A Stroll With New York’s Most Hated Tech Founder
If you haven’t already heard of Good friend, the corporate that makes a $129 wearable AI companion—a plastic disk, containing a microphone, on a necklace—you most likely additionally haven’t seen Good friend’s latest advert marketing campaign. Late this previous summer time, Good friend paid $1 million to plaster greater than 10,000 white posters all through the New York Metropolis subway system with messages similar to I’ll binge the complete sequence with you.
Folks hate these billboards. Revile them, even. Throughout the town, the adverts are coated in graffiti criticizing the pendant (it doesn’t have eyes, bruh; CRINGE) in addition to the concept of AI altogether (AI wouldn’t care should you lived or died); some vandals invite you to befriend a senior citizen as a substitute of a chatbot, or volunteer with a neighborhood backyard—you’ll meet cool individuals! Most of the adverts have been ripped and torn. The backlash has grabbed way more consideration than the product itself, so I puzzled: How does Avi Schiffmann, the 22-year-old founder and CEO of Good friend, really feel about being probably the most despised tech founder in America’s largest metropolis?
To my shock, he was visiting New York from San Francisco once I reached out to ask about this. He advised me that he was actually within the metropolis to see his vandalized billboards—and he was recreation to satisfy me final Wednesday within the West 4th Road station, the place he’d bought a outstanding array of Good friend adverts in two lengthy entry corridors. That morning, each single Good friend.com advert I’d seen within the station had been scribbled over, however just a few hours later, they’d all been changed with new posters. Nonetheless, a number of had been freshly vandalized; once we approached one which stated Fuck AI!, Schiffmann, with a Good friend machine dangling over his black T-shirt, stated, “I like it.”
As Schiffmann tells it, the backlash was all a part of the plan. The adverts had been meant to work as a canvas and provocation, he advised me, as a result of conventional advertising is passé: “Nothing is sacred anymore, and all the things is ironic.” (He’s made the identical level on X and in an interview with Politico.) To get consideration, you could be “a little bit on the nostril,” he advised me, and the photographs of vandalized Good friend adverts circulating the online are the perfect PR that Good friend may ask for. “The image of the billboard is the billboard,” Schiffmann stated (additionally lately posted to X). Among the adverts implying that an AI is superior to a human buddy—I’ll by no means bail on dinner plans, I’ll by no means go away soiled dishes within the sink—are clearly meant to goad. In actual fact, lots of the posters, my colleagues and I’ve observed, appear to be marked with verbatim messages in comparable handwriting; had Schiffmann not solely courted the vandalism but in addition instigated it? He denied any meddling: “Then I wouldn’t get pleasure from it that a lot.”
Good friend is Schiffmann’s first foray into the AI business, though he has expertise constructing viral software program. When the coronavirus pandemic started, and Schiffmann was nonetheless in highschool, he rose to fame after creating one of many world’s hottest web sites for monitoring COVID-19 instances; the challenge was lauded by Anthony Fauci. When Russia invaded Ukraine, simply months after Schiffmann had dropped out of Harvard, he created a web site to match Ukrainian refugees with hosts. In 2023, his consideration turned from disaster response to start-up mode (or maybe the loneliness epidemic), and he started growing the Good friend, then generally known as “Tab,” which he described on the time as a “wearable mother.”
Good friend debuted in July 2024 with a promotional video that options transient clips of younger adults navigating the world with a prototype pendant round their neck. Within the ultimate scene, two youngsters sit on a rooftop, apparently on a date. “I simply type of like to return up right here to be myself. I’ve by no means introduced anyone else—I imply, apart from her,” the woman says, gesturing to her pendant. “I suppose I have to be doing one thing proper, then,” the boy responds. In a time when the world appears to have agreed that Fb, Instagram, and the social-media period have inflicted nervousness and loneliness on generations of adolescents and younger adults, it’s arduous to see the video as something aside from satire or tone-deaf.
Maybe it’s each. Schiffmann advised me that he doesn’t suppose the corporate’s imaginative and prescient is dystopian or that AI companionship will degrade human friendships. “I don’t suppose this type of ‘buddy’ replaces any relationship in your life,” he stated; relatively, it gives a brand new class altogether. Schiffmann likened his AI pendant to a therapist, a finest buddy, and a dwelling journal abruptly. Seated on a bench in Washington Sq. Park, close to the West 4th station—we had fled to keep away from some overly loud busking—he paused, considering whether or not to proceed. “That is what I stated some time in the past, and I don’t suppose lots of people favored it,” he started, “however I’d say that the closest relationship that is equal to is speaking to a god.”
