We've been here already in the movies. Now it's time to try it in real life. The notion of AI becoming your intimate artificial friend, even partner, is nothing new. But it just came a step closer to reality with the new Friend. Yes, this new AI companion is just called "Friend" and sets out to do exactly what it says on the tin. To be your friend. And that's pretty much it.
The physical manifestation of the Friend is a circular pendant on a necklace that looks a little like an Apple AirTag at a glance. It's the brainchild of serial entrepreneur and 21-year-old tech-bro extraordinaire Avi Schiffmann, and it's essentially a chatbot that sits around your neck and listens to absolutely everything.
That allows the Friend to engage in fully context-aware buddy interactions which take the form of texts or notifications on the smartphone to which it is paired.
And that's it. There's no clever productivity functionality. It won't code a website, fold proteins, or even book a restaurant. It just talks to you. As Schiffmann said in an interview with Wired, “productivity is over, no one cares. 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.”
People and, presumably, AI Friends.
You can watch the launch trailer right here and very likely a flurry of questions will leap to mind. Is this for real? Surely this is satire? Who is it really aimed at? For sure, the trailer feels like something you'd see inserted into a satirical near-future sci-fi flick, something superficially plausible but hugely problematic the moment you begin to consider the implications of it all.
The most obvious immediate issue, of course, is the idea that it's always on, all the time. That throws up all kinds of fairly hideous privacy problems, both for the user and anyone who is within AI earshot.
Notably, the Friend doesn't just respond to your questions or comments, it can push unprompted quips and observations as it sees fit. To quote the Friend website, "we have given your friend free will for when they decide to reach out to you."
If you're wondering what's powering it all, well, Schiffmann has opted for Anthropic AI’s Claude 3.5 large language model. The idea is that the Friend will develop a distinct personality over time, one that complements your own. Intriguingly, the Friend FAQ reveals that this personality and its memories are specific to the device itself.
"Your friend and their memories are attached to the physical device. If you lose or damage your friend there is no recovery plan," the FAQ says. It doesn't comment on what happens if the device dies of its own accord.
The actual cost of the Friend, meanwhile, is $99 with no subscription. The pendant's website claims that the first pre-orders will begin shipping in early 2025. It's currently only available in the US and Canada.
As for Schiffmann himself, remarkably he is just 21 years old, a Harvard dropout and yet still has quite the tech resume. In 2020, he built one of the first websites for tracking Covid cases across the world, garnering a Webby Person of the Year. Then in 2022, he created a website for refugees fleeing from Ukraine in the wake of the Russian invasion and helping them match with hosts in neighbouring countries.
Truly, it's hard to know what to make of the Friend. Without using one, it's hard to draw conclusions about how compelling the interactions may be. But if the device is for real, the implications are truly head-spinning.
Certainly, it's easy to be totally cynical, to question whether the whole thing isn't a massive practical joke. The trailer can certainly be viewed as a subtle but pretty effective critique of the very idea behind the device. The triangular relationship it implies in the final scene is particularly unsettling.
Equally, it's all too easy to dismiss this kind of thing, to overlook the problem of loneliness and the people who might benefit most from an AI friend. But then the trailer doesn't seem to be addressing that market. It's all young, attractive people seemingly having their already rich and fulfilling lives made even better through the addition of an all-hearing AI companion.
Best gaming PC: The top pre-built machines.
Best gaming laptop: Great devices for mobile gaming.
In some ways, the Friend might be viewed as more augmented inner dialogue than a separate entity, a perspective which could make the whole prospect of being friends with a bunch of code less weird. It's an interactive version of yourself being reflected back at you, not a being in its own right.
Ultimately, it's hard to ignore the conclusion that even if the Friend itself isn't a goer, some aspects of it are likely to be integrated into other services. Most people would probably appreciate an AI assistant in their phone that had at least a touch of "personality" that was sympathetic to their own, right?
In that regard, the Friend may be a little like those other now notorious AI gadgets, the Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin. Neither makes sense as a stand-alone device, but both arguably hit on functionality or at least interaction models that will likely inform how we use AI-augmented devices like smartphones in future.
