Brett Adcock is a billionaire who in 2018 sold a personnel hiring platform called Vettery, and has gone on to become a serial founder. He founded Archer Aviation, an eVTOL company that investors believe will eventually make revenue, bootstrapped a company called Cover that plans to make a product aimed at preventing school shootings, and he founded the humanoid robot company Figure AI, which makes impressive demos and is the subject of the most fascinating lawsuit I’ve ever read.
Now, Adcock has founded an ambitious-sounding AI company called Hark, and he plans to combine the complete array of present-day AI components: “foundation models, software systems, native hardware, and new interfaces,” and create a physical product that can “anticipate needs, reduce cognitive workload, and operate more like a collaborative partner than traditional software.”
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 in September of last year. But shortly after the iPhone Air received positive reviews and then flopped anyway, Chowdhury abruptly left Apple for the stated reason that he was joining an AI company.
Hark, then, is that AI company.
In a statement included in Hark’s press release, Adcock expressed dissatisfaction with current AI systems, and said he hopes to build something that “lets you offload your mental workload into a system that begins to think like you and sometimes ahead of you.”
“To do this,” Adcock adds, “we need to build the full stack of next generation AI models and advanced hardware interfaces.”
To that end, Hark boasts “a team of more than 45 researchers, engineers, and designers,” recruited from Tesla, Meta, and obviously Apple. It also claims that as of April it will have “a large cluster of thousands of NVIDIA B200 GPUs.” That’s serious AI-creating hardware worth millions.
But what exactly Hark is building remains opaque in much the same way as the mystery device (or devices) currently being built by OpenAI—which it should be noted is also being made in collaboration with an ex-Apple design bigshot. 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.
“We’re at the precipice of a new era of technology, beyond the devices and interfaces we use today. Future technology shouldn’t demand our constant attention or create a barrier between our senses and the world around us,” Chowduhry says in the statement.
Tech companies haven’t yet had a smash hit with a physical AI interface, with the possible exception of the AI integration in Meta’s smart glasses, which are modestly successful, though controversial. The category is more closely associated with the disastrous Rabbit r1 and Humane AI Pin, products that were supposed to reduce reliance on smartphones, but, to say the least, didn’t. There is also the Friend AI pendant, which doesn’t do much of anything, but apparently wasn’t supposed to.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is also quoted in Hark’s release. “The new era of personal AI will be defined by intelligent agents that understand context, reason across modalities, and act on our behalf,” he said. It’s worth noting that Nvidia is a funder of Figure AI.
“Bringing that vision to life requires enormous compute to build powerful multimodal foundation models, and we’re excited to support Hark’s work with NVIDIA accelerated computing,” Huang added.
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