An ambitious new AI startup is creating a sizable buzz — not only because of what it promises to deliver, but also because of who is behind it.
Hark bills itself as an AI lab building “advanced personalized intelligence” that will work on a specifically designed new family of devices that are quite different from what the IT world is accustomed to.
While the product proposition is intriguing enough, interest has been amplified by the fact that the driving force behind Hark is serial innovator Brett Adcock, CEO of humanoid robotics vendor, and also founder of air taxi developer Archer Aviation and Vettery, an AI talent marketplace Adcock sold in 2018 for $110 million.
Adcock is now said to be worth $19 billion and has already reportedly provided Hark with $100 million in his own funds.
A press statement released to herald the arrival of Hark provided some clues as to what to expect, pointing to “next-generation hardware designed to serve as a universal interface between humans and machines.”
It went on to say that, unlike companies that focus on just one layer of the AI stack, Hark is building foundation models, software systems, native hardware and new interfaces together from the outset.
“The AI systems I use today are far from my vision of what the future should be. We want to create intelligence that lets you offload your mental workload into a system that begins to think like you and sometimes ahead of you,” Adcock said in the statement. “To do this, we need to build the full stack of next-generation AI models and advanced hardware interfaces. [The] future only becomes possible when the entire stack is built together.”
He provided further detail in an interview with Bloomberg, saying: “We’re working on a family of AI devices both for yourself and for the home.” These devices would be “distinct from existing handsets, wearables and smart glasses,” he added.
In terms of what to expect from the models, Hark said they will integrate speech, text, vision, and contextual awareness, along with highly personalized memory systems. They will also target proactive behavior that can anticipate a user’s needs rather than wait for prompts, according to Hark.
Hardware-wise, it remains to be seen what Hark ultimately produces, but one clue is that Abidur Chowdhury, formerly a top designer for the iPhone at Apple, will shape the look, having been recruited as the startup’s design chief.
Chowdhury is one of a rapidly growing team of more than 45 designers, engineers and researchers already recruited from tech giants such as Meta, Tesla and Apple, while Hark also appears to have plenty of hardware at its disposal, with thousands of Nvidia HGX B200 GPUs set to come online in April to support multimodal pre-training and model post-training.
Hark is also said to be working closely with Nvidia to expand his company’s infrastructure.
In terms of a timeframe, the startup’s first software and AI models are due in the summer, with the initial devices to follow.
