Meet the 21-year-old Harvard dropout behind Friend, the creepy new AI necklace
Meet the 21-year-old Harvard dropout behind Friend, the creepy new AI necklace
In a no-holds-barred interview, Avi Schiffmann explains why he created Friend, the AI companion everyone is hating on.
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."
You're viewing a single thread.
The history of the UkraineTakeShelter website he built is quite a rabbit hole.
- How a well-meaning tech solution for Ukraine almost became a 'Craigslist for pedophiles'
- A Website Resettling Ukrainian Refugees Got Adoring Headlines. Experts Say It Was Too Good to Be True.
While the American media gushed over UkraineTakeShelter, local activists on the ground in Poland and experts involved in privacy and humanitarian tech looked at the site with concern, outrage, and horror. Here was a site that had made headlines around the world — appearing in overwhelmingly positive stories on CNN, The TODAY Show, and ABC, among many others — but that didn’t verify hosts’ identities until March 21, nearly three weeks after it had gone live, a decision experts said put refugees that used the site at risk for human trafficking. In addition, the lax security measures have also exposed the private data of the hosts opening their homes to refugees, allowing anyone to see information including hosts’ phone numbers and email addresses with a few clicks.
"Look, I definitely agree I should have had a better verification system in place at the start," he says. "But the way I see it is, it's better late than never to add these features."