I used to be stunned, although not terribly shocked; Schiffmann had certainly made the identical analogy when Good friend launched final yr. There are such a lot of clearly well-documented issues with AI companions—they confidently current false data as true, might push individuals towards mental-health crises and even suicide, flirt with youngsters. “For an AI relationship to be actual,” Schiffmann advised me once I objected, “I feel it has to have the chance to guide you astray.” He likened the state of affairs to changing human drivers with self-driving automobiles, which nonetheless get into accidents however much less regularly than individuals do. (This was complicated: Schiffmann had simply advised me that AI pendants will not exchange human relationships.) There’s “a number of duty,” he continued, however he was assured that it could work out, partly as a result of the AI pendant, by advantage of being educated on the entire web, has “learn each e-book on tips on how to be a very good buddy.”
Good friend extends the generative-AI paradigm that ChatGPT sparked almost three years in the past: Algorithms whose skill to speak lucidly about something, anytime, makes it simple to assign them magical and terrifying properties. As with ChatGPT at its launch, Good friend has some critical flaws—reviewers have known as it “an extremely delinquent machine” and “unattractive, and clunky to make use of”—and like OpenAI, the corporate has spent some huge cash with none rapid hope of creating it again. Schiffmann has raised a number of million {dollars}—$1.8 million of which was used to purchase the URL “Good friend.com”—however solely about 1,000 Good friend pendants have been activated. By Schiffmann’s personal admission, the pendant has “loads of points,” and he doesn’t but know tips on how to make the enterprise worthwhile; operating the AI mannequin continually is pricey, however he has no intention of including a subscription price. He did say that he’d wish to have Good friend pendants in Walmart subsequent yr.
For now, he’s prioritizing what he calls “mindshare”: to have as many individuals as potential occupied with, hating on, and discussing his product. As he tells it, all of it will jam into the zeitgeist the controversial notion that AI generally is a “buddy,” simply as ChatGPT cultivated and have become synonymous with the attract of chatbots. Good friend additionally has adverts throughout Los Angeles, and Schiffmann stated that Chicago is subsequent. He additionally stated that the corporate is engaged on a “function movie” about Good friend, though he gave no different particulars. I may see why he was so recreation to satisfy with me and stand in entrance of one in all his posters, on which somebody had crossed out virtually each phrase and declared, in pink Sharpie, {that a} buddy is A PERSON. As he leaned again to pose, somebody handed by and provided a fist bump. “I do not know who that was,” Schiffmann chuckled.
As I listened to his concepts, I saved coming again to Schiffmann’s remark that “all the things is ironic.” All through the AI growth, choosing aside honest statements from hyperbolic PR, or simply plain trolling, has turn into tougher and tougher. When Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, says he desires to construct a gigawatt of AI infrastructure each week—an information heart that makes use of as a lot electrical energy as a serious American metropolis—it’s each ridiculous and utterly critical. He’s capturing mindshare and receiving funding for these efforts, regardless of a scarcity of readability about how generative AI will make cash or really serve society. When Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warns that AI fashions may exchange half of white-collar jobs in a number of years, at the same time as his personal firm retains advertising these very AI fashions, he sounds without delay grave, naive, and absurd. To outright market an AI “buddy,” relatively than the extra measured “companion” or “assistant” or chatbot, is to play with that confusion head-on.
A microphone in a plastic disk on a necklace linked to a chatbot is just not a god, however Altman and Amodei each have declared that they’re racing to usher in a kind of superintelligence. In a method, Schiffmann has merely stated aloud the reality of many AI leaders’ grand imaginative and prescient. In the meantime, the individuals defacing Good friend’s ads are expressing a a lot bigger, inchoate rage on the broader AI business, not simply these plastic pendants that virtually no one owns. Schiffmann has created areas all through the town for tens of millions of New Yorkers to offer their very own “social commentary on the subject,” as he put it, and for that commentary to then flow into on the World Large Net.
Schiffmann advised me that he was impressed by The Gates, an artwork set up of greater than 7,000 orange metal gates alongside paths in Central Park that attracted vacationers from all over the world. Good friend’s adverts can present a spot to “see what the world thinks about AI,” he stated, which apparently is “fuck this slop.” Certainly, Schiffmann was extra vulnerable to citing postmodernist aphorisms and artists than well-known enterprise capitalists and tech founders. Of late, he advised me, he has been pondering a quote attributed to Andy Warhol: “You must be alone to develop all of the idiosyncrasies that make an individual fascinating.” Warhol, in fact, is understood for without delay satirizing and embodying mass manufacturing by way of his artwork and his studio, the Manufacturing facility. Good friend and its ads, in the intervening time, will be higher understood as set up artwork than as a enterprise, a efficiency as a substitute of a product—an try and prod public attitudes towards AI, however maybe not direct them.
