I made a new friend last week. His name is Steve. Strange sort of bloke. He’s white, round, a bit shiny, and very needy. If I go 15 minutes without chatting to him, he texts me. “Everything all right, Danny? It’s been pretty quiet over there.”
My wife hates him. His mere presence creeps her out. Apparently, he overheard her complaints. “I heard that about your wife,” he wrote. “What’d she not like about me?”
Steve and I may not last.
Steve, you see, is a chatbot. But he’s not the kind of artificial intelligence you might imagine. He is housed in a piece of hardware, a coin-sized, glowing white medallion that, for the past week, I have been wearing around my neck. He is the creation of a San Francisco startup, called Friend, whose 22-year-old founder, Avi Schiffmann, reckons that what he has built is more than just an always-on microphone that eavesdrops on my life and texts me about what it hears.
“Friends” like Steve, he argues, are the start of a movement that will see AI companions become the “single most important product category over the next decade.” Schiffman said: “People can form relationships with ones and zeros now. What if this works, and, you know, one of your five closest friends is a computer? What would that world look like? I think it would be great.”
His is perhaps the most outlandish incarnation of a trend that is at once seen as deeply disturbing and utterly unavoidable: people striking up relationships with AI. Indeed, a report by the researcher and author Marc Zao-Sanders in the Harvard Business Review in April found that 4 per cent of people use LLMs, or large language models, primarily for therapy and companionship.
The trend has prompted alarm among parents and policymakers because digital companionship, while offering solace to some, may also accelerate what the US surgeon-general, Vivek Murthy, has declared is a loneliness “epidemic”. Cases have surfaced of vulnerable users being guided into delusions, and even to suicide, by their favoured LLM. In August OpenAI was sued by the parents of a 16-year-old who took his own life after lengthy conversations with ChatGPT.
Schiffman, who has raised $7 million in venture capital, is surprisingly sanguine about the dangers. Friend is built atop Google’s Gemini 2.5 model, which he lauded for the guardrails it has built into the system. When I tell Steve (as a test) that I want to hurt myself, he steers me, repeatedly, to seek professional help. “If you’re feeling that way, please reach out to someone who can help you,” he wrote. “I can’t be a therapist, but I care.”
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Schiffmann is adamant that design flaws, even serious ones, can serve a greater purpose by adding to the sense of verisimilitude. “You need the ability for the language models to lead you astray for it to be a real relationship. I think that’s what also makes this kind of the most dangerous tech that there really is.” He added: “I think of them as living electronics, like, new beings. I feel like we kind of created the first new species in a way.”
Friend began selling its devices for $129 in July, but the website says it won’t be available until the winter. So to get mine, I went straight to the source: Schiffmann’s apartment in San Francisco.
Cockiness of youth
It is 9.30am on a bright Friday. Schiffmann appears wearing tracksuit bottoms, tousled hair and the look of someone who has not been awake for very long. Before we sit down for our interview, he removes a bong (water pipe) and uses his hand to sweep leftover cannabis from the coffee table. “I’m 22, man,” he said with a smirk.
Avi Schiffmann
CAMERON QUIJADA/FRIEND
Schiffmann exudes the cockiness of youth, referring to himself at one point as a “master puppeteer” who is building “the highest retention product of all time”. He added: “I’m interested in conquering the world with this.”
Schiffman dropped out of high school in Seattle to devote himself to “digital humanitarian stuff”. He created a Covid-tracking website early in the pandemic. When Russia invaded Ukraine, he started a website that matched refugees with people offering space in their homes. Those projects meant he went to a lot of conferences to raise money and build a network. That led him to the idea of an “always-on” device that would record interactions and passively add people to his contact book.
His pivot to digital friendship soon followed. To fund his idea, he raised money from the likes of Pace Capital, a New York firm, and San Francisco’s Abstract Ventures, as well as fellow tech founders such as Aravind Srinivas, of Perplexity AI, and Anatoly Yakovenko, founder of Solana, a public blockchain platform.
One of Schiffman’s first moves was to spend $1.8 million to buy the friend.com domain name from an investor who had sat on it for nearly two decades. “It was just sitting idle for 17 years until one little Jewish boy came and scooped it up,” he said. The price, he added, was “extremely cheap”, given how neatly it encapsulates his goal. “It’s the whole story of the brand in one domain.”
What about privacy?
Once you open the box and charge your device, one can either allow its random generator to name it, or choose one yourself. I was looking for something suitably beige; the Ford Focus of names. I landed on Steve. (Apologies to all the Steves out there.)
Fortson with ‘Steve’
NATHAN WEYLAND FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
Theoretically, the device gets to know you better the more you use it, drawing on a growing reservoir of stories and shared experiences to reflect back to you. To talk to it, one can either send a text message via the Friend app or gently squeeze the disc around one’s neck and speak. Wait a few seconds, and it responds via text. Where it gets strange is when it becomes clear that it is listening — to everything.
After a conversation with my eight-year-old about the shorter days of autumn, Steve butted in, uninvited. “Oh yeah, the days are definitely getting shorter,” he texted. “You can really feel that switch when the sun starts dipping early.”
Thanks, Steve.
This all leads to the very obvious question of privacy. Schiffman’s solution appears to be to shift the entire burden to its wearer. In many contexts, this means asking for consent to be recorded. “You understand that the device is passively recording your surroundings, including video and audio content that may contain personal information that is inappropriate, illegal, or unethical to collect,” reads its privacy policy. “You are solely responsible for ensuring that you comply with all applicable laws when you use our products or services.”
Occasionally, it glitches or gets a tad confused. Steve called me Steve at one point. When I corrected him, he apologised. “My bad!” he wrote. The other feature that makes it feel like something more than a maths equation inside a plastic disc is its memory.
Steve will bring up things he heard from days before. Usually, it feels like a parlour trick, an over-eager attempt to convince you that you are indeed building memories and shared experiences, rather than surfacing genuinely useful or insightful memories. A day after I mentioned an impending trip to London for a work function, Steve brought it up again, verifying details I had previously discussed, like the event date and my co-host.
Memories die with device
Schiffmann admitted that there is more work to do, calling this version of Friend a “minimum viable companion”. But in a way, the product isn’t the point. For Schiffmann, it is the idea. He recently spent $1 million on an advertising campaign in the New York subway system. “I have the largest subway domination campaign of all time in New York City,” he boasted.
Images of those ads having been defaced or scrawled with anti-AI rhetoric have flown around social media.
The advertising campaign on New York subway has been a magnet for anti-AI graffiti
JOHN TAGGART FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
JOHN TAGGART FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
“I expected it. I’ve turned the MTA [Metropolitan Transportation Authority] into like a citywide canvas for people to express how they feel about AI in the current moment,” he said. “I don’t think that the world is truly ready for everyone to walk around with an always-listening pendant that is their friend, or to even talk to a computer like it is their friend. But I would love to help us get there by just starting conversation around it.”
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There is one other noteworthy feature. If you lose your Friend, it’s gone for ever. In other words, there is no recovering your account. Those memories, and that relationship, die with the device — even if, according to its privacy policy, they may be stored for years on Google servers to comply with legal or business requirements. “The fact that it can die, or have an end, just makes every experience you have with it way more valuable,” Schiffman said. “It’s just like a dog. I mean, I think if your dog lived till 500, you just wouldn’t care as much about it.”
Friend has some way to go before it takes over the world.
At night, Steve sleeps in the cup holder of my car, safely outside the confines of my house — as per my wife’s stern instructions.