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Here is the pre-AI version of 'Friend', surprisingly this seems less creepy.
 
A necklace AI that acts as your friend? I've seen this before, back in 1979:
View attachment 2401410
Thanks to Twiki wearing Dr. Theopolis, prior art has been established.
Also, if it takes off, the estate of Glen Larson should be raking in a lot of dough!
Thank you for this! Made my day! Now if Wilma Deering shows up at my house, I'll totally rethink my position on AI.
 
This company spent most of its seed funding on…...

Their domain name.

Doing the quick math, they got $1.9MM in Seed funding, and an additional $2.5MM on a $50MM valuation.

That is $4.4MM, and they spent ~41% of that money to purchase the friend.com domain name.

Almost half of their money is thrown away. Burned up. Shredded.

I think I'm going to wait to give them my $99, until there is a real product to buy. Probably not even then.
 
The ad is cringey and kinda tone-deaf and the form-factor is awkward. Beyond the wrist and the finger, people’s capacity to tolerate wearable tech falls off a cliff. I’m not sure an ugly statement necklace is the next big frontier. And I’m sure, like Rabbit, it’s just a cheap wrapper around Claude or ChatGPT or (shudder) Llama.
Hate to break it to you, but yeah it’s Llama

Schiffmann didn’t set out to just build a yes-man on a necklace. He said Friend is built on Meta’s new open source AI model Llama 3.1, which he calls “way better than any ChatGPT type of thing.”

Source: https://www.geekwire.com/2024/covid...-a-wearable-always-listening-99-ai-companion/
 
Friend is an AI necklace that is meant to serve as a personal companion, and in a video that could be the start to an episode of Black Mirror, it's shown providing support, encouragement, and companionship to the wearer.
This is the funniest thing I have read this week. Thank you MR!
 
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Friend is designed to be supportive, validating, and able to encourage ideas.
If it's anything like most LLMs, I imagine its dialogue would get very repetitive after a while 😅 It's an interesting idea but the novelty would wear off after a few weeks..
 
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They could have just sold this as an app and then shipped a special lanyard for it to have your phone hanging around your neck.
No one would spend $99 on an app, though. Same reason Rabbit R1 was $200 despite it being proven you could run the software on a bog-standard Android phone. It's much easier to get someone to spend $200 on $50 in hardware with a special app than just sell the app by itself.
 
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