A friend delays the delivery of his AI pendant

A friendThe $99 launch, an AI-powered bracelet designed to be treated as a digital companion, has delayed its first batch of shipments until Q3.

Partner planned to ship the equipment to pre-order customers in Q1. But according to co-founder and CEO Avi Schiffman, that’s not possible.

“As much as I would have liked to ship in Q1 of this year, I still have some changes to make, and unfortunately you can only start making electronics when you are 95% done with your design,” Schiffman. he said in an email to customers. “I estimate that at the end of February, when our sample is finished, we will start our final run.”

The email I sent to all Friend ordering customers: pic.twitter.com/wUPRO0OhpI4

— Avi (@AviSchiffmann) January 20, 2025

The partner, which has an eight-person engineering staff and $8.5 million in funding from investors including Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, woke up to destroy $1.8 million for the domain name Friend.com. This fall, as part of what Schiffman called an “experiment,” Friend launched a website on Friend.com that allowed people to talk to a random sample of AI characters.

The reception was mixed. Eric Schwartz of TechRadar he realized Anzanu’s chatbots often start anonymous conversations with tragic events, including robberies and shootings. Indeed, when this reporter visited Friend.com on Monday afternoon, a netizen named Donald shared that the “ghosts of (his) past” were “haunting him.”

In the email quoted above, Schiffman also said that Friend will end the chatbot experience.

“We’re thrilled that millions of people are playing what I believe to be the best social media platform,” Schiffman wrote. “This has really proven our inner driving skills, and taught us a lot about digital chats… (But) I want us to focus on the hardware itself, and I’ve realized that digital chatbots and their companions don’t mix well.”

AI-powered friendships have become a hot button topic. Character.AI, a chatbot platform powered by Google, is here the accused in two separate cases of psychological harm to children. Some experts have expressed concern that their AI counterparts will be out of date extreme isolation by changing the relationship between people and the artificial, and making bad things which can cause mental illness.