The future of AI might be on your finger
Mina Fahmi is building the first AI wearable that I really want. Also: Why OpenAI bought TBPN.
It’s spring break week for many of you, and while AI news has only slowed just a little, I’ve taken the opportunity to focus on some longer-term projects and bigger stories, one of which I’ll publish tomorrow. Next week, I’m at HumanX in SF for two main stage interviews on Tuesday and then heading to NYC for a quick trip.
A new take on AI wearables
Last October, Sandbar CEO Mina Fahmi met me at a cafe in east Los Angeles with a case full of smart ring prototypes. He held one up to his mouth, quietly spoke a thought, and then showed me the companion mobile app, which talked back to him in his own voice.
I’ve done a lot of product demos. Most of them fade. This one didn’t. I’ve consistently found myself in moments since then — walking the dogs, leaving a meeting, context-switching between interviews — wishing that I had Mina’s ring on.
Sandbar is getting ready to ship its Stream smart ring this summer, and the product has gotten significantly more capable since my demo. What makes it different from the wave of AI wearable plays out there is that Stream is built around conversation, not just voice capture. It doesn’t just transcribe what you say. It remembers across sessions, asks follow-up questions, and can talk through ideas with you like a thinking partner. Fahmi calls the design philosophy “self extension.” He isn’t positioning Stream as an assistant or a companion with its own personality, which I think could help it resonate more broadly.
Mina joined this week’s episode of ACCESS, the podcast I co-host with Ellis Hamburger:
Mina's path to building an AI smart ring started in neural interfaces. He did research at the MIT Media Lab on neural prostheses, briefly interned at Brian Johnson’s Kernel when it was still doing brain implants, then joined CTRL-labs, the neural interface startup that Meta acquired and turned into the neural wristband now shipping with its Ray-Ban display glasses.
Mina left Meta to start Sandbar with co-founder Kirak Hong. The company has now raised $36 million in total funding, including a $23 million Series A led by Adjacent and Kindred Ventures, announced last month. The Stream ring is $249 in silver and $299 in gold. The first batch of preorders has already sold out, and a second batch is now open, with shipping slated for summer. Preorders include three months of Stream Pro, a $10-per-month tier with unlimited conversations.
Three things that stood out from our conversation with Mina on the pod:
The conversation distinction matters. He drew a clear line between voice input and conversation. A lot of competing products are essentially voice memo recorders with AI slapped on. Stream is designed so the AI talks back, asks clarifying questions, and builds on previous sessions. During our recording, he demoed it live by asking it to prep him for our podcast, and it responded by asking what angle he wanted to take.
“Personality without identity.” Sandbar’s AI is intentionally designed to have no opinions and no goals of its own. He said it’s actually harder to build a model that behaves that way out of the box. They’ve had to construct extensive eval infrastructure with synthetic users and judges to keep the personality on track. The idea is that the ring should be alterable by you, not prescriptive. It’s a sharp contrast to the companion-forward approach that most AI wearable startups are chasing.
Agents are opening up the product roadmap. He said that the explosion of agentic AI has opened up new possibilities for what Stream could do, including firing off actions, triggering workflows, and connecting to other tools via an SDK they’re now developing. But he’s resisting the temptation for the ring to become a general-purpose utility. The team is focused on proving the core interaction model works before expanding.
Also in this week’s episode: Ellis and I chat about OpenAI’s new super app strategy, Meta’s acquisition of Dreamer, and how difficult it is for us to take proper vacations.
Listen or watch wherever you get podcasts.
Catch me on Prof G Markets
I joined the show today to talk about OpenAI’s mega funding round. Thanks, as always, to Ed Elsen for having me on.
