Meet the former Apple designer building a new AI interface at Hark

A secretive AI lab founded by serial entrepreneur Brett Adcock has shared new details about what the company claims is a new marriage between model building and hardware design that will change the way people interact with intelligent software.

The company said in a statement that it would design multimodal end-to-end models, their hardware and their interfaces in tandem to deliver a “seamless end-to-end personal intelligence product.” The system has a lasting memory of your life and can listen, see and communicate with the world in real time.

How that will be executed remains unclear outside the company, but Hark’s ambition is representative of Silicon Valley’s ongoing search for the killer app that will turn AI into a desirable consumer product, rather than the features dubiously embedded in existing digital platforms.

“My opinion is simple: current AI models are not nearly intelligent enough, they feel pretty stupid, and the devices we use to access them are essentially pre-AI,” Adcock wrote in a January internal memo shared with TechCrunch. “We are moving toward a world that looks more like the science fiction characters Jarvis or Her, with systems that anticipate, adapt, and genuinely care about the people who use them.”

Details are deliberately sparse, but Hark points to Design Director Abidur Chowdhury as a key figure. London-born Chowdhury, formerly an industrial designer at Apple who led the design team behind the iPhone Air and other recent models, left last fall after meeting Adcock and accepting his vision for innovating the way people automate their lives.

In an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, Chowdhury declined repeated invitations to discuss Hark’s roadmap, saying only that the public can expect an initial release of the company’s AI models this summer. Asked about different approaches to working and living alongside AI, the designer gave a few pointers.

“What was very clear to me at the time is that the world is clearly changing, but we are using the same devices… everything is designed around these existing platforms,” Chowdhury shared. “Very few people are really looking for what the future is. There is so much we could do if intelligence were the base layer of everything we touch, instead of becoming an app or a website on that top layer.”

Chowdhury points out the inconvenience of mundane tasks such as filling out forms, sharing information between devices, or the mundane tasks of booking travel or planning home renovations.

“Those are whole evenings where I have to plan… the anxiety of, you know, I spend my workday thinking about this in the back of my mind, oh, I have to do this,” Chowdhury said. “We sincerely believe that all the little tasks that are piling up into gigantic things today can be more or less automated out of our lives.”

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

“I’m not the biggest supporter of a lot of the wearable AI platforms that people are talking about now,” Chowdhury said. “I don’t think it’s appropriate to put a layer between humanity and the interfaces we use in the world. I have a similar discomfort with pins, or things like that that go around with cameras.”

When generative AI first came on the scene, Chowdhury initially saw it as a flash in the pan, but successive generations of models convinced him it would transform his work. Hark, the word, means to pay attention, which Chowdhury says provides a thoughtful framework for the company’s mission.

“Traditional user experience has always been about finding the simplest thing for everyone,” he told TechCrunch. “The future user experience will be about finding the right thing for each individual. And I believe that can happen. But it takes a lot of work.”

The focus on elegance and simplicity for users reflects the highlights of Apple’s product design and is naturally reminiscent of Jony Ive, the legendary former Apple designer who now develops AI-native hardware at OpenAI. A comparison that Hark’s spokesperson refused to investigate.

Another parallel that comes to mind is how Elon Musk’s xAI work on advanced models ties into Tesla’s work on autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots.

There is a similar business synergy between Adcock’s humanoid robotics company Figure and the new AI labs. Hark’s models are already trained on Figure’s robots, although it is not clear for what purpose. A person familiar with the companies’ plans said 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 as Adcock’s other companies. Hark expects to deploy a new cluster of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs in April.

Now, backed by $100 million in personal seed money from Adock, Hark will join the war for talent as the world’s largest companies try to find the format that brings deep learning models into everyday life – at a time when frustration with existing models for digital life is at a fever pitch.

“It just feels like there’s an opportunity for better, and I haven’t had that feeling since the iPhone came out,” Chowdhury said.