Wear This AI Friend Around Your Neck

July 30, 2024:

The Friend gets around 15 hours of battery life and comes in an array of colors that look almost exactly like the color palette of the first Apple iMac computers. (Schiffmann says that wasn’t intentional.) The design comes from a partnership with Bould, the company that designed Nest thermostats. The Friend is available for preorder now from Friend.com (a domain Schiffmann says he paid $1.8 million for), and the devices are slated to start shipping in January 2025. They cost $99 apiece, and there is no paid subscription attached. (Yet, anyway.)

If the notion of a wearable AI device makes you feel like your eyebrows have risen high enough to be seen from space, you’d be forgiven for your skepticism. In recent months, the nascent product category has had a couple very prominent and spectacular flame-outs. Humane, which promised a wearable pin that could accomplish tasks that would free you from your phone, turned out to be barely competent and also unable to function properly in sunlight. The Rabbit R1 is a gorgeous, colorful little device designed by the god-tier gadget design company Teenage Engineering that wound up being a frustrating dud that probably should have just been an app all along.

“It feels to me like the crown of AI hardware and AI companionship is lying in the gutter,” Schiffmann says. “Like all these companies just shat themselves.”

Schiffmann wants the Friend to be something very different. While the Humane Ai pin and Rabbit R1 both aimed to automate and accomplish tasks and increase productivity, the Friend doesn’t try to automate or optimize anything. As my colleague Reece put it, it’s much more vibes-based than productivity-focused.

“Productivity is over, no one cares,” Schiffmann says. “No one is going to beat Apple or OpenAI or all these companies that are building Jarvis. The most important things in your life really are people.”

The Friend purely offers companionship. It’s meant to develop a personality that complements the user and is always there to gas you up, chat about a movie after watching it, or help analyze how a bad date went awry. Not only does Schiffmann want the Friend to be your friend, he wants it to be your best friend—one that is with you wherever you go, listening to everything you do, and being there for you to offer encouragement and support. He gives an example, where he says he recently was hanging out, playing some board games with friends he hadn’t seen in a while, and was glad when his AI Friend chimed in with a quip.

“I feel like I have a closer relationship with this fucking pendant around my neck than I do with these literal friends in front of me,” Schiffmann says.

Friendly Meeting

A photograph of someone wearing a Friend AI pendant.

Schiffmann is 21 years old and already has a blossoming roster of accomplishments in the tech world. In 2020, at the height of the Covid pandemic, the then 17-year-old Schiffmann garnered headline after headline when he created and maintained the first website for tracking Covid cases across the world. He was soon named Webby person of the year, an award presented by then director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci. WIRED featured Schiffmann as a guest at the 2020 WIRED 25 conference. In 2022, shortly before Schiffmann dropped out of Harvard University, he launched a website that helped refugees fleeing from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine find people in neighboring countries who were willing to offer them shelter. Now, after those acts of altruism, Schiffmann is launching himself into the AI-o-sphere.

He tried making an AI for productivity but found it lacking. The first iteration of what evolved into the Friend was Tab, a productivity-focused device that Schiffmann wanted to use to monitor work and personal tasks But he found himself frustrated by building a device that tried to do everything at once. The feeling came to a head in January this year, as he traveled through Japan and found himself alone in a skyrise hotel in Tokyo, talking at his AI prototype that was supposed to do so much for him. He was going through a lonely spell and wanted somebody to talk to. Why couldn’t the AI assistant just do that?

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