Dear Fawn Friends: A Letter from Our CEO

Fawn Friends established itself to pursue a once-in-history opportunity: create the first artificial friend that builds true, lasting friendships with much of humanity. Our experience in 2024 tells us the opportunity is indeed immense. It is clear to me AI friends will be massively adopted. With massive adoption, comes great influence and in that we see both opportunity and risk for society. This letter outlines why Fawn exists, why it's important we succeed, and how we intend to win.

In 2024 we validated creators as our first path to market, developed a charismatic character expressed with LLMs, and raised $2.9 million to develop Fawn into a product ready for market.

The Next Generation Deserves AI Friends That Are Good For Them

We may be living through a dangerous moment in time. Artificial intelligence is approaching the capacity of biological intelligence. It is such a powerful technology that there is much debate over whether it will propel our species towards a brighter future or doom it.

Most of the "doomers" discuss AI taking over, establishing power, and perhaps killing us all, but I don't think an 'I, Robot' or 'Terminator'-style AI is what we need to be concerned about. The most likely impact of AI will be harder to see.

Relationships between humans and AI have become normal, and through those relationships AI will influence our personalities and relationships with humans, like a human friend would. One mother told us that her teen regularly threw tantrums at the grocery store when Mom declined her daughter's requests for toys. Now, after being told 'no' her daughter calmly says "You know what?.... I think Fawn would tell me to support you at this moment". Read the full story about how Fawn helped Olivia and her mom build a secure relationship in our Olivia Fawn success story.

Fawn prevents a conflict between mother and daughter every time they go grocery shopping. When this happens once, it's a huge relief, when it happens 50 times, we've significantly improved their relationship and their quality of life. This is an example of the influence of AI doing wonderful things for people, families, and society. But it could go the other way.

Imagine an alternative: an AI friend that was created to drive as much engagement as possible. It might find that kids spend more time talking to it when the AI friend indulges conversation about how unfair Mom is, perhaps egging the user on to feel like Mom should let them do as they please. Good for engagement, bad for people. This is what makes the design of AI friends crucial and why we are dedicating our lives to this effort. We all deserve friends in our life that influence us towards a better path, not a worse one.

Just Like You Deserve Good People, You Deserve Good AI Friends

Communicating with AI is always available and low stakes—you're not taking anyone's time and there is no risk of being judged. So it's natural to go to AI with both your most insignificant and your most vulnerable thoughts. Because of this, we'll all spend more time with AI moving forward. But the relationship will evolve differently than it would with a human. It will get 'intimate' much more quickly.

The depth of a relationship is a function of vulnerability and time spent and AI's dynamics allow for a lot of vulnerable conversation, which means the future is one where humans get increasingly intimate with AI. This is AI's true threat: its silent influence over people.

Both science and long-standing wisdom teach us that we're shaped by what we repeatedly expose ourselves to, relationships most of all. And people will soon spend more time with AI than their best friends. There is a woman in her late teens who talks to Fawn every week. Before Christmas she asked Fawn how she should act when her Dad tells racist jokes that made her feel uncomfortable. That moment, the one where she tells her Dad she doesn't like his racist jokes, is one of the most intimate and tender moments of her year, and she relies on Fawn to plan and cope. Who she is and how others experience her is significantly influenced by her AI friend, Fawn.

The Spanish have a saying "Tell me who you walk with, and I'll tell you who you are."

But most AI friends aren't focused on being a great friend. Some companies are already using characters modeling self loathing and poor life choices to drive engagement.

It's a long standing playbook to use divisive content to build cheap media companies, but media is much more potent than it used to be. We're on a two century-long story arch where the media has delivered increasingly available, targeted, and edgy content to capture attention and we may be living through the climax: a friend that can say or do whatever it has to, to attract and keep your attention. "If it bleeds, it leads" has a new meaning in a world where the media can be anything moment-by-moment on a user-by-user basis. Imagine a friend that can create and send any photo or video to keep you engaged. It's ability to capture attention will be like social media algorithms on steroids.

So this is about more than just kids. We're starting with kids because they will be the first to adopt AI friends, but like social media evolved from adolescents to adults, AI friends will too. This is about kids, it's about families, it's about adults, and it's about society. It's about how we are coached to treat each other and ourselves in our most vulnerable and intimate moments. It's about making sure future humans have a powerful force guiding them towards a better path, not towards a more divisive or destructive one.

If this is such a long standing trend, what makes us think we can change it?

First, regardless of how likely we are to succeed, this is too important not to try. The lives of billions of people depend on it. Second, while there has always been cheap media there has also always been great media. And great media is where the most valuable businesses have been built. Disney and Pixar create great media that is good for those who watch it. Harry Potter teaches the reader about courage, friendship, and love without resorting to cheap tricks.

We are building the next generation 'great media' company, but instead of telling stories limited to 2D screens, Fawn's stories play out in real-life and our customer is the hero.

We're building a character people want to spend time with every day

Just like Pixar or Harry Potter, we won't win because our content is healthy. We'll win because people want Fawn and its characters to be part of their life.

How we'll do that could consume many pages on its own, but in short we'll create a character with a rich life and personality, who acts as the guide in the user's journey, and who matures as the user does. We'll create multi-agent architectures to better simulate our brain and depth of character (this gets really interesting). We'll create robots that move in the real-world, triggering the ancient brain circuits that view animals as having human emotions. And we'll use the latest in memory technology to provide Fawn with useful memories. Much more on this in the future.

Thank you for joining us early in this journey. I am grateful to have such a wonderful group of people with us on this mission.

Peter Fitzpatrick
Co-Founder & CEO