Meet the 21-year-old Harvard dropout behind Friend, the creepy new AI necklace

The internet, however, has found Friend to be less than dank.

Unlike Siri, Alexa, and their brethren, Friend is not an ask-and-tell robot assistant. Instead, the $99 device aspires to take the place of human companionship, capitalizing on a culture in which nearly 10 percent of Americans say they have no close friends. With Friend, you're never alone — which, depending on how much you value solitude and privacy, is either extremely comforting or extremely creepy.

If any of this sounds bleak or dystopian, then you'll understand the vitriolic reactions to the product across the internet. A sampling from X: "Friend strikes me as a product for losers, which is a totally valid market," and "One of the more depressing things I've ever seen…Do whatever the opposite of this is." Many compared Friend to a "Black Mirror" episode.

The 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. (He is not the first entrepreneur to purchase an expensive domain — Elon Musk, Schiffmann was quick to point out, spent some $11 million to acquire Tesla.com.) Friend's investors include Caffeinated Capital's Raymond Tonsing, Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas, and Morning Brew cofounder Austin Rief. "People think my investors hate me, but they could not love me any more," he said.

Still, Schiffmann admits that the online reaction to Friend is not what he expected. "I honestly think it's because the video was too good," he said."That, maybe, was my biggest mistake. There hasn't been a video this high quality about AI companionship since 'Her,'" — the Oscar-winning 2013 film in which Scarlett Johansson plays an AI voice assistant so transfixing Joaquin Phoenix's human character falls in love with her.

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, a "friend" that could offer camaraderie and emotional support. "A good friend that sends you a text like 'Good luck on the interview' is more productive than reminding you that you have a meeting in five minutes," he said.

A 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. But Schiffmann sees a throughline in all these projects: "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."

"I'm building friends for myself, but I also have a ton of friends," he added. "I don't think it's a complete substitution. If one of your five close friends is an AI, it's a good thing, especially if you fear judgment from other people. It can fill in gaps when you're traveling and it's late at night and you want to talk to someone."

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 confidante, but it's 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 Friends' users who fear being alone. Friend needs to have access to every aspect of your life in order to work, says Schiffmann. "You wouldn't put headphones over your dog," he said. "It makes it feel like it's actually there with you. It's nice to be with a sentient entity."

Schiffmann is not the only tech founder building an AI companion in the form of a pendant. In fact, on the day Friend launched, a competing AI hardware founder named Nik Shevchenko released a diss track — as any self-respecting 23-year-old AI hardware founder would do — insinuating that Schiffmann stole his idea. Shevchenko is also building an open-source competitor AI pendant, which he wears in his rap video, that looks a lot like Friend's. It is, in what seems to be more than a coincidence, also named Friend. "For those who don't know / I built Friend / renamed your Tab/ jacked my style," Shevchenko raps.

When I asked Schiffmann about Shevchenko's claims, Schiffmann told me it was the opposite: Shevchenko had copied him. (It would not be the first time that Shevchenko built an open source competitor that closely resembled another AI hardware device. In March, the AI pin company Humane sent Shevchenko a cease and desist after he launched a similar device called Whomane.) "There are a lot of people building open source competitors," said Schiffmann. "[Shevchenko] is the most annoying one."

"Maybe I am annoying," Shevchenko said when I reached him for comment. But he disagreed with at least some of Schiffmann's claims. He actually had been copying another AI companion pendant, he said. "The project that we built was indeed fascinated by another project but it was not Avi's Tab. It was an open-source wearable called Adeus." There are nearly as many upstart AI companion pendant necklaces, it seems, as there are Taylor Swift friendship bracelets.

At least from the world'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. As for Friend's online detractors, they are just "being Twitter tech people and, like, yappin'," he said.

Schiffmann is unbothered by the vitriol, he says. When it comes to creating Friend, "every decision I made was guided by personal vibes."

"I'm just chilling at my house smoking cigarettes and continuing to work," he continued. Schiffmann says he has big plans for Friend. "I fully plan on winning the industry," he said. "If this is what I can do with 2.5 million dollars, wait till you see what I can do with $100 million."

Zoë Bernard is a feature writer based in Los Angeles. She writes about technology, crime, and culture. Formerly, she covered technology for The Information and Business Insider.