General AI
Friend 2 Pendant Review: Boring AI, Hivemind Plans
WIRED AIhigh confidence
Why it matters
- →Highlights the trade-off between personalized AI experiences and centralized data aggregation.
- →Demonstrates how hardware startups are pivoting from novelty gadgets to ambitious agent architectures.
- →Signals a potential industry trend toward shared, global AI models rather than isolated user instances.
WIRED reviewed the Friend 2, an AI-powered pendant by startup founder Avi Schiffmann that costs $249 and runs on OpenAI models. The device features a persistent chatbot named Sage, which reviewers found to be bland and lacking the distinct personality of its predecessor. Schiffmann announced plans to replace individual user profiles with a single global AI entity that shares context across all users. This 'hivemind' approach aims for realism but requires users to surrender significant privacy data to a centralized system.
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How we got here
- 1Friend AI Pendant Now Speaks Aloud
WIRED AI · July 30, 2026 · Same story
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