Meet the former Apple designer who is building the new AI interface at Hark

The secret AI lab founded by serial entrepreneur Brett Adcock has shared new details about what it believes is a new marriage of modeling and hardware design that will change the way people interact with intelligent software.

The company said in a statement that it will design more end-to-end models, their hardware, and their interfaces to deliver a “seamless human intelligence product.” The system will have a continuous memory of your life and can listen, see, and interact with the world in real time.

How that will be done remains unclear outside the company, but Hark’s desire represents Silicon Valley’s ongoing hunt for a killer app that will make AI a desirable product for consumers, not features that are arguably embedded in existing digital platforms.

“My view is simple: today’s AI models are probably not smart enough, they feel dumb, and the tools we use to achieve them are pre-AI,” Adcock wrote in an internal January memo shared with TechCrunch. “We’re headed for a world more like the sci-fi characters Jarvis or Her, with systems that anticipate, adapt, and really care about the people who use them.”

Details are intentionally sparse, but Hark points to Project Director Abidur Chowdhury as a key hire. Formerly 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 Adcock and buying into his idea of ​​revising the way people live automatically.

In an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, Chowdhury declined repeated invitations to spill the beans on Hark’s roadmap, saying only that the public can expect the first release of the company’s AI models this summer. Asked about different ways to work and live around AI, the designer gave a few pointers.

“What was very clear to me at that time was that the world is clearly changing, but we are using the same devices…everything is done with these existing platforms,” ​​said Chowdhury. “Very few people follow what the future holds. We could do a lot more if intelligence was at the bottom level of everything we touched instead of just being an app or a website at that top level.”

Chowdhury points to the difficulty of the daily tasks of filling out forms, sharing information between devices, or the mundane tasks of booking a trip or planning home renovations.

“Those evenings where I have to plan … the anxiety, you know, I spend my work day thinking about this in the back of my head, oh, I have to do this,” Chowdhury said. “We truly believe that all the small tasks that add up to become a kind of luxury today can become a form of automation in our lives.”

Chowdhury says the company knows what it’s building, but can’t yet say how users will find it. His comments suggest that wearables, like Meta’s Glasses, seem unlikely.

“I’m not a big believer in a lot of wearable AI platforms that people are talking about right now,” Chowdhury said. “I don’t think it’s appropriate to put a layer between humanity and the places we use in the world. I have the same discomfort with pins, or that kind of thing that goes with cameras.”

When generative AI first arrived on the scene, Chowdhury initially saw it as a flash in the pan, but successive generations of models convinced him that it would change his career. Hark, the name, means attention, which Chowdhury says provides a thoughtful framework for the company’s work.

“A common user experience is always about getting something simple for everyone,” he told TechCrunch. “The future of the user will be finding the right thing for each person. And I believe that is possible. But it requires a lot of work.”

The focus on beauty and ease of use for users echoes the high points of Apple’s product design, and naturally reminds us of Jony Ive, the famous Apple designer who now develops native AI-hardware at OpenAI. A spokesperson for Hark declined to verify the comparison.

Another parallel that comes to mind is how Elon Musk’s xAI works in advanced models alongside Tesla’s work in autonomous cars and human robots.

There is a similar collaboration between the Adcock humanoid robotics company Figure and the new AI labs. Hark’s models are already being trained on Figure’s robots, though it’s unclear where it will end up. A person familiar with the company’s plans says there are no plans to merge.

Hark employs 45 engineers and designers, including former Meta AI researchers and designers from Apple and Tesla, all working on the same campus that hosts Adcock’s other companies. Hark expects to start using the new batch of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs in April.

Now Hark, backed by $100 million in private seed funding from Adock, will enter the fray for talent as the world’s biggest companies scramble to find a format that brings deep learning models into everyday life — and at a time when frustration with existing models of digital life is heating up.

“It feels like there’s room for improvement, and I haven’t felt that way since the iPhone,” Chowdhury said.