Maybe interest rates could still go higher
That said tryfriend.ai is available :)
https://nitter.poast.org/AviSchiffmann/status/18182898106471...
How out of touch do you have to be to think this is a product anyone would ever want near them? This is such a horrible idea I don't even have the correct words to describe it.
> Your friend and their memories are attached to the physical device. If you lose or damage your friend there is no recovery plan.
Surely this is some kind of performance art.
I feel like I'm in the target demographic for something like this. I want my phone to be worse. I don't want to look at my phone as much as I do. The fact that I can't use this without a phone makes it a non-starter for me.
"My Friend is brain dead..."
I'm still keeping my preorder, but I'm a bit more cautious.
Even if it can respond in real-time, the responses seem to come back on the user’s phone. I thought AI hardware was being designed to let people pick up their phone less. This does the opposite. And if the user needs to pick up their phone anyway to read the reply, why not start the interaction from the phone?
It seems like this device would require something like AirPods, with message announcements, to make it more conversational. However, with the unprompted messages it sometimes sent, that could also be intrusive. Not to mention, having headphones in all day would get old fast.
Figuring out and delivering the real AI use case for the average person, beyond what is obvious today, will likely take years of effort, not months.
I mean, that’s the current AI bubble in a nutshell. It has ‘AI’ in the name, therefore it would be most improper to ask the emperor about his tailor.
And like, even if this somehow worked, and some people thought they wanted it, it would be a bad product. If I notice that the person I’m talking to is wearing a 24/7 surveillance device, I’ll, er, talk to someone else. It’s social pariah-hood in a box.
Why was this not abandoned immediately as soon as the AI Pin and the Rabbit thing failed miserably.
Putting aside the questionable (and frankly dystopian) side of using AI for something like this, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are all building LLM's into their OS's. It would take, a day, maybe? to tweak the system prompt to do exactly what this is doing but built into your OS and not some other unnecessary hardware.
Also the product page is, kinda cringe. Like they somehow turned the time it takes for an LLM to process into part of the Marketing with "Pause" "Your friend will think for a moment and come up with something good to say".
This has to be a joke? Please, someone tell me this is a joke.
Also "Always Listening". For the love of god how do people think that is a good idea. Hope no one wears this to work and it hears and processes something that is non public information. I wouldn't trust the privacy with this one bit.
Edit:
The tagline "not imaginary", I am at a loss for words on that one. Thats... what is wrong with people.
AI is at a point where unless there is another breakthrough they need orders of magnitude more fresh raw data to improve the models. Everything everywhere all the time. They don't just want it, they need it to grow.
SLAP a smile on that microphone and people will eat it like candy.
Related Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDUC-LqVrPU
I mean I am not going to pretend that in its purist form, if there was something always listening and could chime in in at the right time with some contextual information or later on I could ask it a question about something that happened. That it would not be valuable. Think that Disney Smart House movie or Star Trek.
Like I said, in its purest form. If it somehow magically worked, no privacy issues, no data collection, all local, actually would reason unlike LLM's, etc etc etc. Like it sounds like a genuinely useful tool.
But, it falls apart as soon as we recognize that all of these tools are just going to he hovering up all of this data, privacy is non existent regardless of what they claim, and ultimately since we live in a capitalist society we can't just assume that this will only benefit us. It will be a weak point for any number of nefarious purposes.
Maybe one day we can truly have some tech like this that really truly acts like a second brain basically, to remember all the things that we maybe didn't process, didn't write down, whatever. But while I am sure we have the tech to do it, at least to some basic degree with LLM's. There are too many other reasons the tech is also not suitable for exactly this task.
Or interpersonal communications. I know that I would be extremely circumspect about what I'd be willing to say near someone wearing something like this, even (or especially) if that someone is a close friend.
P.s I'm still going to hate
