From Singapore to Porto: Why turning his life upside down was Gabriel Tan's best move

While the rest of the world was hunkering down in 2020 as the reality of COVID set in, Gabriel Tan was moving house — halfway around the world.

The Singaporean designer and his heavily pregnant wife Cherie Er relocated with their five-year-old son to Porto, on the coast of Portugal. It was a bold move given Tan had an established studio in Singapore, but the couple decided it was worth the risk to be in the heart of the design centres in Europe and the US.

“It was difficult because we had a good business in Singapore and my wife had a really good job — she was running the Asia Pacific sales for Credit Suisse,” he says. “We threw everything in the basket and moved to Portugal.

“We decided that this design business has to work.”

For more stories like this, order your copy of Kanebridge Quarterly magazine here.

By the time Tan, who decided on a career in design while doing his national service in the navy, left for Portugal, he was already a name in Singapore and Japan, first with Outofstock, which he started with two friends, then his own studio before working with Japanese brand Ariake.

“I met them when they were still doing contract manufacturing and they were a local brand that wasn’t even known in Tokyo,” he says. “Originally the plan was just for me to design a few products for them. I told them that’s not going to move the needle for them if you are just going to add my products to your current collection so I suggested something more ambitious.

“I kind of appointed myself as the creative director.”

Origin story

The experience with Ariake spurred Tan onto build his own brand, Origin Made, designing products and taking on interior design projects, but he was keen to continue to extend himself.

Over time, living and working in a country of 5.5 million people was beginning to feel limiting.

With more of his time and attention being directed towards brands in Italy, Scandinavia and the United States, it made sense for Tan to make a permanent move to a location with easier access to Europe as well as North America. It was also an opportunity for a fresh start in design terms.

“I felt I was getting pigeon holed a little bit before COVID because people felt my work was very minimalist Japanese/Scandinavian, but it was because I was designing for Japanese clients,” he says. “When you work with a company, it is 50 percent them and 50 percent you. You bring part of yourself but at the same time, you can’t ignore the brand, their culture and their customers.”

Life in lockdown

Like much of the rest of the world, Portugal was in lockdown when Tan and Er arrived and their rental accommodation was not entirely comfortable for the family. As some work dried up in Singapore, Tan found himself with time to think.

“We were spending a lot of time in front of the TV and we were all wishing we had a more comfortable couch in our apartment,” he says.

“I was still waiting for my home to be finished construction so we were in a very uncomfortable spot.

“I really prioritised comfort when I was designing this sofa so I really went for it and tried to think ‘what is the craziest, most comfortable form we could get’.”

The Luva, meaning ‘glove’ in Portuguese, draws inspiration from a boxing glove and Japanese futon. It is now part of the Herman Miller range, alongside classics such as the Eames lounge and ottoman.

The sofa is the Luva (Portuguese for glove), a modular design taking its inspiration from Japanese futon beds and western boxing gloves. The backrest has the ability to extend for full lounging or to fold down to create a ‘fist’ for more support. It’s a deliberate attempt at cross cultural pollination.

“You have the eastern influence of the futon and the western sport of boxing and I tried to get an aesthetic that different cultures would be familiar with whether they are from Asia, Europe or the US,” he says. “You will find this shape is familiar to you and you will be naturally drawn to it.”

Build your own

While the lounge is in keeping with a contemporary aesthetic and comfort levels, it also embodies the practicality that is an integral part of Tan’s approach. Each piece is available individually, allowing the user to ‘build’ the lounge to suit their needs, whether they live in a large house or a small apartment.

“I have lived in apartments all my life,” he says. “You can see how narrow the stairwells can be, and you have to carry the sofa up.

“Whenever we are doing interior design for clients we know the consideration when you’re buying a sofa. If it’s modular, if you can get it through doorways and narrow hallways, it’s going to be much easier to convince the client to buy.”

It’s also a design that the user can add to over time, extending the usefulness and longevity of the sofa. Tan took it to product design director at Herman Miller, Noah Schwarz, who was quick to recognise its applications.

“He would often ask what I was working on so I showed him this sofa and immediately he was like ‘this could be something for us’,” says Tan.

“He thought it might be something for the MillerKnoll group but which brand he couldn’t tell yet.

