Friend.com's Epic Launch: Why Brand Matters More Than Ever in the AI Era

Hi everyone

This is Lore, the techno-optimist newsletter. 

Every week, I share 5 interesting things to help you thrive in the age of AI.

Thank you for being a part of 20k+ techno-optimists and growing. Feel free to forward this to your friends if you feel the urge. 🙏

P.S. Watch the latest episode of The Next Wave with Alvin Graylin here!

1) Things Are Getting Better

AI is now helping detect breast cancer sooner than possible before. I expect AI to continue to revolutionize health and help us to live longer and better lives.

That is why it’s essential to consider this when discussing AI safety. How many lives will be lost if we slow down AI development?

2) Friend.com's Epic Launch: Why Brand Matters More Than Ever in the AI Era

Guess who's back? Avi Schiffmann.

Avi, who previously founded AI wearables startup Tab, is back with a rebrand and a fancy $1.8M domain. Friend.com. Check out their launch trailer.

From what I can tell, this is an AI wearable that's always with you and that you can chat with. It's basically an AI friend.

Now, I know what you're thinking. AI wearables haven't exactly been killing it lately. Remember when Marques Brownlee reviewed the Humane AI pin? He called it the worst product he's ever reviewed. Ouch.

I could see this being incredibly useful for daily life—helping me keep track of things and giving me feedback. But I'm also thinking it could get really weird in social situations, like hanging out with my wife and son.

One thing for sure, it's been the most controversial AI launch in recent memory. Some folks are calling it dystopian, while others are laughing at Avi for dropping so much of his investor's cash on a domain.

I see it way differently. To me, this is exactly what we need. More ambitious risk-takers who aren't afraid to try new things and make bold bets to push things forward.

This is acceleration.

Why The Domain Was Brilliant

In this crazy AI age, competition is going to be fiercer than ever. Most companies are not ready for this shift.

Soon enough, it will be super easy to copy most software using AI. In that world, having a strong brand and doing the hard stuff will be crucial.

With Friend, Avi's scored an amazing brand domain name. Plus, he's doing hardware, which is way harder to replicate than something like a SaaS tool. I think it's a brilliant move.

The design is beautiful and I think if anyone is going to nail AI wearables, Avi has the best chance since he’s been at it for a while.

I suggest you pre-order it today. (not sponsored, I just think Avi is awesome and for me, ambitious projects like this are what techno-optimism is all about)

3) The Next Wave With Alvin Graylin

In this week’s episode of The Next Wave, Matt Wolfe and I spoke with Alvin Graylin, the author of Our Next Reality. 

We discussed the future of AI & VR, the USA vs. China in the AI wars, and more. Check it out!

It would also help if you subscribe to The Next Wave on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. That’d make HubSpot and me very happy.

4) AI Video Breakthroughs

This week, two major advancements happened in the land of AI Video.

First, Runway AI, the current leader in AI video (not to be confused with my friend Siqi Chen’s company, Runway.com), released Gen-3 Alpha Image to Video. And it’s pretty incredible.

You can take any images, from a random picture on your phone or amazing art you created with Midjourney, and turn it into a video.

They created a great video that shows how it works.

Then, Meta, who's been killing it lately as we discussed in last week’s issue, dropped SAM 2 (Segment Anything Model 2). And let me tell you, it's a game-changer for video and image segmentation.

Here's the lowdown on SAM 2:

• It's like the Swiss Army knife of segmentation – works on both videos and images in real-time. Pretty neat, right?

• Open-source goodness: Meta's sharing the code and model weights with an Apache 2.0 license. Translation? Anyone can use it to build cool stuff.

• They're also releasing a massive dataset called SA-V with about 51,000 real-world videos and over 600,000 "masklets" (fancy term for spatio-temporal masks).

• The coolest part? SAM 2 can segment any object in any video or image, even if it's never seen it before.

Potential real-world applications? Think video editing on steroids, faster annotation tools for visual data, and even help in scientific research like tracking endangered animals in drone footage.

Meta's really pushing the open science approach here, and I'm excited to see what the AI community builds with this.

5) Things I’m Learning From

• ARTICLE: Who will control the future of AI? This is an opinion piece by Sam Altman about the risks of what could happen if China becomes dominant in AI.

• ARTICLE: Ridley Scott Wants to ‘Embrace’ AI for Post-Production— This is an interesting article on Indiewire about Ridley Scott’s wanting to use AI in films.

• VIDEO: AI News: A Massive Week For AI Advancement! Despite being on vacation, Matt made a great video highlighting important AI news this week.

• VIDEO: The Real Risk is Totalitarian World Government—This is a rare interview with Peter Thiel on Triggernometry, one of my favorite podcasts. He discusses why innovation in America has stalled, what we need to do, and his thoughts on the state of AI and if we’re in a bubble.

• VIDEO: AI and The Next Computing Platforms With Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg

That’s all for today. Please consider sharing the newsletter with your friends if you think they’d enjoy it. 🙏

Please give me feedback on Twitter. I am still figuring out the best format for this newsletter. Which part did you like? Dislike? Do you have other suggestions? Please let me know—just tweet @NathanLands.

-Nathan