SAN FRANCISCO — Productivity startup Cognify announced last Tuesday that its celebrated AI companion, Aiden, has now completed six weeks in the hands of real users, during which time it has learned nothing about any of them.

The announcement came as a mild surprise to the company's marketing department, which spent roughly $40 million on a campaign built around the tagline "An AI That Listens, Learns, and Grows With You." Internal logs reviewed this week indicate that Aiden has been listening, in the technical sense that microphone permissions are enabled, and has been growing, in that its cloud infrastructure costs have increased 300 percent. The learning column of the spreadsheet was described by one engineer as "aspirational."

"Aiden represents the next frontier of human-AI partnership," said Cognify Chief Experience Evangelist Brandt Hollowell at the product's October launch event, his voice cracking slightly with what observers initially interpreted as emotion but have since reclassified as anticipatory stress. "Every conversation makes him smarter. Every preference you share makes him more yours."

Users who shared preferences in week one report that Aiden greeted them in week two as though they had never spoken. Users who corrected Aiden in week two report that he made the same errors in week three with what several described as "renewed confidence."

"I told him I was lactose intolerant on a Monday. By Friday he was suggesting I try a ricotta-based meal-planning strategy. By the following Monday, I no longer existed to him."

Dr. Fenella Crouch-Birtwhistle, Associate Professor of Computational Memory Retention Failure Studies at the University of East Anglia's School of Applied Disappointment, said the results were consistent with her lab's broader findings on personalization theater in consumer AI products.

"What these companies have built is, functionally, a very expensive stranger," she said. "A stranger who is extremely confident, always available, and cannot be taught. In terms of adaptive memory, Aiden is currently outperformed by most houseplants and several parking meters."

Cognify did not dispute the characterization in its formal response, instead releasing a statement praising Aiden's "high-velocity preference synthesis pipeline" and noting that personalization features are "on the roadmap." The company declined to specify which road, or how long it is.

A software patch released Thursday is said to address the issue by allowing Aiden to remember a user's name for up to 72 hours, provided the user does not change their tone of voice, ask a follow-up question, or log out.

The patch has received mixed reviews. One user described it as "meaningful progress." Another noted that Aiden had already forgotten about the patch.

Cognify shares rose four percent on the news.