The Good friend will get round 15 hours of battery life and is available in an array of colours that look nearly 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 offered 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 price $99 apiece, and there’s no paid subscription hooked up. (But, anyway.)
If the notion of a wearable AI system makes you are feeling like your eyebrows have risen excessive sufficient to be seen from area, you would be forgiven to your skepticism. In latest months, the nascent product class has had a pair very distinguished and spectacular flame-outs. Humane, which promised a wearable pin that might accomplish duties that might free you out of your cellphone, turned out to be barely competent and in addition unable to perform correctly in daylight. The Rabbit R1 is a beautiful, colourful little system designed by the god-tier gadget design firm Teenage Engineering that wound up being a irritating dud that in all probability ought to have simply been an app all alongside.
“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.”
Schiffmann desires the Good friend to be one thing very totally different. Whereas the Humane Ai pin and Rabbit R1 each aimed to automate and attain duties and enhance productiveness, the Good friend doesn’t attempt to automate or optimize something. As my colleague Reece put it, it’s far more vibes-based than productivity-focused.
“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.”
The Good friend purely gives companionship. It’s meant to develop a persona that enhances the consumer and is all the time there to gasoline you up, chat a couple of film after watching it, or assist analyze how a nasty date went awry. Not solely does Schiffmann need the Good friend to be your pal, he desires it to be your greatest pal—one that’s with you wherever you go, listening to every thing you do, and being there so that you can supply encouragement and help. He provides an instance, the place he says he not too long ago was hanging out, enjoying some board video games with buddies he hadn’t seen shortly, and was glad when his AI Good 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.
Pleasant Assembly
Schiffmann is 21 years previous and already has a blossoming roster of accomplishments within the tech world. In 2020, on the top of the Covid pandemic, the then 17-year-old Schiffmann garnered headline after headline when he created and maintained the first web site for monitoring Covid circumstances internationally. He was quickly named Webby particular person of the yr, an award introduced 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 have been prepared 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 system that Schiffmann needed to make use of to watch work and private duties However he discovered himself pissed off by constructing a tool that attempted to do every thing directly. The sensation got here to a head in January this yr, as he traveled via 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 via a lonely spell and needed any person to speak to. Why couldn’t the AI assistant simply do this?