“But he said ‘definitely don’t show it to other people’.”

The Luva has since been joined by the Cyclade tables, a trio of coffee and occasional tables designed to work equally well together or singularly. Other collaborations have followed, including work with major European brands such as B+B Italia, Menu, Abstracta and Design Within Reach while still maintaining his Singaporean office.

The Cyclade tables, named for the group of islands in Greece, have been designed for flexibility.

Cutting down travel times has meant more time on the ground.

“Here I travel quite a lot to meet with different companies I am working with and that helps because to me these distances are super short,” he says. “For designers living in Europe they might not want to go to Denmark because it’s a 3.5 hour flight but to me, even if I have to transit, five hours is no problem.”

Leap of faith

Although the move to Europe was risky, Tan has no regrets. While he admits his Portuguese is still a work in progress, his two sons (Er delivered a baby boy not long after arriving in Portugal) are quickly learning the language and the family has now moved into a traditional townhouse, which Tan has renovated, and where their office is based.

Tan and his wife Cherie Er work and live in the house they recently finished building in Porto.

Being in the heart of Europe has opened up a world of opportunity for Tan that has been both invigorating and challenging.

“I am designing for companies of different countries and I get to learn more about other ways of life and how people from other countries see design and see their homes and their spaces and how people do business in different parts of the world,” he says. “Coming from Singapore, it can be very stifling because it is so small. It’s really such a joy to experience these different cultures through design collaborations.”

Moving away from family and friends was a leap of faith but it gave him the push he needed. For a designer whose work is all about comfort, he is not one taking the safe path and staying home.

“It’s a good business model for revenue but you are not going to leave a mark on design history, you are not going to touch the lives of that many people if you are working with regional brands,” he says. “I really wanted to work with the international brands that have the reach with customers worldwide and I think if I hadn’t moved I would not have had that clarity of mind and that focus to really go for it.”

There is ample and alarming evidence that artificial intelligence can help humans do bad things, such as committing cyberattacks, building weapons and even killing themselves or others. The Hugging Face hacking episode—and a growing list of others by poorly constrained swarms of agents—indicate just how powerful and potentially dangerous AI has quickly become.

Yet many inside the U.S. AI industry insist far worse is coming, on account of the imminent arrival of AI with superhuman and self-improving abilities.

Plenty of experts, including many who study AI harms for a living, are skeptical. The so-called doomers’ assertion that AI might decide to wipe out all of humanity—or even “just” topple human civilization—is contingent on it achieving a pace of development not yet seen.

And if the assumptions behind this global-doomsday scenario are wrong, it could lead us to curb or regulate AI in ways that don’t address its real harms.

At the center of this debate is the claim that current AI systems might take over the job of training their next versions, a process called “recursive self-improvement.” Think of it like evolution on steroids—billions of years happening at light speed within vast AI supercomputers. Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei recently proposed a global agreement to slow down the pace of releasing new AI models, with the goal of delaying the arrival of recursive self-improvement.

“I don’t think we’re anywhere near ‘artificial general intelligence,’” says Melanie Mitchell, a professor at the nonprofit research group Santa Fe Institute who studies AI. She said AI is making impressive strides but thinks claims by engineers that they’ve achieved recursive self-improvement don’t stand up to scrutiny.

She is hardly alone. A recent paper by two dozen academics at Princeton, Stanford and other institutions found that even the most cutting-edge AIs are incapable of doing the original research required to advance the AI frontier.

Two of the authors involved in that paper also threw cold water on the idea that the Hugging Face swarm hack by OpenAI agents occurred because of a breakthrough in intelligence. The attack succeeded primarily because of a lack of basic technical guardrails, not an unmanageable explosion in AI capability, they wrote.

Yann LeCun, former chief AI scientist at Meta, posted that this analysis was “a welcome dose of sanity in an otherwise insane debate.”

OpenAI and Anthropic didn’t respond to several requests for comment.

The people who disagree with the doomers still consider AI to be dangerous, and point out that such systems don’t have to be particularly capable to be powerful. Some argue that AI should undergo regular evaluation by outsiders and that the companies that make it should be held responsible when their systems do harm. AI should also be treated the same as airplanes and elevators, and should be designed to do the least harm possible, they say.

