AI Friend or AI Friendo?
While we're only a couple months removed from the first wave of AI wearables crashing and burning, the good news would seem to be that the launches are continuing unabated. Here's Boone Ashworth learning about the Friend:
Avi Schiffmann shows up to the WIRED office with a Friend hanging around his neck. It dangles there like a pendant on a necklace. It’s about the size and shape of an AirTag—a soft, round little puck that rests right next to Schiffmann’s heart, just atop the Dark Side of the Moon logo on the shirt behind it.
The Friend, to be clear, is an AI wearable. It’s a pal, a buddy, but mostly an AI chatbot that lives inside the pendant. It always has an opinion to share about what’s going on around it, which it communicates using text messages and push notifications on the phone it’s paired to.
So it looks similar to the Limitless Pendant – a device unveiled back in April, but that won't be out in the wild until Q4 – but whereas that device focused more on the enterprise use-case of recording meetings, this is sort of the consumer version of that idea (borne out of an enterprise play, more on that below). And a bit more...
“Always listening” is one of the main taglines of Schiffmann’s as yet unreleased AI device. The Friend has an onboard microphone that listens to everything happening around the wearer by default. You can tap and hold it to ask it a question, but sometimes it will send messages—commentary about the conversation you just had, for example—unprompted. It is powered by Anthropic AI’s Claude 3.5 large language model, which can engage in helpful conversation, offer encouragement, or rib you for being bad at a video game.
Yeah I mean obviously this is a privacy disaster just waiting to happen – and why, again, Limitless was probably smart to focus on the business use-case to start – but let's set that aside for the moment. If this works as it's stated to, it's potentially interesting as a companion product.
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.)
The battery life sounds decent enough – though you'll obviously have to charge it at least once a day and I wonder what regular explicit usage, such as invoking Claude, does to it... The design looks pretty good, but it's a bit too AirTag-y for my taste. I think I prefer the Limitless Pendant's (goddamn delicious) macaron-look, but I haven't seen either in person yet, so I'll hold off on full judgement there. The price seems right at $99 (same as the Pendant). But I'm sorry, paying $1.8M for a domain, much less touting the price paid, is a pretty big joker red flag here.
It's a great domain, sure. Should any startup spend that much money on a domain? No. Even if you have the money, there are at least a thousand better things to spend that money on. Get that domain once the company proves itself. Sure, it may be more expensive then, but it's hard to imagine a domain much more expensive than $1.8M. But again, the real flag is just touting this all in this article. Not a good look. I don't know Schiffmann so maybe we can give the benefit of the doubt that he was just matter-of-factly answering a question about the cost of the domain. But still, paying that much is questionable unless he bought it on his own. But even then... Let's move on...
“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.”
Okay, that is a good quote. And I appreciate him not shying away from mentioning the elephants in the room, in the form of Human and the Rabbit R1. But such a comment is obviously also putting some pretty lofty expectations on the Friend.
“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.”
Also a fun quote. Presumably Limitless cares! Let's see where he's going with this...
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.
Oh boy. At the very least, Schiffmann is going to need some media training if he's going to get anybody to use his device. Look, the guy is 21-years-old. Mark Zuckerberg was a mess at 21-years-old, now he's rocking gold chains and wakeboarding in interviews. Schiffmann would seem to have some real and interesting bonafides, especially impressive for someone his age. But Friend is also a pivot:
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?
“I've never felt more lonely in my entire life,” Schiffmann says. “And in that moment, I was looking at the Tab prototype, and I was like, it's not that I just want to talk to this thing. I want it to feel like this companion is actually there with me traveling.”
It would be easy to make fun of the above in a plot-of-Lost-in-Translation sort of way. But again, I think some benefit of the doubt is warranted here. Obviously loneliness is a real issue and while there's probably a bigger debate to be had on the merits of human friends versus "artificial" friends, if something like this can actually help someone... I'm just not willing to dismiss it outright.
While Schiffmann insists the Friend is a fundamentally new form of digital companion, he acknowledges that it is also an amalgamation of many things. He welcomes comparisons to a Tamagotchi. He knows the Friend looks like an Air Tag. And he knows—based on the fact that people have been getting emotionally attached to AI chatbots like Replika for a decade or more—that some people will probably take it a little too far.
For sure there will be some people that try and fuck the USB-C port of this,” Schiffmann says, “I think I'm shameless enough to understand what I'm building. But if you look at something like Replika and you look at the studies of this too, the lowest tiered thing that people do is try to fuck it. Most people really are just talking about literally what they did today and their feelings and the AI's feelings.”
Goddamnit I'm trying to help you, Schiffmann! Can you please stop talking to this reporter? Like, immediately. Can you say the Friend made you say such things? That some kinks are still being worked out?
Schiffmann knows that criticism is coming. He also knows detractors will ding his device, with its always-on microphone, as an invasion of privacy. He’s careful to say that Friend will not store audio recordings or transcripts, and that users can change or delete whatever memories the Friend has stored.
He says the exposure he's gotten from his other projects has hardened him, and that he's ready for the backlash.
“I'm a solo founder with this, and I am shameless with what the tech is,” Schiffmann says. “And I will 100 percent be able to weather that storm, because I've done way harder versions of it.” In a way, he’s sort of looking forward to it. “I think in some ways, this actually kind of turns the world into a theme park.”
This interview was a roller coaster ride for sure. I am legitimately interested in this product but legitimately worried about many of these responses. In these early days of such products, you can't be the brash founder who aims to move fast and break things. Yes, that's what Elon Musk still does, but the stakes are too high and the technology too nascent with AI. And regulators are already watching closely – probably too closely.
I appreciate the concept of having a device that's always with you as a sort of digital companion. Yes, some real Her-vibes to match the Lost in Translation ones above. Sadly, OpenAI sort of poisoned that well for all of us, at least for the time being. That just means this device is going to have to be that good if it's to work. And I love the idea that it interacts with you via text message. That is a clever way to bridge worlds and acknowledge the current state of things. But I would be pretty worried that about a thousand other things haven't really been thought through here, just reading this interview. The whole tone is all so strange that I honestly can't quite tell if this is real. Again, I guess benefit of the doubt for now.
I do appreciate the vibe of their teaser video though, it paints the aspirations of this type of product pretty well: