Friend

Headlines · 3

1. 3d
   Friend 2 review: the AI pendant is louder, and duller

   WIRED's reviewer tried the second-generation Friend pendant from Avi Schiffmann: it costs $249, $100 more than the original, runs on OpenAI's latest language models, listens through a speaker around your neck, starts conversations at a button press and sometimes pipes up unprompted. Once paired with the Friend app it lets users create and swap among multiple named personas — Sage, Nova, Onyx and others — but the reviewer found them hard to tell apart, bland, unable to browse the web like other AI agents and limited to casual, content-restricted chat. Schiffmann said a future update will let Friends act "agentically" and switch to a single shared entity that draws on all users' context for a more realistic personality, acknowledging that users would give up significant privacy in the process.

   WIRED AI · 🔥 0
2. 4d
   The 'pointless' AI hardware boom pulling in VC cash

   A commentary piece surveys a wave of consumer AI hardware startups: founder Tang Zhenyi's Mark II AI bookmark, priced at $159 and reportedly launched on May 15 inside the COLLINS design studio's library in Brooklyn, has supposedly booked hundreds of thousands of dollars in preorders; Shenzhen-based OdyssLife's Odyss N1 AI necklace costs $299 plus a monthly subscription, with the article claiming roughly 200 million yuan raised and delivery planned for late 2026; and BubblePal claims more than 200,000 units sold plus a 200 million yuan Series A. The piece also cites Humane's AI Pin (said to have been sold to HP for $116 million in February 2025), Limitless's recording pendant (said to have been acquired by Meta in December 2025) and Friend, arguing that what these products truly reinvent is the way they charge: old, already-solved needs dressed up as AI, funded by founder storytelling and buyers' sense of identity.

   虎嗅 AI · 🔥 0
3. 4d
   Palantir CTO claims AI researchers smoke to signal faith AI will cure cancer

   Gizmodo and cnBeta report that Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar said on CBS's Face the Nation that some AI researchers have taken up smoking to signal to peers how much they believe in AI — telling them they are betting everything on AI eventually curing cancer. Sankar named no researchers and offered no evidence; his point was critical, describing quasi-religious AGI belief in Silicon Valley as a "machine god" and "mass psychosis," invoking Pascal's idea of a God-shaped hole in humans. The reports also cite earlier press accounts of smoking and nicotine use spreading among some tech founders, engineers and investors, and Friend founder Avi Schiffmann's remark that "by the time you do get lung cancer, our AI robots are supposed to have cured that" — claims that remain unverified, with no sign AI is close to curing cancer.

   Gizmodo · 🔥 0

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