Good friend, a startup making a $99, AI-powered necklace designed to be handled as a digital companion, has delayed its first batch of shipments till Q3.
Good friend had deliberate to ship gadgets to pre-order clients in Q1. However in response to co-founder and CEO Avi Schiffman, that’s not possible.
“As a lot as I’d preferred to have shipped in Q1 of this yr, I nonetheless have refinements to do, and sadly you may solely begin manufacturing electronics if you end up 95% accomplished together with your design,” Schiffman stated in an electronic mail to clients. “I estimate that by the top of February, when our prototype is full, that we are going to start our closing dash.”
An electronic mail I despatched out to all Good friend preorder clients: pic.twitter.com/wUPR0OhpI4
— Avi (@AviSchiffmann) January 20, 2025
Good friend, which has an eight-person engineering employees and $8.5 million in capital from buyers together with Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, raised eyebrows when it spent $1.8 million on the area identify Good friend.com. This fall, as a part of what Schiffman known as an “experiment,” Good friend debuted an online platform on Good friend.com that allowed folks to speak to random examples of AI characters.
Reception was combined. TechRadar’s Eric Schwartz famous that Good friend’s chatbots typically inexplicably kicked off conversations with anecdotes of traumas, together with muggings and firings. Certainly, when this reporter visited Good friend.com Monday afternoon, a chatbot named Donald shared that the “ghosts of [his] previous” have been “freaking him the f— out.”
Within the above-mentioned electronic mail, Schiffman additionally stated that Good friend could be winding down its chatbot expertise.
“We’re glad that thousands and thousands received to mess around with what I consider to be probably the most life like chatbot on the market,” Schiffman wrote. “This has actually confirmed our inside potential to handle site visitors, and has actually taught us quite a bit about digital companionship … [But] I need us to remain targeted on solely the {hardware}, and I’ve realized that digital chatbots and embodied companions don’t combine effectively.”
AI-powered companions have turn out to be a hot-button matter. Character.AI, a chatbot platform backed by Google, has been accused in two separate lawsuits of inflicting psychological hurt on youngsters. Some specialists have expressed issues that AI companions may worsen isolation by changing human relationships with synthetic ones, and generate dangerous content material that may set off psychological well being circumstances.
