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A secretive AI lab founded by serial entrepreneur Brett Adcock shared new details about what it believes is a novel marriage of model-building and hardware design that will change how humans interact with intelligent software.<\/p>\n
The company said in a statement it would design multi-modal end-to-end models, their hardware, and their interfaces in tandem to deliver a \u201cseamless end-to-end personal intelligence product.\u201d The system will have a persistent memory of your life and can listen, see, and interact with the world in real time.<\/p>\n
How that will be executed remains unclear outside the company, but Hark\u2019s ambition is representative of Silicon Valley\u2019s ongoing hunt for the killer app that will make AI a desired consumer product, not features kludged dubiously into existing digital platforms. <\/p>\n
\u201cMy view is simple: today\u2019s AI models aren\u2019t nearly intelligent enough, they feel quite dumb, and the devices we use to access them are fundamentally pre-AI,\u201d Adcock wrote in a January internal memo shared with TechCrunch. \u201cWe\u2019re moving toward a world that looks more like sci-fi characters Jarvis or Her, with systems that anticipate, adapt, and genuinely care about the people using them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Details are intentionally sparse, but Hark points to Director of Design Abidur Chowdhury as a key hire. Previously an industrial designer at Apple credited with leading the design team behind the iPhone Air and other recent models, London-born Chowdhury left last fall after meeting with Adcock and buying into his vision for updating the way humans automate their lives.<\/p>\n
In an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, Chowdhury declined repeated invitations to spill the beans on Hark\u2019s roadmap, only saying that the public can anticipate a first release of the company\u2019s AI models this summer. Asked about different approaches to working and living alongside AI, the designer did offer a few clues.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA<\/span> \u201cWhat was very clear for me at the time is that the world is clearly changing, but we\u2019re using the same devices\u2026everything\u2019s been designed around these existing platforms,\u201d Chowdhury told. \u201cVery few people are really going after what the future is. There\u2019s so much that we could be doing if intelligence was at the base layer of everything we touched instead of becoming an app or a website at that upper layer.\u201d<\/p>\n Chowdhury points to the awkwardness of everyday tasks of filling out forms, sharing information between devices, or the mundane tasks of booking travel or planning home renovation.<\/p>\n \u201cThose are entire evenings of time where I have to plan\u2026the anxiety of, you know, I spend my work day thinking about this in the back of my head, oh, I have to do this,\u201d Chowdhury said. \u201cWe genuinely believe that all of the small tasks that pile up to be kind of gargantuan things today can be sort of automated from our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n Chowdhury says the company knows what it is building, but can\u2019t yet say how users will experience it. His comments suggest that wearables, like Meta\u2019s Glasses, seem unlikely.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not the biggest believer in a lot of the wearable AI platforms that people are talking about right now,\u201d Chowdhury said. \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s appropriate to put a layer between humanity and the interfaces we use in the world. I have similar discomfort with pins, or that kind of stuff that is going around with cameras.\u201d<\/p>\n When generative AI first arrived on the scene, Chowdhury at first saw it as a flash in the pan, but successive generations of models convinced him that it would change his work.\u00a0Hark, the word, means to pay attention, which Chowdhury says offers a thoughtful framing for the company\u2019s mission.<\/p>\n \u201cTraditional user experience always is about finding the simplest thing for everyone,\u201d he told TechCrunch. \u201cThe future user experience will be finding the right thing for each individual. And I believe that can happen. But it requires a lot of work.\u201d<\/p>\n The focus on elegance and simplicity for users echoes the high points of Apple\u2019s product design, and naturally brings to mind Jony Ive, the legendary former Apple designer who is now developing AI native-hardware at OpenAI. A comparison that a Hark\u2019s spokesperson declined to explore.\u00a0<\/p>\n Another parallel that comes to mind is how Elon Musk\u2019s xAI work on advanced models dovetails with Tesla\u2019s work on autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots. <\/p>\n There is similar corporate synergy between Adcock\u2019s humanoid robotics company Figure and the new AI labs. Hark\u2019s models are already being trained on Figure\u2019s robots, although it is not clear to what end. A person familiar with the companies\u2019 plans says there is no intention to combine them.<\/p>\n Hark employs 45 engineers and designers, including former Meta AI researchers and designers from Apple and Tesla, all of whom are working on the same campus that hosts Adcock\u2019s other companies. Hark expects to begin using a new cluster of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs in April. <\/p>\n Now Hark, backed by $100 million in personal seed money from Adcock, will join the scramble for talent as the world\u2019s biggest companies try to figure out the format that brings deep learning models into daily life \u2014 and at a time when frustration with the existing models for digital life is hitting a fever pitch.<\/p>\n \u201cIt just feels like there\u2019s an opportunity for better, and I\u2019ve not felt like that since the iPhone came up,\u201d Chowdhury said. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n