Former Apple designer builds new AI interface at Hark

A secretive AI lab founded by serial entrepreneur Brett Adcock has released new details about what it describes as a novel integration of model development and hardware design, with the goal of transforming how people interact with intelligent software.

According to a company statement, Hark will develop multi-modal end-to-end models, their hardware, and their interfaces in parallel, aiming to deliver a “seamless end-to-end personal intelligence product.” The system is designed to maintain a persistent memory of users’ lives, and to listen, see, and interact with the world in real time.

How this will be achieved remains unclear outside the company, but Hark’s ambition reflects Silicon Valley’s ongoing search for the killer application that turns AI into a desirable consumer product—rather than a set of features awkwardly bolted onto existing digital platforms.

“My view is simple: today’s AI models aren’t nearly intelligent enough, they feel quite dumb, and the devices we use to access them are fundamentally pre-AI,” Adcock wrote in a January internal memo shared with TechCrunch. “We’re 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, London-born Chowdhury left last fall after meeting with Adcock and buying into his vision for reshaping how people automate their lives.

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

“What was very clear for me at the time is that the world is clearly changing, but we’re using the same devices… everything’s been designed around these existing platforms,” Chowdhury said. “Very few people are really going after what the future is. There’s so much that we could be doing if intelligence was at the base layer of everything we touched instead of becoming an app or a website at that upper layer.”

Chowdhury points to the awkwardness of everyday tasks like filling out forms, sharing information between devices, or the mundane chores of booking travel or planning home renovation.

“Those are entire evenings of time where I have to plan… the anxiety of, you know, I spend my work day thinking about this in the back of my head, oh, I have to do this,” he said. “We genuinely believe that all of the small tasks that pile up to be kind of gargantuan things today can be sort of automated from our lives.”

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

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

When generative AI first appeared, Chowdhury initially saw it as a flash in the pan, but successive generations of models convinced him it would transform his work. The word “Hark” means to pay attention, which Chowdhury says offers a thoughtful framing for the company’s mission.

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

The focus on elegance and simplicity for users echoes the high points of Apple’s product design, and naturally brings to mind Jony Ive, the legendary former Apple designer who is now developing AI native hardware at OpenAI—a comparison that a Hark spokesperson declined to explore.

Another parallel that comes to mind 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 of whom work 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—and at a time when frustration with existing models for digital life is hitting a fever pitch.

“It just feels like there’s an opportunity for better, and I’ve not felt like that since the iPhone came up,” Chowdhury said.