Drift

Hi, Tudinh here.

In 1912 Alfred Wegener told a room of geologists that the continents move. He was right. The one thing he couldn’t explain was how, and it took half a century of sonar and magnetometers, instruments that read the magnetism in rock, to prove it.

Wegener at his desk in the winter quarters, northeast Greenland

He called it die Verschiebung der Kontinente, the displacement of the continents. The English edition of 1924 renamed it continental drift, and drift stuck. Satellites measure the drift now, at roughly the speed a fingernail grows, and given enough time that produces an Atlantic Ocean.

The year he told the room, he went back to the ice

Proved at last, and small enough to cross the ocean it explains

Ordinary life works the same way. Nobody remembers deciding to stop carrying cash, or the last time a 56k modem tied up the phone line. No decision, just a long run of it being easier, until the old way had gone, displaced by the new.

AI is moving in-house, from data centre to studio

Nothing about AI has been slow, and for most businesses the last few years have been a sprint. Now the models are leaving the cloud for local hardware. This month Perplexity and Nvidia released Portable Computer, an AI agent that runs entirely on your own machine.

Nvidia’s DGX Spark, the desk-sized machine Perplexity’s Portable Computer runs on

More teams want their work to stay in-house, and until recently the models were too big to run there. The community is shrinking them to fit, and the best of them are open at the same time, free for anyone to download and run. That matters most for material you would rather not send to the cloud. For a marketing or editorial team that means interviews, subtitles and asset tags stay in the building.

Last week AT&T said open models handle 40% of its employee AI queries, and it wants that at 60–70%. The routing runs request by request through LiteLLM, an open-source switchboard a team can run itself. Coding and some advanced tasks cost 56% less, and quality dropped just 2%.

The way this is going, most teams will never need to build any of that. Adobe and Figma will look the same, but behind the menus the default cloud model gives way to a small local one, fine-tuned to the studio. It takes single steps, such as crops and sizes, translations, or artboards checked against the system. There is no meter on a local model, so the checks run on everything, not samples, and unreleased work never leaves the studio.

You only learn where it goes by making it

Field notes are observations from the week’s work. Four this month, on startups, buying, the stack and the studio.

• Startups are prototypes — treat the whole venture as a test, not just the product. David Lowbridge, Director of Innovation & Systems
• Security deep dive — procurement reads your security pages before anyone picks up the phone. Barry Cumberlidge, Chief Client Officer
• Choosing the right tech stack — convention for most of it, conviction for the rest. Guang Wu, Chief Digital Officer
• Shapeshifting the Future — a week in the studio changes the shape of what feels possible. Tara Heal, People & Operations Lead

Recess Capital: levelling the playing field

Women’s sport fills arenas and breaks television records, and the backing has not caught up. Closing that gap is what Recess Capital is for. Malala Yousafzai and Asser Malik co-founded it to back teams, leagues and the businesses around them. We made the site that puts the case and the work in one place, so anyone can see what they back and why.

View the case study

Bombas: giving, live and searchable

For thirteen years Bombas has donated an item to someone experiencing homelessness for every item it sells, through more than 4,000 giving partners. The BeeBetter Hub is the public record of that giving, and we rebuilt it with them from the foundations. Behind the 200 million items are the partners doing the work, and anyone can find them by cause and place.

Find a partner by what it does and where

Or start with a region and follow the giving

View the case study

London Design Festival: our sixth festival together

LDF26 runs 12–20 September, its 24th year, in showrooms, museums and the street across eleven design districts.

We created the digital platform in 2021 and have extended it every festival since. The site carries the nine days as they happen, new events and stories with them. Every year the whole thing arrives in a new identity. A visitor turns it into an afternoon they can walk. Being part of it keeps us in the room with the people making the work, and that is where you hear what comes next.

View the case study

Drift always sounds slower than it is. Nothing gets anywhere in one move, and the things that end up somewhere new were moving long before anyone noticed.

Until next month,

Tudinh Duong

Founding Partner & CEO

Made by ON

Ps. The Atlantic widens by about two and a half centimetres a year, and we know it to the millimetre. The transatlantic cables I wrote about in January carry a reply in under a tenth of a second, and the milliseconds keep coming off.