{"id":560962,"date":"2026-03-24T11:11:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-24T11:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/560962\/"},"modified":"2026-03-24T11:11:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-24T11:11:08","slug":"figure-ai-founder-and-iphone-air-designer-team-up-on-ai-mystery-product","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/560962\/","title":{"rendered":"Figure AI Founder and iPhone Air Designer Team Up on AI Mystery Product"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brett Adcock is a billionaire<\/a> who in 2018 sold a personnel hiring platform called Vettery<\/a>, and has gone on to become a serial founder. He founded Archer Aviation, an eVTOL company that investors believe will eventually make revenue<\/a>, bootstrapped a company called Cover<\/a> that plans to make a product aimed at preventing school shootings, and he founded the humanoid robot company Figure AI, which makes impressive demos<\/a> and is the subject of the most fascinating lawsuit I<\/a>\u2019ve ever read<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now, Adcock has founded an ambitious-sounding AI company called Hark, and he plans to combine the complete array of present-day AI components: \u201cfoundation models, software systems, native hardware, and new interfaces,\u201d and create a physical product that can \u201canticipate needs, reduce cognitive workload, and\u00a0operate more like a collaborative partner than traditional software.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the moment, the most remarkable thing about Hark is one of its key hires: Abidur Chowdhury, formerly a major designer at Apple. Chowdhury apparently played enough of a role as a design lead for the iPhone Air, and was perceived as such a rising star, that he was chosen to narrate the product announcement<\/a> in September of last year. But shortly after the iPhone Air received positive reviews<\/a> and then flopped anyway<\/a>, Chowdhury abruptly left Apple<\/a> for the stated reason that he was joining an AI company.<\/p>\n

Hark, then, is that AI company.<\/p>\n

In a statement included in Hark\u2019s press release, Adcock expressed dissatisfaction with current AI systems, and said he hopes to build something that \u201clets you offload your mental workload into a system that begins to think like you and sometimes ahead of you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTo do this,\u201d Adcock adds, \u201cwe need to build the full stack of next generation AI models and advanced hardware interfaces.\u201d<\/p>\n

To that end, Hark boasts \u201ca team of more than 45 researchers, engineers, and designers,\u201d recruited from Tesla, Meta, and obviously Apple. It also claims that as of April it will have \u201ca large cluster of thousands of NVIDIA B200 GPUs.\u201d That\u2019s serious AI-creating hardware worth millions.<\/p>\n

But what exactly Hark is building remains opaque in much the same way as the mystery device<\/a> (or devices<\/a>) currently being built by OpenAI\u2014which it should be noted is also being made in collaboration with an ex-Apple design bigshot<\/a>. Hark claims its device will place some kind of AI interface capable of performing agentic work in the vicinity of the user in order to operate continuously throughout the day, apparently by speaking to it conversationally, but in some ostensibly seamless and natural way.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re at the precipice of a new era of technology, beyond the devices and interfaces we use today. Future technology shouldn\u2019t demand our constant attention or create a barrier between our senses and the world around us,\u201d Chowduhry says in the statement.<\/p>\n

Tech companies haven\u2019t yet had a smash hit with a physical AI interface, with the possible exception of the AI integration in Meta\u2019s smart glasses<\/a>, which are modestly successful<\/a>, though controversial<\/a>. The category is more closely associated with the disastrous Rabbit r1 and Humane AI Pin<\/a>, products that were supposed to reduce reliance on smartphones, but, to say the least, didn\u2019t. There is also the Friend AI pendant<\/a>, which doesn\u2019t do much of anything, but apparently wasn\u2019t supposed to.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is also quoted in Hark\u2019s release. \u201cThe new era of personal AI will be defined by intelligent agents that understand context, reason across modalities, and act on our behalf,\u201d he said. It\u2019s worth noting that Nvidia is a funder of Figure AI<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cBringing that vision to life requires\u00a0 enormous compute to build powerful multimodal foundation models, and we\u2019re excited to support Hark\u2019s work with NVIDIA accelerated computing,\u201d Huang added.<\/p>\n