A secretive AI lab founded by serial entrepreneur Brett Adcock has shared new details about what it believes is a novel marriage of model-building and hardware design. This approach aims to change how humans interact with intelligent software. The company stated it will design multi-modal end-to-end models, their hardware, and their interfaces in tandem to deliver a seamless end-to-end personal intelligence product. The envisioned system will have a persistent memory of your life and can listen, see, and interact with the world in real time.
How this will be executed remains unclear outside the company. However, Hark’s ambition is representative of Silicon Valley’s ongoing hunt for the killer app that will make AI a desired consumer product, rather than features awkwardly integrated into existing digital platforms. In a January internal memo, Adcock wrote that today’s AI models are not nearly intelligent enough and feel quite dumb, and the devices used to access them are fundamentally pre-AI. He described 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.
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, Chowdhury left last fall after meeting with Adcock and buying into his vision for updating the way humans automate their lives.
In an interview, Chowdhury declined to reveal specifics of Hark’s roadmap, saying only that the public can anticipate a first release of the company’s AI models this summer. He did offer clues about the company’s philosophy. Chowdhury noted that the world is clearly changing, but we are using the same devices designed around existing platforms. He believes very few people are going after what the future is, and that intelligence should be at the base layer of everything we touch instead of being an app or a website at an upper layer.
He pointed to the awkwardness of everyday tasks like filling out forms, sharing information between devices, or planning travel and home renovations. These tasks create anxiety and consume entire evenings. Chowdhury stated the company genuinely believes all the small tasks that pile up into gargantuan things today can be automated from our lives.
Chowdhury says the company knows what it is building but cannot yet say how users will experience it. His comments suggest wearables, like Meta’s Glasses, seem unlikely. He expressed that he is not the biggest believer in many of the wearable AI platforms being discussed, and feels discomfort with pins or cameras that create a layer between humanity and the interfaces we use in the world.
When generative AI first arrived, Chowdhury initially saw it as a flash in the pan, but successive generations of models convinced him it would change his work. The name Hark means to pay attention, which he says offers a thoughtful framing for the company’s mission. He stated that traditional user experience is about finding the simplest thing for everyone, while the future user experience will be about finding the right thing for each individual, which requires a lot of work.
The focus on elegance and simplicity for users echoes the high points of Apple’s product design, naturally bringing to mind former Apple designer Jony Ive, who is now developing AI-native hardware at OpenAI. A comparison that a Hark spokesperson declined to explore. Another parallel is how Elon Musk’s xAI work on advanced models dovetails with Tesla’s work on autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots. There is similar corporate synergy between Adcock’s humanoid robotics company, Figure, and the new AI labs. Hark’s models are already being trained on Figure’s robots, although it is not clear to what end. A person familiar with the companies’ plans says there is no intention to combine them.
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 begin using a new cluster of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs in April.
Now Hark, backed by $100 million in personal seed money from Adcock, will join the scramble for talent as the world’s biggest companies try to figure out the format that brings deep learning models into daily life. This comes at a time when frustration with existing models for digital life is hitting a fever pitch. Chowdhury remarked that it feels like there is an opportunity for better, a feeling he has not had since the iPhone first arrived.