Meet the 21-year-old Harvard dropout behind Friend, the creepy new AI necklace

Yes I'm posting more business insider click bait slop

introduced in a glossy, A24-style promotional video in which fresh-faced Zoomers speak to an AI pendant that provides emotional support, commentary, and playful jabs in the form of canned text messages. "This show is completely underrated," it texts a woman while she's watching a show and eating falafel on her lunch break. Then it texts, "How's the falafel?" The woman is seemingly heartened by this. "It's dank," she tells her necklace, "I could eat one of these every day."

dank

online commentary grew only more heated when Friend's founder, a 21-year-old Harvard dropout named Avi Schiffmann, revealed that he spent $1.8 million of Friend's $2.5 million funding to buy the website domain "Friend.com."

"People think it's outrageous that I would buy a domain like that, but this is the point of VC money," Schiffmann told me in an interview.

Schiffmann admitted that the online reaction to Friend is not what he expected. "I honestly think it's because the video was too good,"

Schiffmann's original vision for an AI hardware device was a pendant that would act as a more standard-fare AI assistant called Tab — he once described it as a "wearable mom." But after spending a lonely night in Tokyo, he began considering a more intimate version

venture-funded AI-friendship necklace is something of a hard pivot for Schiffmann. In 2020, when he was 17, he built one of the first COVID-tracking websites. Anthony Fauci presented him with a Webby Person of the Year award. He went on to build a tool that tracked Black Lives Matter protesters and a website that helped refugees fleeing war-torn Ukraine find people offering spare rooms and couches around the world

HOLD UP "a tool that tracked Black Lives Matter protesters" ???

"These are all really just big art projects to me," he said. "I haven't been able to come up with a stronger intrinsic [reason] why it's worth doing anything like this at all. It's just something to do and I'm bored. But maybe I've just read too much Camus."

Of the many AI hardware devices that launched in recent months, such as Humane's AI pin, Meta's smart glasses, and Rabbit's AI-powered R1, Friend is the most personal contender. Not only does it aspire to be a close confidant, it's also privy to all its users' conversations. As in, it never stops listening. The incessant eavesdropping that people fear when it comes to devices like Siri and Alexa is a selling point to allay Friend users who fear being alone. Friend needs to have access to every aspect of your life in order to work, Schiffmann said

Based on the public's initial reaction to it, Friend appears to be a long way from product-market fit, in that people do not want this product. Schiffmann disagrees. "People underlyingly want this," he told me

When it comes to creating Friend, "every decision I made was guided by personal vibes."