[imagesource:friend]

Avi Schiffmann, who rose to fame when he created a popular COVID-tracking website at age 17, needed a friend when he was alone travelling in Japan.

So he made one, and he’s released it for the rest of the world to have one too. That is a little AI-generated necklace pendant called ‘Friend’ that sits right next to your heart listening to every word you have to say.

The ‘Friend’, to be clear, is an AI wearable, AKA an AI chatbot that lives inside a pendant.

When Avi posted about it on X, the hype quickly grew, but less so because people were excited about the technology on display, and more because the video he used to promote it presented a bleak vision of our AI future that only a tech bro could find appealing.

The novel personal computing device powered by ChatGPT and other AI models is there to listen to everything you say and respond to you “conversationally” via a chat window on your phone.

With the push of a button, you can talk directly to your Friend, but beware—it’s always eavesdropping. Unbidden, it interjects into your daily life, like a Tamagotchi turned spy, or a person so intrusive you’d seek a restraining order against them.

If you’ve never thought a real-life moment could be anything like Black Mirror, then think again, buddy:

It’s such a viscerally creepy idea that you might figure it has to be an attempt at social commentary, or some bullshit vaporware, or an online hoax, but then you realise Schiffmann bought the domain Friend.com for a whopping $1.8 million of his company’s $2.5 million in seed money, so he’s pretty serious. Friend also has an undisclosed amount of funding and a valuation of $50 million.

Wired played with their own Friend and spoke to the creator, who has the right kind of background to have developed something like this. Twenty-one-year-old Avi Schiffman was named a Webby Person of the Year and was a guest at the 2020 WIRED 25 conference, among other accomplishments.

Avi says he isn’t competing with productive AI because Friend is all about companionship and conversation:

“Productivity is over, no one cares,” Schiffmann told Wired. “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.”

Wait, what does he think a person is? Yikes.

Image: Friend

Anyway, if you’re a lonely tech bro or whatever, you can preorder the Friend right now for $99. Wired reports that will get you a pendant that’s powered by Claude AI and connects to your phone via Bluetooth, has a battery life of around 15 hours, doesn’t require a subscription fee (yet), and will ship sometime in 2025.

[source:lifehacker&fastcompany]