Writing from Copenhagen, once again named the most liveable city in the world, which the locals will mention to you roughly every fifteen minutes. If you are passing through, come by the Studio for a bun with cheese and a conversation about cities, food, design and, inevitably, AI.
Two very different pictures of where AI is heading arrived this month, within days of each other. Put them side by side and you get a useful map of the choices in front of anyone allocating capital or rethinking how their office runs.
The fast lane
At Google I/O 2025, the message was speed and more of it. New multimodal models. Tools built straight into Workspace. Flow, a video generator now good enough to make you look twice, sitting alongside lifelike avatars and emails that draft themselves before you have finished thinking the thought. Google says demand has grown fiftyfold in a single year. Whatever you make of the number, the direction is not subtle.
This is AI as horsepower. It rewards whoever moves first, ships fastest, and can absorb the cost of being early.
The scenic route
The same week, quietly, came The Way of Code, a collaboration between Rick Rubin and Anthropic's Claude. It is a digital book that folds old philosophical ideas into generative code experiments. No keynote. No demo reel. Just an invitation to sit with how, and why, we make things at all.
If Google I/O is horsepower, this is the hand on the wheel. It is a reminder that the interesting question is rarely how fast the tool goes.
So which one is for you
Both, probably. Some offices in our network are backing the fast lane directly, through AI infrastructure and thematic funds. Others are on the scenic route, testing quietly what these tools do to their own workflows, or to the creative ventures they actually care about. Neither group is wrong. The families getting this right are the ones paying attention to which road they are on, and driving it deliberately rather than by accident.
On that note, we have expanded the beta of our new platform. If you would like a preview, reach out, and we will show you what we have been building on the quiet.