shrinking. Today it is glasses. Tomorrow it is a ring with a microphone. Then something you cannot see at all. Elon already says Neuralink will restore hearing one day, straight to the brain. No ear. No microphone you can spot. A sign on the door will not be enough.

So here is a business idea for free. Build the detector. A small sensor that tells a changing room, a school or a meeting room when something is recording. Someone will. Why not you?

Protect the playground. Keep the future.

THINGS NOT TOO WEIRD, BUT STILL WORTH READING

• Claude sat down inside Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, editing your open file with an approval card for every change.
• Anthropic put 150 million dollars into America’s Genesis Mission, taking Claude to NASA, the NIH and more than fifteen agencies, aimed at fusion and quantum computing.
• It also pointed Claude at power grids, water systems and transport networks with eleven founding partners, among them Rockwell Automation, Hitachi and Dragos.
• The same push gave open source a free vulnerability scanner that has already turned up more than 29,000 candidates. Humans have reviewed about 6,000 of them.
• From 12 November, sustained and needless cruelty towards Claude breaks Anthropic’s usage policy. Ordinary frustration and dark creative work are explicitly fine.
• Claude Haiku 5.5 reads a million tokens for ten cents.
• An astrophysicist used Claude to fill in the third of the ultraviolet sky nobody has ever photographed, and labelled every predicted pixel as predicted.
• OpenAI published 722 AI written maths papers and withdrew three the next day over a sign error.
• Ring’s first smart lock has a hand crank for when the battery dies.
• Amazon built three new tablets and put Google’s app store on them, ending about fifteen years of a walled garden.
• Spotify started selling the software it built for itself, from Backstage to a tool for managing AI coding agents.
• Volvo’s autonomous trucks began hauling paying freight between Dallas and Houston, with an observer still sitting in the driver’s seat.

Seven ways to supercharge your Monday

• Ask any AI to build you a tiny game in the browser. One prompt. Ten minutes. Then sit back and say wow.
• Ask ChatGPT to turn your pricing into a calculator a customer could use. Study what it gets wrong. That is your data problem, in one screen.
• Ask your data the one question you never had time to ask. Then turn the answer into a 30 second animation and show it at your next meeting.
• Count the screens you look at before lunch. Then try one task with your voice only. Feel the future shrink.
• Ask your IT team where your AI data actually lives. If nobody knows, that is your Monday.
• Name something you cannot measure in your business. Book an hour to work out what the gauge would cost.
• Write your rule for AI glasses in three sentences. Where they are welcome. Where they are not. And why.

Last week you got more done than in a year. This week AI shrank to a ring. Next week? Probably both.

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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