Hark Hires Apple's iPhone Air Designer for AI Interface
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- Hark, a secretive AI lab founded by serial entrepreneur Brett Adcock, said it will design multimodal end-to-end models, its own hardware, and its interfaces in tandem to deliver what it calls a "seamless end-to-end personal intelligence product" with persistent memory.
- Abidur Chowdhury, previously an industrial designer at Apple credited with leading the design team behind the iPhone Air, joined Hark as Director of Design after leaving Apple last fall following a meeting with Adcock.
- Chowdhury said Hark will release its first AI models this summer, and cast doubt on wearable AI approaches: "I'm not the biggest believer in a lot of the wearable AI platforms that people are talking about right now," including Meta's glasses, pins, and camera-equipped devices.
- 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, and expects to begin using a new cluster of thousands of Nvidia GPUs in April.
- Hark is backed by $100 million in personal seed money from Adcock, and its models are already being trained on robots from Adcock's humanoid robotics company Figure, though a person familiar with the plans said there is no intention to combine the two companies.
Why it matters: Hark's $100M self-funded bet, led by the iPhone Air's designer, targets AI-native hardware rather than apps layered onto existing platforms. The summer model release will test whether the 'Jarvis/Her' vision becomes product or vaporware, with 45 engineers and thousands of Nvidia GPUs backing Adcock's scale-up wager.
