An only-in-San-Francisco fight is brewing between two AI startups that are developing wearable devices of the same name: Friend.
On Tuesday, San Francisco-based My TabAl Inc. released a viral video announcing its new Friend product, worn as a necklace, that records users' every word to send contextual text messages mimicking the experience of having a real friend. The advertisement prompted a strong response on X with some calling the it "weird" and like a skit from the Netflix sci-fi series "Black Mirror."
The announcement drew a swift response from Nik Shevchenko, a Thiel Fellow and founder of Based Hardware, also headquartered in S.F., who posted a rap diss track on X, accusing My TabAI's founder Avi Schiffmann of stealing the name.
Based Hardware's product, also named Friend, is a similar-looking necklace that records users' conversations, but instead provides summaries and analysis of the recorded speech. It is also open source, unlike My TabAI's Friend, which uses Anthropic's Claude 3.5 large language model, according to Wired.
Shevchenko even challenged Schiffmann to a fight, an increasingly popular occurrence in Silicon Valley after Tesla's Elon Musk and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg briefly entertained the idea of having a cage match.
But who came up with the idea for the device and name first? The founders have differing views of the timeline and each says the other is misrepresenting the truth.
"I started working on Tab back in May of last year, and had a viral demo in October of the first wearable, 'always-on' AI," Schiffmann told the Business Times in a text. "Everyone in S.F. knows this. Nik and many others then copied the idea and tried to make open source versions, fine, whatever. But earlier this year I rebranded to Friend, bought friend.com in February. Someone told Nik I rebranded to 'Friend' before I announced and he copied that too when he launched in April I believe."
Schiffmann said he bought the domain name friend.com for $1.8 million, a hefty sum considering the company has only raised $2.5 million from angel investors, who include Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal. He said the investment has already paid for itself in marketing his product, which is currently available for advance orders at $99.
Shevchenko said that he was not aware that Tab had rebranded to Friend in February, and that he launched his product on March 24. It's currently available to buy for $69.99. He said his main inspiration from the device came from Adeus, a discontinued AI necklace project by an Israeli developer.
"The renaming in February is a lie," he said. "It was not announced anywhere and it was not publicly sold as a brand or anything. And regarding the launch (of Tab) in October last year, it was something multiple companies launched. AI necklaces — even Meta, Google or Apple are probably working on this right now."
The pair of AI founders have sparred on X, posting screenshots that dispute when the URL of friend.com was changed to denote the brand change. Schiffmann has shown that he bought friend.com in February, but its not abundantly clear if Shevchenko was aware of the rebrand.
AI wearables has proven a difficult market for startups in the past year. San Francisco-based Humane and L.A.-based Rabbit both launched AI-powered products that were savaged in product reviews for their poor functionality and overpromising of features. Despite the setbacks, millions of dollars of venture capital have poured into the space to test whether well-designed AI hardware can capture — or perhaps stimulate — consumer demand.
