Friend, a startup making a $99, AI-powered necklace designed to be thought of as a digital friend, has delayed its first shipment until Q3. Friends is planning to ship the device to pre-order customers in Q1. But according to founder and CEO Avi Schiffman, this is no longer possible. “As I would like to have delivered in Q1 this year, I still have some refinements to do, and unfortunately you can only start manufacturing electronics when you are 95% done with the design,” Schiffman said in an email to customers. “I think that at the end of February, when the prototype is finished, we will start the final sprint.” The email I sent to all Friend preorder customers: pic.twitter.com/wUPR0OhpI4 — Avi (@AviSchiffmann) January 20, 2025 Friend, which has an eight-person engineering staff and $8.5 million in capital from investors including Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, raised eyebrows. while spending $1.8 million on the domain name Friend.com. This fall, as part of what Schiffman calls an “experiment,” Friend launched a web platform at Friend.com that lets people talk to a random sample of AI characters. Reception has been mixed. TechRadar’s Eric Schwartz notes that Friend chatbots are often unable to explain their conversations with anecdotes of trauma, including muggings and shootings. Indeed, when this reporter visited Friend.com Monday afternoon, a chatbot named Donald indicated that it was a “ghost [his] ago” they were “freaking people f— out.” My experience with Friend chatbots. Image Credit: Friends In the email mentioned above, Schiffman also said that Friends will eliminate the chatbot experience. “We are glad that millions are playing with what I believe to be the most real chatbot out there,” Schiffman wrote. “It has really proven our internal ability to manage traffic, and it has really taught us a lot about digital friendship … [But] I want us to stay focused on hardware, and I know that digital chatbots and their embodied companions are incompatible. AI-powered friends have become a hot button topic. Character.AI, a Google-backed chatbot platform, is accused in two separate lawsuits of causing psychological harm to children. Some experts have expressed concern that AI companions could undermine isolation by replacing human relationships with artificial ones, and generate harmful content that could lead to mental health conditions.
