Harvard Startup Says Its Smart Glasses Will Do "Vibe Thinking" for You

We live in an age where the tech industry's core pitch is for you to outsource your brain's cognitive functions, be it to an AI chatbot or an app.

The idea has now reached a new zenith. A startup called Halo is releasing a pair of smart glasses that will record and transcribe all your conversations and use it to beam you AI-powered insights. It'll remember details you forgot and recall what someone told you they like, the startup says, arming you with facts it looks up on the fly and answering questions you don't know the answer to so you can look like a genius.

In other words, it'll make you smarter — or at least make you appear smarter, even if you're actually a dolt — its Harvard dropout creators claim.

"Our goal is to make glasses that make you super intelligent the moment you put them on," AnhPhu Nguyen, co-founder of Halo, told TechCrunch.

His cofounder Caine Ardayfio called the glasses, dubbed Halo X, the "first real step towards vibe thinking."

Yes, vibe thinking.

For those out of the loop, using "vibe" is the hip lingo in tech circles for saying "AI-assisted." Many have recently embraced describing their heavy use of AI tools for programming as "vibe coding." You let loose, spitball ideas to an AI, and go with the algorithmically-determined flow.

In an interview with Futurism, Ardayfio said he's seen more evolution and productivity in his coding workflows than ever before because of AI.

Our gray matter is next.

"I think that we can make a similar development and like a similar evolution for actual thinking," Ardafio told Futurism. "I think that with an AI assistant constantly helping you, you can become way smarter. You'll know everything. You'll have all of the facts at your disposal."

"You'll know exactly what to say and how to say it," Ardafio added, "and that's what I think vibe thinking is: it's not replacing — it's not making me dumber, it's empowering me to be able to say ten times more things, ten times more intelligently."

Of course, if the glasses are going to be acting as a brain augmenter capable of revolutionizing thinking itself, they'll need to be on all the time, recording everything you do. That's what sets it apart from competitors, which have balked at the reputational risks that entails.

"I think our core difference from a lot of these wearables — like the Meta Ray Bans — for example, is that we aim to literally record everything in your life, and we think that will unlock just way more power to the AI to help you on a hybrid personal level," Nguyen told Futurism.

Nguyen and Ardafio's first claim to fame was modifying a pair of Meta's smart glasses to use facial recognition software that instantly identified strangers and pulled up info like their address and their employer, in a cautionary demonstration of how the tech could be misused. They caught some flak, however, for seemingly testing the device on people without their permission.

Nguyen believes that while consumers wouldn't be receptive to Meta making glasses that record everything you do — given its appalling privacy track record — they'd be more willing to take a chance on a "smaller, underdog startup."

So they've made another bold choice: unlike Meta's smart glasses, the Halo pair won't have a light that indicates when the glasses are listening and recording — because, again, they're recording all the time.

That could spell trouble in states which have laws that make it illegal to record someone's conversation without their consent. But getting that consent, Ardalfio says, is "ultimately just up to the user."

You probably don't need hints from Halo's glasses to perceive that there's some serious questions to be raised about the device's central premise: that it makes you smarter.

Some research, in fact, suggests that AI does the opposite. A recent study from researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon found that a person's critical thinking skills atrophied the more they relied on AI responses, in a phenomenon dubbed "cognitive offloading." Another study found that students who heavily used ChatGPT reported memory loss and tanking grades. Shoving the tech into eyewear will enable users to tap their brain into an AI, ironically, without even thinking about it.

The Halo X glasses will be available to preoder and will set you back $249 a pop. Nguyen anticipates a future where digitally chronicling everything we do is the norm — and it's up to startups like them to make it happen.

"We think that everyone will be recording everything about their lives in the future, because it's just so useful and helpful to their lives," he told Futurism. "And I don't think Big Tech will do that before a startup does just purely from brand risk."

Maggie Harrison Dupré contributed reporting.

More on AI: AI Experts No Longer Saving for Retirement Because They Assume AI Will Kill Us All by Then