I just found out something quite interesting in the world of AI and robotics. Brett Adcock, the founder of Figure, has just launched a completely new project called Hark, and this looks like a major strategic move.

What caught my attention is the scale: we're talking about $100 million in initial funding, money coming out of Brett Adcock's personal pocket. That's not small. This isn't just any side project; it's a serious AI lab with ambitious goals for personal AI devices.

The team he assembled is impressive. They have Abidur Chowdhury, who comes from designing at Apple, as Head of Design. Additionally, they recruited David Narajowski and Dave Wilkes, also veterans from Apple. But the most relevant thing is that they secured senior researchers from Meta's Superintelligence Laboratory. That speaks to the seriousness of the project.

What Hark is trying to do is combine proprietary multimodal models with custom hardware. Basically, they want to create next-generation personal AI devices. From what I know, the lab has been operating discreetly for eight months, and they plan to launch their first AI models this summer, followed by the hardware.

The projected growth is aggressive: they started with 45 people and expect to reach 100 by mid-year. Brett Adcock is recruiting talent from Google, Amazon, and Tesla, which shows he's looking for the best in the market.

Another thing that adds credibility is that they secured a computing agreement with NVIDIA. That’s essential for training AI models at this scale. In summary, what Brett Adcock is doing with Hark seems to be a very serious move in the race for personal AI devices. It’s worth closely following how this develops.