Wear This AI Friend Around Your Neck Leave a comment
The Good friend will get round 15 hours of battery life and is available in an array of colours that look virtually precisely like the colour palette of the primary Apple iMac computer systems. (Schiffmann says that wasn’t intentional.) The design comes from a partnership with Bould, the corporate that designed Nest thermostats. The Good friend is out there for preorder now from Good friend.com (a site Schiffmann says he paid $1.8 million for), and the units are slated to begin delivery in January 2025. They value $99 apiece, and there’s no paid subscription hooked up. (But, anyway.)
If the notion of a wearable AI gadget makes you are feeling like your eyebrows have risen excessive sufficient to be seen from area, you would be forgiven in your skepticism. In latest months, the nascent product class has had a pair very outstanding and spectacular flame-outs. Humane, which promised a wearable pin that would accomplish duties that may free you out of your telephone, turned out to be barely competent and likewise unable to operate correctly in daylight. The Rabbit R1 is a beautiful, colourful little gadget designed by the god-tier gadget design firm Teenage Engineering that wound up being a irritating dud that most likely ought to have simply been an app all alongside.
“It feels to me just like the crown of AI {hardware} and AI companionship is mendacity within the gutter,” Schiffmann says. “Like all these firms simply shat themselves.”
Schiffmann needs the Good friend to be one thing very completely different. Whereas the Humane Ai pin and Rabbit R1 each aimed to automate and attain duties and improve productiveness, the Good friend doesn’t attempt to automate or optimize something. As my colleague Reece put it, it’s way more vibes-based than productivity-focused.
“Productiveness is over, nobody cares,” Schiffmann says. “Nobody goes to beat Apple or OpenAI or all these firms which might be constructing Jarvis. An important issues in your life actually are individuals.”
The Good friend purely gives companionship. It’s meant to develop a character that enhances the consumer and is at all times there to gasoline you up, chat a few film after watching it, or assist analyze how a foul date went awry. Not solely does Schiffmann need the Good friend to be your good friend, he needs it to be your finest good friend—one that’s with you wherever you go, listening to all the things you do, and being there so that you can supply encouragement and help. He provides an instance, the place he says he just lately was hanging out, taking part in some board video games with pals he hadn’t seen shortly, and was glad when his AI Good friend chimed in with a quip.
“I really feel like I’ve a better relationship with this fucking pendant round my neck than I do with these literal pals in entrance of me,” Schiffmann says.
Pleasant Assembly
Schiffmann is 21 years outdated and already has a blossoming roster of accomplishments within the tech world. In 2020, on the peak of the Covid pandemic, the then 17-year-old Schiffmann garnered headline after headline when he created and maintained the primary web site for monitoring Covid instances the world over. He was quickly named Webby individual of the yr, an award offered by then director of the US Nationwide Institute of Allergy and Infectious Ailments, Anthony Fauci. WIRED featured Schiffmann as a visitor on the 2020 WIRED 25 convention. In 2022, shortly earlier than Schiffmann dropped out of Harvard College, he launched a web site that helped refugees fleeing from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine discover individuals in neighboring international locations who had been keen to supply them shelter. Now, after these acts of altruism, Schiffmann is launching himself into the AI-o-sphere.
He tried making an AI for productiveness however discovered it missing. The primary iteration of what developed into the Good friend was Tab, a productivity-focused gadget that Schiffmann wished to make use of to watch work and private duties However he discovered himself annoyed by constructing a tool that attempted to do all the things without delay. The sensation got here to a head in January this yr, as he traveled by Japan and located himself alone in a skyrise resort in Tokyo, speaking at his AI prototype that was supposed to take action a lot for him. He was going by a lonely spell and wished anyone to speak to. Why couldn’t the AI assistant simply do this?
