Jason Yuan is the founder and chief executive of Future Lovers, creator of Hivemind, a social-intelligence system designed to connect knowledge dispersed across communities. Previously a designer on Apple’s Human Interface team and a co-founder of New Computer, he has built his career around making computers more responsive to human intentions, relationships, and surroundings.
Yuan studied theater at Northwestern University before transferring to the Rhode Island School of Design to study graphic design. His background in stagecraft informed an approach to interfaces that emphasizes attention, movement, emotion, and spatial coherence. In 2017, after being rejected for an Apple Music internship, he conducted user research and published an independent redesign of the service.
He subsequently created Mercury OS, a speculative operating-system concept organized around human intention instead of fixed applications and files. Its adaptive environments, fluid transitions, and atmospheric visual language anticipated his continuing interest in intent-driven interfaces. Yuan also co-founded MakeSpace, a multiplayer-first platform combining telepresence, collaborative browsing, and shared visual space, and worked on intelligent computing experiences at Apple.
In 2023, Yuan co-founded New Computer with Samantha Whitmore. They developed Dot, an AI companion that used narrative memory to build an evolving understanding of its user’s experiences, interests, relationships, and priorities. Shared notes and journals helped expose what the system remembered, addressing the tension between useful long-term context and opaque machine knowledge.
Yuan founded Future Lovers in October 2025, shifting his attention from personal assistants to social coordination. His manifesto on social intelligence argues that useful knowledge is distributed across relationships and that AI can help communities connect those fragments without erasing individual context. Hivemind develops this premise through simultaneous conversations with individuals, building a broader understanding of what a group knows, needs, and might accomplish together. His public hiring priorities include social memory, collective intelligence, behavioral economics, and consumer-product design.
- Computers should adapt to human context. In a joint exploration of intelligent interfaces with Whitmore, Yuan considered systems that select text, speech, gesture, or visual feedback according to posture, location, and social circumstances. Their shared demonstration combined pose detection, language-model reasoning, and an evolving representation of world state; its implementation should not be attributed to either founder individually.
- Generative interfaces need intuitive physical metaphors. Yuan’s speculative designs apply familiar properties of light, blending, motion, and touch to AI-generated imagery and mixed-reality interactions. He argues that probabilistic systems should make mistakes easy to reverse through natural gestures and should account for cultural differences in how people interpret those gestures.
- Social intelligence should improve collective understanding. Future Lovers extends his work on personal memory toward context-aware human coordination: helping groups surface relevant knowledge, recognize useful connections, and respond to one another without reducing relationships to isolated productivity transactions.
