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Covid-era whiz kid is back, and he brought a Friend — a wearable, always listening, $99 AI companion (www.geekwire.com)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by Telorand@reddthat.com to c/technology@lemmy.world

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This isn't a joke, though it almost seems like one. It uses Llama 3.1, and supposedly the conversation data stays on the device and gets forgotten over time (through what the founder calls a rolling "context window").

The implementation is interesting, and you can see the founder talking about earlier prototypes and project goals in interviews from several months ago.

iOS only, for now.

Edit: Apparently, you can build your own for around $50 that runs on ChatGPT instead of Llama. I'm sure you could also figure out how to switch it to the LLM of your choice.

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[–] randon31415@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Oh, crap! This is getting confusing. I think this is what happened:

The "Friend.com" AI friend was originally named "Tab". The Basedhardware.com wearable was originally named "Friend", but "AI Friend" was turning up to much stuff, so they added Based hardware to the name.

Then the creator of Tab renamed it "Friend" and bough Friend.com. Both AI wearable, but the Friend.com sounds more closed source than the based hardware Friend. So they are technically two different projects.

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 1 points 3 months ago

I mean, taking open source and turning it into closed source isn't an impossible case. It wouldn't surprise me if he borrowed ideas from the other project, at any rate.

But yeah, definitely different projects, though it remains to be seen how different they are at their core. I'm not spending $100 to find out; I'll let the whales do that.