Omi押注开源AI可穿戴是'第二大脑'：89美元吊坠，GitHub星标13.4k

做的是什么生意

Based Hardware sells Omi, an $89 AI pendant plus app that records conversations, transcribes them, summarizes action items, and remembers context across desktop, phone and wearables.

启动资金：~$700,000 raised, of which founder Nik Shevchenko spent $150,000 on promotional videos shot in Los Angeles (TechCrunch, January 2025)

起因

Nik Shevchenko, a Thiel Fellow with a history of eye-grabbing stunts, first marketed the device on Kickstarter under the name Friend, then renamed it Omi after Avi Schiffmann's rival Friend launched and bought the Friend domain for $1.8 million. At CES 2025 in Las Vegas, Based Hardware announced Omi as a small round orb worn as a necklace — or taped to the temple using what the company called a 'brain interface' to tell when the user is talking to it, a capability TechCrunch noted it could not verify.

经过

The consumer version cost $89 and started shipping in Q2 2025; a developer version sold for about $70. Omi listens continuously, runs conversations through GPT-4o, and remembers context for personalized advice. Shevchenko said he had raised roughly $700,000 and spent $150,000 of it on promotional videos, betting that attention itself improved an open-source product. GitHub growth followed the launch: the repo trended 9 days since March 2024 with a best all-languages rank of #2 on 2026-04-19, and held 13.4k stars by 2026-09-01. An April 2026 week-long field test by agency Imagination described the app as the real brain, praised its action-item extraction and plugin ecosystem, and noted Omi states it does not train models on conversations without consent.

结果

Omi is still shipping and expanding: the fully open-source, MIT-licensed repo now spans a mobile app, macOS and Windows apps, firmware, and Omi Glass on ESP32-S3, and the README claims 300,000+ professionals as users as of 2026-09-02.

可借鉴之处

开源是始终聆听硬件的一个可信度武器：展示代码并让用户将数据留在本地，将隐私反对者转化为分发优势。