Avi Schiffmann’s Tab AI necklace has raised $1.9 million to replace God

If the meme-ified response and recent layoffs are any indication, our first piece of AI hardware—Humane’s $240 million AI Pin from ex-Apple duo Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno—appears to be dead on arrival. But that hasn’t stopped AI enthusiasts across X from buzzing about another entrant in the category.

I’m actually not referring to the highly anticipated “iPhone of AI” being developed by OpenAI and Lovefrom with $1 billion in funding from Softbank. And I’m also not talking about the $200 Rabbit R1, a sort of AI camera-meets-walkie-talkie that can control apps on your phone, designed by Teenage Engineering and announced just this week.

I’m referring to a relatively humble pendant, a wearable AI microphone called Tab, developed by 21-year-old Harvard dropout Avi Schiffmann. At age 17, Schiffmann built a massively successful COVID-19 tracking website that welcomed tens of millions of users daily. He became a youth ambassador to the U.N., and received a Webby award from Anthony Fauci himself. (Schiffmann claims to have turned down millions of dollars in advertising because he didn’t feel comfortable profiting on the pandemic.) Then at 19, Schiffmann founded another helpful site, Ukraine Take Shelter, that he says matched 100,000 displaced Ukrainians with open homes.

Schiffmann has a knack for building critical, minimum viable products by focusing on the readily available technology of today. He knocked around the nonprofit sector with his own platform Internet Activism hoping to scale his approach to other causes, before spending nearly the entire last year turning his attention to generative AI and developing Tab.

Tab is a small puck that hangs around your neck and listens to everything you (and the people around you) say. Essentially just a microphone and a battery that lasts up to 30 hours between charges, it uses Bluetooth to beam your audio to your phone and into the cloud, where ChatGPT currently transcribes your conversations, and various AI models will extract insights for you. (Its UX isn’t final, but assume you’ll use your phone screen for most anything you want to do.) Ultimately, Tab is meant to be an AI companion, or what Schiffmann calls a “clarity machine” that rides along in every moment of your life.

“Tab is not an assistant, period. I’m not building something that’s going to connect to Notion or your emails any time soon. I’m solely building . . . a friend that morphs into your creative partner, life coach, [or] therapist as needed,” he says. “What I’m trying to do is create a new relationship in your life; radical transparency without concern of judgment. I think this is a relationship people used to have with God but is lacking in the modern world.”

How Tab will actually transform your conversations into insights is ultimately the value of its proposition, and that UX is still very much in flux. First and foremost, though, Schiffmann imagines that the interface will be proactive, providing bits of information when you need them, like Google’s defunct Google Now feed (which tried to anticipate everything from the directions to the sports scores you wanted) minus the feed. Translating piles of information into true insight is a tremendous challenge, even with modern AI. But Schiffmann’s biggest bet is that people will feel comfortable when you’re always recording them (Tab seems to be relying on brute force here: If the utility is high enough, people will use it, Schiffmann insists.)

Since preorders launched in October, Tab has sold $100,000 in early units at $600 apiece, which includes a year of service at $50 a month. Schiffmann also reveals that he’s raised $1.9 million on a valuation of $15 to $20 million from Caffeinated Capital; Austin Rief’s Rief Capital; Cory Levy; Guillermo Rauch; Shawn Wang; Solana founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal; and Aravind Srinivas, founder and CEO of Perplexity AI.

“As far as I can tell, I think I’ll be first to market truly with an always-on wearable,” he says of his plan to ship in summer or, at minimum, sometime in 2024. “I don’t know what will happen after. My goal is then to scale it as fast as possible.”

Designing Tab

Schiffmann didn’t originally intend to create a wearable AI buddy. He began poking around generative AI software in attempts to build a natural language customer relation management (CRM) system for his nonprofit fundraising. But even entering data in natural language becomes laborious, and quickly Schiffmann began to consider how a wearable camera and microphone could keep track of his relationships automatically.

Despite having no experience with soldering, Schiffmann pieced together his first Tab with a Raspberry Pi and a GoPro harness, using an off-the-shelf camera and LTE module. 

“People gave me stares but never said anything,” laughs Schiffmann, who insists that if a wearable is useful enough everyone will simply get used to it. “I had a roommate who was always hating on it . . . one night I was in the kitchen and we were talking . . . he looked at me and said, ‘Honestly Avi, I forgot you were even wearing that.’”

This prototype took pictures every 30 seconds and used pre-ChatGPT vision models to make sense of Schiffmann’s environment and his activities. That led him to turn his software into something of an AI coach that would allow him to set goals and nudge him toward better behavior, but he ultimately recognized what a lot of people in the industry have: That while an LLM like ChatGPT is fascinating out of the box, an AI that can learn about you over time, and recognize patterns and problems within the context of your day, could become an indispensable partner, a new type of computer we haven’t seen before.

“It needs to be with me, a parrot on my shoulder—a tamagotchi vibe—and reference hyper-specific things within the framing of my life,” says Schiffmann, who believes that physical hardware traveling with you all the time would create a physical bond of shared experience that “you don’t get from an app on your phone.” He imagines that such a quietly observant system could be a powerful force in people’s lives.

“There’s a huge existing industry of therapy and coaching. But they all have the most fundamental flaw: They all hear what you say you do, not what you actually do,” says Schiffmann. “I think a therapist with you 24/7 . . . who doesn’t hear the biased version where you forget the details and who you aren’t fully authentic with. You could view it as an industry I think we’ll completely obliterate.”

As he worked toward a more solidified form for the device, Schiffmann decided to ditch the camera and focus exclusively on audio transcription. Recording at a very low quality provided both the rich data stream in a practical, power-friendly approach that could make his first product feasible.

“You don’t need new interaction paradigm [for AI], you need an alway-on device,” says Schiffmann, making a tacit nod to the Humane Ai Pin’s blurry hand projector. 

Schiffmann has landed on a pendant that’s something like Google’s Nest Mini or Kano’s Stem Player that lives around your neck. He’s produced 10 3D printed prototypes and the renders you see here alongside OpenPurpose, and has been in talks with various industrial design firms to finalize the design for manufacture.

However, the ultimate experience of Tab isn’t about the hardware, which is meant to disappear as an afterthought. The ins and outs of Tab will be defined through its UX—and specifically how its proactive approach to providing life insights pans out. But Schiffmann’s ambition to move past the paradigm of prompt-based AI conversation holds a certain appeal. Facing a prompt is more intimidating than one might assume, and an AI that only answers questions can only share insights that we humans are smart enough to ask it about.

“You can have this personal AI and you [still] don’t know what question to ask it,” says Schiffmann. “This is the primary issue with chat as UX. It’s so open-ended.” 

Schiffmann also wants to figure out ways you might be able to share snippets of your conversations with the people in them—perhaps as a way to add value or incentive for putting up with the Tab in the first place. But he insists that the company won’t store recordings, nor will it sell or share user data. Long term, it might not even charge for Tab hardware, and instead offset those costs with a subscription model.

“I think ultimately there’s far, far more value in this as . . . friendship as a service,” says Schiffmann. “You could literally make a line graph of Her on one end and Jarvis on another end. And I’m making Her.”