The maker of an open-source AI companion device has released a diss track against ‘Friend,’ the AI necklace announced on Tuesday, claiming that the maker of Friend had stolen his idea. The open-source device is also a necklace, also called Friend (Wearable AI), and was originally announced in April.
Web developer Avi Schiffmann announced the release of Friend on X on Tuesday morning. Twelve hours later, entrepreneur Nik Shevchenko posted a 32-second-long diss track with a caption congratulating Schiffmann on his product launch.
“Yo, I’m Nik, and for those who don’t know, I built Friend,” Shevchenko says in the video. He points to a black triangular necklace, which is listed on his website, Based Hardware, as the Friend Dev Kit for $49. The website also offers the Friend Necklace for an additional $20, which it says will start shipping later this year. Schiffmann’s Friend necklace goes for $99, and will begin shipping in 2025.
“Renamed your Tab, jacked my style,” Shevchenko raps. “Investor cash? You burn it quick…Avi, you a joke. Spent a mil on a name. Can’t ship a thing, just Twitter fame. Friend ain’t yours, you’re riding my wave…respect the grind, respect the source. I’m the real Friend, the AI Force.”
Tab is the original name of Schiffmann’s AI necklace, which he told 404 Media he began working on last year.
“I started working on Tab back in May of last year, and had a viral demo in October of the first wearable always-on AI,” Schiffmann wrote in an email to 404 Media. “Everyone in SF knows this. Nik & many others then copied the idea and tried to make open source versions, fine whatever. But earlier this year I rebranded to friend, [and] bought friend.com in Feb[ruary]. Someone told Nik I rebranded to friend before I announced and he copied that too when he launched in April I believe.”
Schiffmann had previously posted a screenshot of his receipt for the domain friend.com, which he purchased on February 6 for $1.8 million—a massive chunk of the total $2.5 million his company had raised. In the email to 404 Media, he also linked an X post of his text conversations with another AI developer from January 25, where he shared a sample Friend logo with the caption “renamed Tab.”
“Tab is a great name but it’s too assistant-focused,” Schiffmann wrote in one of the texts. “I’m focused on companionship. I will solve loneliness and anxiety in one product.”
Shevchenko launched his version of Friend in March. “Friend is an actual open-source AI wearable that doesn’t charge a single dollar, that you can build yourself,” he said in a video at the time. “It will record the entire conversations of your day. It will give you proactive feedback and advice. You can also talk to it via chat interface or with your voice.”
“It was fully open source,” he said in a phone call with 404 Media. “It has open source firmware, hardware, and software. How we got to that name is we were at a hackathon, and we had pretty much one hour to decide on the name. There were maybe 20 people suggesting random names to us, and someone said, ‘Why don’t you call it Friend?’. We had literally one hour to make a decision and post it. Today [yesterday], they dropped their own version of Friend, which was renamed to Friend from a company called Tab, after we launched. [Schiffmann] never actually sold any products with that domain name.”
In the thread of his diss track post, Shevchenko has also challenged Schiffmann to a fight.
Outside of AI, Schiffmann is known for building Ncov2019.live, a website that displayed live COVID-19 infection and death rates by country in 2020. A group of volunteer COVID-19 trackers on Reddit accused him in 2022 of stealing their data, using it on his site, and making thousands of dollars off of it without proper credit. In a response to their post, Schiffmann denied that he had not given credit.
“I have no relation to Nik,” Schiffmann said in the email to 404 Media. “Not going to continue to comment on Nik.”
Update: This story was updated with comment from Nik Shevchenko.
