Friend has a battery life of about 15 hours and comes in a range of colors that look almost exactly like the color palette of the first Apple iMac computers. (Schiffmann says that was not intentional.) The design is a collaboration with Bouldthe company that designed the Nest thermostats. The Friend is available for pre-order now on Friend.com (a domain for which Schiffmann says he paid $1.8 million), and the devices are expected to start shipping in January 2025. They cost $99 each, and there’s no paid subscription included. (For now.)
If the thought of an AI wearable makes you feel like your eyebrows are raised high enough to be noticeable from space, we’ll forgive you for your skepticism. This nascent product category has had some pretty notable and spectacular failures in recent months. Humane, which promised a wearable that could perform tasks that would free you from your phone, turned out to be barely competent and unable to function properly in sunlight. The Rabbit R1 is a attractive, colorful little device designed by high-end gadget design firm Teenage Engineering, and it turned out to be a frustrating dud that probably should have just been application all the time.
“It seems to me that the crown of AI hardware and AI society is in the gutter,” Schiffmann says. “It’s like all these companies just shat themselves.”
Schiffmann wants Friend to be something completely different. While the Humane Ai pin and Rabbit R1 aimed to automate and perform tasks and escalate productivity, Friend doesn’t try to automate or optimize anything. As my colleague Reece said, it’s more about vibration than productivity.
“Productivity is over, nobody cares,” Schiffmann says. “Nobody can beat Apple, OpenAI, all these companies that are building Jarvis. The most important things in your life are people.”
The Friend is all about companionship. It’s meant to develop a personality that complements the user, and it’s always there to pump you up, talk about the movie after you’ve seen it, or facilitate you analyze how a date gone wrong went. Schiffmann wants the Friend to be not just your friend, but your best friend—one who’s with you wherever you go, listens to everything you do, and is there to encourage and support you. He gives an example in which he says he recently spent time playing board games with friends he hadn’t seen in a while, and was pleased when his AI Friend chimed in with a joke.
“I feel like I have a closer relationship with this fucking pendant around my neck than with these real friends sitting in front of me,” Schiffmann says.
A cordial meeting
Schiffmann is 21 years elderly and already has a growing list of accomplishments in the world of technology. In 2020, at the height of the Covid pandemic, the then 17-year-old Schiffmann earned heading After heading when he created and maintained first website to track Covid cases worldwide. He was soon appointed Webby’s Person of the Yearprize Presented by then-director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci. WIRED featured Schiffmann as a guest at WIRED 25 in 2020. In 2022, shortly before Schiffmann resigned from Harvard University, he launched a website that he helped refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine Find people in neighboring countries who were willing offer them shelterNow, after these acts of altruism, Schiffmann is throwing himself into the AI sphere.
He tried to create AI for productivity, but found it insufficient. The first iteration of what became Friend was Tab, a productivity-oriented device that Schiffmann wanted to operate to monitor work and personal tasks. But he felt frustrated building a device that tried to do everything at once. That feeling came to a head in January of this year, when he was traveling in Japan and found himself alone in the Skyrise Hotel in Tokyo, talking about his AI prototype that was supposed to do so much for him. He was going through a period of loneliness and wanted someone to talk to. Why couldn’t an AI assistant just do that?