Hey Everyone,
This is Daniel. Together with Matt and a small group of conspirators, we are building Inanimate - a consumer electronics company for the AI Era.
This is Lab Notes, where we share our work and inspirations.
Previously…
Here’s what’s happening in The Lab.
Peer Inside the Design Process
WORKS are our limited-edition, fast-to-market AI devices. We are making them right now, and shipping the first batch in a matter of weeks.
We are committed to being “uncomfortably open” - about the design choices and influences feeding into our products. It’s our small contribution to the public discourse on how we live in a world with agents.
And so, therefore - WORKS in Progress - our video diary.
This week, we take you inside a crucial design workshop with our industrial design partners Alex, Julie, Emilios, and Kiran at Approach Studio.
Wanna join the team?
We need awesome folk to immediately come cook with us.
Is this you? Do you know someone? Please send them our way.
Marketing & Events Producer: Early-to-mid career producer to help spin up and manage a launch event in London for WORKS, and this is just the beginning. Head screwed on, sleeves rolled up.
Visual Designer: An experienced hand with taste and skill who can run a short, sharp multi-day design spike to push the visual universe of Inanimate in a new direction.
UI & UX Designer: Solid web and app designer who can re-design the Inanimate website, build it with Claude/WebFlow, and integrate it with Shopify. This will be a speedrun. Then support development and implementation of a design system into the Inanimate web app.
What’s Happening
Everything! It’s a lot rn.
Shooting WORKS Prototypes: we’ve been shooting our pre-launch videos, leading to the first major pressure-testing of on-device, in-room experience on production components.
OTA (Over-The-Air) Updates: are now live! We can now securely push firmware updates to devices, anywhere in the world.
Developing Preloads: all WORKS come with a default behaviour that we call a “preload”. We’re iterating these across three themes: home, work, and self.
Arc Upgrade: is our app design and development framework that all our agentic devices run. We’ve added a rich animation library and the device UI is starting to look really nice. We’ve gone from Tetris to Mario, basically.
Naming devices: we’ve moved from prototype names (Light P1) through archetypes (Lamp) and now we have market-ready names for all five WORKS.
What else?
Celebrating the launch of Rokk, waiting for the unbreakable bike lock, considering the problematic framing of husband vs. wife agents, and feeling the resonant thrill of a simultaneous design/ code/ shoot session.
Yes, and…
Matt’s grabs the controls this week. Here’s what has been influencing us.
Fruit flies playing video games, which is a weird future
Google Research and partners have mapped every single connection in the brain of a male fruit fly – and released the code.
There’s been a flurry of research and interesting projects (here’s a big list)... but also there are some weird things you can do with a fruit fly sim that runs on your computer.
For example: fly brains are good at spotting and responding to looming things in the visual field, so here’s the fruit fly wired up to play Beat Saber.
Full video in this post on X (@_lyraaaa_, 9 Sept).
ngl I felt that AI future shock seeing these experiments appearing on my feed. It’s not quite consciousness uploading, but on the path.
(Also some ethical qualms which I unpacked over on my blog last week.)
New decision models make intelligence part of the UI
New AI model category just dropped. And it has some great user interface unlocks.
AI lab TypeSafe AI (which, btw, has an awesome website) introduced Jev.
Rather than generating text, like a chat model, it’s a Decision Model (that name from Maggie Appleton).
Simon Willison has a great explainer. You give Jev some input, then you can ask one of three type of question:
Yes/No questions
Choice questions, where the model picks one from a set of provided options
Score questions
Sounds abstract? Kinda, but get this: Jev is insanely cheap and also it responds in less than 150ms.
150ms is magic because then you can integrate intelligence into UIs. (150ms is a special cognitive number because sub 150ms things feel instant.)
My favourite teeny-weeny example is by Gustav Ekerot posted here on X.
You name a folder… it intelligently gets a colour and a badge. Seems so trivial, but why not?
But what really blew my mind is this demo by Jack Cheng (watch the full vid in that post on X).
Jack has taken the classic Put That There demo from MIT in 1979 (YouTube) – this is the demo that showed multimodal, environmental computing, combined pointing and conversational speech (and a big inspiration for the Inanimate room-scale computer).
And then reimplemented it in the browser using Jev. Amazing.
Jev has opened the floodgates… there are now a ton of competitors.
I am totally here for these sub 150ms decision models.
Muse might be the AI agent for the rest of us?
AI agents are hitting the mainstream and that’s pretty cool?
Muse from Meta puts a friendly wrapper on agent superpowers. So it can book your vacation or remind you what your kid has to take into school today or dispute a parking ticket…
It comes with a friendly mascot and a ton of features.
And with Muse Gadgets, they have joined the hardware makers by releasing an SDK for ESP32 devices and Raspberry Pi (reminder: check our Resident - our spin on this). So you can pick up a Waveshare round AMOLED device, or an e-paper display with an ESP32, and wire it up.
It’s fun going through the Project Ideas on that page…
“Give your Muse a color e-ink display. Muse can show a morning briefing, reminders, shopping list, or anything else you think of.”
“A tiny desk buddy for Muse. Press a button to talk, and Muse answers out loud and shows pictures on the color screen.”
And so on.
AI belongs in the real world. Love to see it.
Hey watch this
Let’s finish with a musical instrument made from cogs and belts and 2,000 marbles. You’ll want the sound up for this one. (Can’t see the YouTube Embed? Click here)
Catch you next time.