“If you believe that technology is powerful enough to create novel, dangerous viruses, or to essentially take over the whole planet for some reason, then it must also be strong enough to create cures for cancer, to cure aging, to fix socio-economic or political problems,” says Christopher Canal, CEO of EquiStamp, a company that helps companies and governments evaluate AIs.

AI has shown an ability to rapidly advance because it is matching the abilities of humans who are constantly feeding it their knowledge. Sometimes it can recombine that knowledge and exceed what people have been capable of, through a kind of post-training known as reinforcement learning, as we’ve seen in mathematics.

Today’s LLMs are “models of knowledge” rather than actually intelligent, wrote Yi Ma, professor of AI at Hong Kong University.

Researchers at universities and commercial AI research labs in China wrote in a recent paper that autonomous, self-improving AI is likely to be a long way off, due to the sheer number of breakthroughs required. They also argue that humans will probably remain in the loop, supervising that process—and gating how fast it can occur.

Vals AI, a company that evaluates today’s AI models, maintains an RSI Index that benchmarks whether models can “do the research that builds the next model.” So far, no publicly released model is even close.

Yet Rayan Krishnan, CEO of Vals AI, says his team projects models will exceed humans’ ability to improve the next generation of AIs by August 2027, or sooner, and at that point could start building their successors all on their own.

“Once we get to recursive self-improvement, the fear is that all bets are off,” he says. “You could end up with a ‘fast takeoff’ situation, where the models quickly acquire skills and eclipse humans across every possible domain.”

In a reply to the resignation tweet heard round the world from Jacob Coxon, another Anthropic engineer declared his belief that those odds were at least 10% over the next decade. Many others in the industry chimed in to say they thought the percentage was even higher.

Some who argue the end is nigh say they calculate their personal p(doom) based on a chain of conditional probabilities—a bit like the Drake equation for calculating the likelihood of intelligent alien life. Since all those probabilities are based on speculation, estimates range from 0% to nearly 100%. Many land around 10%.

“The weird thing is that if you go back and look at the predictions on this over the last 10 years or more, it’s always been 10%—it’s just a nice round number,” says Mitchell. “I think it’s all vibes, and there’s no actual evidence or calculation.”

One argument against worrying about superintelligent AI is that the world is full of unlikely humanity-ending disasters, and trying to avert them all can make it impossible to prioritize, says Canal.

This has led AI experts and the policymakers who listen to them to propose remedies that don’t get at its real and present dangers.

AI companies’ proposals to “pace the frontier” aren’t addressing the problem in the right way, argues Stuart Russell, a computer-science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the president of the International Association for Safe and Ethical Artificial Intelligence.

“It’s like saying we’re driving toward the cliff at 60 miles per hour and we’re going to drive toward it at 40 miles per hour instead, and everything will be OK,” he says.

Russell and his peers have proposed that AI companies should have to meet the same standards that govern other areas of everyday life, from air travel and buildings to food and drugs. They highlight the “behavioral red lines” AI should not be allowed to cross. Breaking into other computer systems, stealing information or advising terrorists on how to build biological weapons are all illegal for a human to do, and should be illegal for companies’ AIs as well, he argues.

The challenge for AI companies in such a proposal, he adds, is that it would be a de facto ban on today’s advanced AI systems, since the companies behind them don’t know how to make them respect such boundaries all of the time.

Others have proposed something like the Food and Drug Administration, but for AI, but setting up a new agency has so far been a nonstarter in Congress. And some prominent voices in tech have said such a structure would give up America’s AI edge to China.

Given the bipartisan groundswell of support for curbing AI companies and their creations, however, that may soon change.

“The tech industry has had this mantra for decades that regulation is bad,” says Russell. “They don’t accept the liability for any harm, and they hide behind free speech. That, I think, has to change.”

From Singapore to Porto: Why turning his life upside down was Gabriel Tan’s best move

Miles from home and in lockdown with family, the designer took inspiration for his new sofa from an unlikely source

Could fears of an AI apocalypse be distracting us from the dangers already here? Experts debate whether regulation should focus on speculative existential threats or present-day harms, including cyberattacks, weapons and unsafe autonomous agents. Read more via the link in bio.