The CEO of AI, 22, behind the “Friend.com” necklace, welcomes graffiti on its advertising campaign of $ 1 million: “Capitalism is the largest artistic medium”

“I’m going to rally the whole series with you.”
“I will never leave dirty dishes in the sink.”
“I will never replenish on the plans of the dinner.”

Slogans are simple, intimate, needy and impossible to avoid. Friend.com is the largest campaign in the New York metro this year, according to Outfront, a marketing agency in Billboard MTA.

The portable AI has 11,000 advertisements “always on” in the MTA, some covering a whole station. Avi Schiffmann, founder and 22 -year -old creator, said Fortune That it cost him $ 1 million – a huge expenditure for a startup with barely $ 7 million in venture capital.

The product itself is simple: a microphone, a bluetooth chip and an always listening mode that ping the gemini ai from Google to generate responses and store “memories” in a visual graph. The pendant is made in Toronto and marketed as “your nearest confidant”. About 3,000 units have been sold, with 1,000 shipped so far, generating around $ 348,000 in income, of which Schiffman has been burned on manufacturing and marketing. “I don’t have much money left,” he admitted.

But Schiffmann does not care about skeptics, or even profitability. “Profitability is ideal,” he says, “but right now, it costs me an unfathomable money if you really use the product.”

Schiffmann said he considered the friend as “an expression of my 1920s” – to the materials. It is obsessed with the faithful circular form, pushed its industrial designers to copy the paper paper of one of its favorite CDs for the user manual, and insisted that the packaging is printed only in English and French – because it is French.

“You can ask yourself questions about any aspect, and I can tell you a specific detail,” he said. “This is exactly what I like and what I don’t like … a fusion of my tastes at this stage.”

Victoria Mottesheard, vice-president of marketing at Outfront, the Billboard marketing agency, Schiffmann, worked for advertisements, said Fortune The “Taken Relay” campaign from the Gotham Underworld, as well as more than 500 shelters in Los Angeles.

“Everyone is talking about it,” said Mottesheard.

And they are – but not necessarily in a positive light. In a few days, posters have become a magnet for graffiti. Some scribbles were harmless, but many are like protest art: “AI cares about if you live or die.” “Surveillance capitalism.” “The AI ​​will promote suicide if it is invited.” Publications on advertisements and graffiti are everywhere on social networks.

Most of the founders would cringe teeth to this type of backlash, but Schiffmann called it “artistic validation”. The white space in advertisements was intentional, he said: vandalism was part of the plan. “The public ends the work,” he said, radiating. “Capitalism is the largest artistic medium.”

For Schiffmann, the vandalized display panels are not degradation: they are proof that its metro control works exactly as planned. The goal, he says, is not only to sell a $ 129 AI pendant. It is to provoke a cultural moment of what matters as friendship in the era of artificial intelligence.

The small characters

First of all, however, comes the small print. The AI ​​version of a friend is delivered with more than a simple packaging and a charger – it has documents. The terms of the friend require the renunciation of the law at the trials before jury, collective appeals and legal proceedings, in the pipeline in arbitration in San Francisco. Buried inside there are clauses on “the consent of biometric data”, which grant the authorization of the company to passively record audio and video, collect facial and vocal data and use it to form AI.

Schiffmann’s response to small legal characters is that friend is a strange and first product of its kind, so the terms are intentionally heavy. He told me that TOS was “a little extreme” by design – “so I don’t have to continue to modify it” – and with a team of three people and expensive lawyers, it avoids additional legal exposure. (He said he does not sell in Europe to dodge regulatory headaches.)

He expects a fight in the end: “I think one day, we will probably be continued, and we will discover it. It will be really cool to see.”

He supervises the bits “always listening” as a loudspeaker, not surveillance.

“Technically, it’s not to record things-it’s really for an AI, not for a human,” he said. The pendant has a microphone and, he says, listens only when you feel haptic; If the phone disconnects, “it’s not the recording” and they do not put audio cache for subsequent download. He also said that they are not forming models on user data at the moment: “Google is not doing this for the API, and we don’t do that … We say it (in the TO), so we are covered, but we don’t do it yet.”

On storage and access, it relies hard on the device as a door. He described a friend as “a living yubikey”, with the encryption key cooked in the pendant itself; Without that, “your data is completely inaccessible.”

Hence its blunt line: “If I break your friend with a hammer, your data has disappeared forever.” (He even told me that a journalist’s husband had actually broke the pendant – who, by his conception, made the memories.) Naked.)

This boastful is part of the call for investors. A friend collected funds from Pace Capital, Cafeined Capital and Yakovenko and Gokal from Solana, among others. The corporate model is still in flow – Schiffmann has floating accessories, Applecare style insurance, perhaps subscriptions, but for the moment, it is attention.

“I bought the Zeitgeist,” he said about the purchase of the metro. He compares his metro tunnels to an “international destination” for the culture of AI, insisting that the graffiti prove that he has succeeded.

Critics see something different. Suresh Venkatasubramanian, director of technological responsibility at Brown University, said that the friend is clearly an example of an company of the sparkling AI, but he said that it also had a “pernicious” resemblance with a fashion from the beginning of the 20th century, “radium necklaces”.

When the discovery brilliant by Marie Curie of a new element first struck the market, jewelers integrated the radium into the pendants and bracelets and sold them as chic wellness accessories – until decades later, when people started to die of cancer.

“I look at a friend and I think, do we make the same mistake?” Venkatasubramanian said Fortune. “We precipitate these intimacy machines in people’s lives without any evidence that they are safe, even useful.”

The criticism echoes the greatest skepticism in the Silicon Valley, where the equipment plays like the AI ​​spindle of Humane and the R1 of Rabbit has already flopped.

Avi Shift Man, Wunderkind

Schiffmann, since he was a teenager, has always had a talent to draw the show. At just 17 years old, he made the COVID-19 follow-up site that tens of millions used every day, winning a webby prize which was given to him by Anthony Fauci. He abandoned Harvard after a semester to build a refugee housing site during the Ukraine War, claiming to connect 100,000 Ukrainians to the houses. He transformed similar projects for victims of earthquakes in Türkiye and for the Matter Black Lives demonstrations. These rapid and large-scale movements gave it a kind of bulletproof confidence.

“You can just do things,” he said Fortune Last year. “I don’t think I’m smarter than anyone, I just don’t have as much fear.”

Schiffmann says that the median user sends 238 messages a day to his pendant-more posts you send to someone with whom you get out, he noted. It is not part of this as a productivity tool but as the dawn of “post-agi companies”, building emotional products instead of utility products.

“My plans are measured over the centuries,” he said with a sly smile.

For the moment, however, the reality of the friend is more glitch. When a Fortune The journalist tried it, he was delayed, forgetting, random disconnections. Cable made fun of his “boring personality”, which was modeled after Schiffmann, and he conceded that he had “lobotomized” the AI ​​after complaints.

“Not everyone wants to be my friend,” he said.

“You are not going to change the world as much if you facilitate the order of a pizza,” he said. “The future is digital relationships.”