This is Daniel. Together with Matt, we are building Inanimate - a consumer electronics company for the AI Era. 

First time here? Welcome! This is Lab Notes, where we share our work and inspirations.

Lots of big milestones since the last update.

It’s been exactly 12 months since, over a takeaway curry and a bottle of red, Matt and I started building Inanimate.

It was called Hawthorn back then. We had a hunch we could design a platform to re-write physical product behaviour on the fly, all prompted with voice and running on a $1 microcontroller. If we got the interactions right, it would feel to the user like magic.

This could open up an entirely new category of devices. We called them Promptable Products. And off the back of this, we could build a pioneering new company. A British Sony for the AI Era.

Well, here we are. One year later. 

We’ve raised some money, built lots of mad prototypes, launched Courier and Resident, and worked with many amazing people. And soon, we’ll be shipping products.

Current goal: standing up a minimum viable consumer electronics company. Thanks for following our journey! 

We just moved into our first dedicated office!

Just like we outgrew our time with the lovely guys at Granola last summer, we outgrew the desks at our co-working space. Swelling piles of electronics and constantly repeated wake words wore thin on our neighbours.

We’re now up-and-running with a demo station, build table, whiteboards, and office speakers!

Chris Scott is joining us for a few months to help us expand the visual universe around Inanimate. Expect to see Chris’s work on the FYP soon!

Work continues with the team at Approach. In the concepting phase, we started with a dizzying range of parameters, but managed to focus down into an exciting short-list of experiments in agentic hardware.

Next, we determine form, design language, and start to explore the practicalities of production. 

Inanimate is now a registered trademark in the UK, European Union and United States! 

Contributing to open source projects, sketching over breakfast with brilliant designers, assembling furniture and building a “wall of crazy”.

Here’s what’s been influencing and inspiring me this week.

Another week, another frontier Lab opens shop in London. Must be our pubs and famously good weather.

AI Labs are Londonmaxxing. But are they really? I was curious, so I counted them.

6 general-purpose frontier lab teams are using London as a centre for model-training. Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft AI, Cohere, and Ineffable Intelligence.

9 specialised model labs spanning embodied AI, biology, audio/video also have a significant presence here. Meta AI (FAIR), Mistral, Conjecture, Wayve, Isomorphic, ElevenLabs, Synthesia, Stability AI, and Latent Labs.

4 non-commercial AI safety and eval labs which (except Apollo) are HQ’d in LDN. UK AI Security Institute, Apollo Research, LASR Labs, and Thomson Reuters–Imperial Frontier AI Research Lab.

That’s 15 commercial labs, of which 9 are HQ’d on the outer walls of Londinium. Complemented by a dense safety and eval. ecosystem. 

Great to see London stand up tall in this brave new era.

In Jorge Luis Borges “Library of Babel”, the author imagines an infinite library containing every book ever written, and yet to be written. Within the organised religion that exists among the library’s vast population, there is a sect that scours the shelves looking for perfect books.

I think about this a lot, as I scroll through rage slop on X. Fake police stops, generated white nationalist rappers, Karen car crashes. Like Neo scouring the internet, waiting, hoping for a sign that we don’t live in the ruins of the Dead Internet.

There is hope in collaborative fiction projects. The best example is the SCP Wiki, where anyone can contribute to the shared fictional universe of the SCP Foundation - a secret organisation responsible for capturing, containing, and studying paranormal phenomena. Its break out user - qntm - nearly won an Arthur C. Clarke Award this year. 

I also love seeing new storytellers emerge, that are using generative techniques to tell stories in new ways. AI slop can be great, as we’ve said before. 

That brings me to The Archive In Between. These are human written “tales from the library between worlds” presented through generative video tools as grainy dispatches from a parallel 1960s sci-fi universe. They are a wonderful example of how gen AI in the hands of great storytellers can unlock something familiar, but radically new. Dive into the archive.

Thanks for reading. See you soon.

Daniel & Matt