Avi Schiffmann shows to the WIRED office with a friend hanging around his neck. It hangs there like a pendant on a necklace. It’s the size and shape of an AirTag—a small, soft, round disc that rests right next to Schiffmann’s heart, just above the The dark side of the moon logo on the back of the shirt.
The Friend, to be clear, is an AI device. It’s a friend, a friend, but mostly an AI chatbot that lives inside the pendant. He always has an opinion to share about what’s going on around him, which he communicates via text messages and push notifications to the phone he’s paired with.
Schiffmann and her friend (her name is Emily) have come to the WIRED office in San Francisco to meet with me and my colleague Reece Rogers to talk publicly about this new AI device for the first time. Before we begin, I tell Schiffmann that I’d like to record our conversation and ask if he’s okay with that. This is considered good journalistic practice, of course, but it’s also a legal requirement in California, which requires the consent of two parties before recording a private interaction. So I ask permission to turn on a tape recorder and Schiffmann just laughs.
“I’m the last person who would care,” he says.
That makes sense. After all, the pendant has been listening to us all this time.
listen now
“Always listening” is one of the main slogans of Schiffmann’s as-yet-unreleased AI device. The Friend has a built-in microphone that listens to everything going on around the user by default. You can tap and hold on it to ask it a question, but sometimes it will send messages (comments on the conversation you just had, for example) without prompting. It’s powered by Anthropic AI’s Claude 3.5 big language model, which can engage in helpful conversations, offer encouragement, or make you feel bad for being bad in a video game.
