Mystery AI lab that poached iPhone Air designer revealed

Two months after reporting that the industrial designer who introduced the iPhone Air at Apple’s September event had left for an unnamed AI company, Bloomberg has now shared details on where he went.

30 engineers hired away from tech giants to date

According to Bloomberg, industrial designer Abidur Chowdhury has left Apple to join Hark, a recently founded AI startup led by Brett Adcock, who also serves as CEO of Figure AI.

There is little information available about Hark. Based on a memo seen by The Information, the startup was launched just a few weeks ago with $100 million in funding from Adcock’s personal capital, and will focus on:

[…] building “human-centric” AI, which can “think proactively, recursively improve and care deeply about people,” the memo said. Hark’s first cluster of graphics processing units went online on Monday, the memo said, though it couldn’t be learned how large the cluster was. Adcock will remain the CEO of Figure, in addition to his new role at Hark, according to a person with knowledge of the move.

Back to Bloomberg’s report, it says that Hark has already poached dozens of engineers from Google, Meta, and Amazon, and is “aiming to reach 100 in the first half of the year”.

9to5Mac’s take

Beyond the “human-centric AI” description cited by The Information, it remains unclear what exactly Abidur Chowdhury will help build at Hark.

So far, AI-based hardware has failed to capture the public’s attention, with companies such as Humane, Rabbit, Limitless, and Bee either being acquired or all but forgotten.

Meta, on the other hand, has found success with its partnership with EssilorLuxottica. However, there’s a case to be made that most of that success was out of timely luck, as the LLM boom happened after the release of the company’s first Ray-Ban-branded connected glasses.

To be clear, ChatGPT was launched a few months before that, but the actual boom happened later. Meta was quick to adapt its vision for the second version of its glasses, and is still reaping the benefits of that move as the rest of the market scrambles to react.

Finally, OpenAI has also announced that it is working on a line of AI-based hardware, but so far, it has only confirmed that its first product will not be a set of AI-powered in-ear headphones, or a wearable device.

What’s your take on what a “human-centric” AI product could mean? Let us know in the comments.