Humane AI Pin is a disaster: Founders already want to sell the company
arstechnica.com
Despite seemingly having nothing else in the pipeline and the AI Pin being dead on arrival, Bloomberg reports the company is "seeking a price of between $750 million and $1 billion in a sale."
So this is scam right? Overpromise on a product that doesn't work then sell the company for some huge price because it's cutting edge technology? Because it feels like a scam.
Yeah, the product was a boondoggle. Trying to sell the company after that launch, with nothing else in the pipeline, is a scam.
remember how over the past few years almost everything brand new had the word "blockchain" shoehorned into it for no good reason?
This is the same kind of thing. It's an atrocious boondoggle. There must still be a serious amount of cocaine floating around Venture Capitalist parties, because one of those boys is gonna drop 500M on this company and think they bought the dip, when in fact they, themselves, are the dip.
I can't even remember the last time when some hot new technology changed our lives significantly. I'm inclined to say Android because it was a new mobile OS and now it's everywhere and various devices but even that is more than a decade old.
Bluetooth ANC IEMs/earbuds were rare a decade ago, and now I see half the people around me wearing them all day
I don't think "Blockchain" ever reached anywhere near this level of shoehornery.
oh, for a while there, it was close. things have changed even in the past 2 months since I wrote that comment.
Anything with "AI" in the title is a cash grab with very little actual technical worth except the models and training data.
Pretty much anything with AI on the tin is a scam. Because when an AI product gets a useful valuable application, it immediately changes name to something else.
They're all scams. This one's just more obvious.
It's just how the us economy works
Scam how? Selling pre-launch could have been a scam. Money taken from investors could have been a scam, depending on what they pitched. But selling after a complete and known flop of a release? There's no cards left on the table to be scammy about. "Here's our brand name. Here's our patent collection. We'd like to think our patents are worth a ton of money, but we know we'd be lucky getting twenty million."
My assumption is that, since they were always going to be about collecting, processing, and selling data (usually what AI is used for commercially) that they might have what they think is between 500m and 1b in data to sell.
This might be enough to start a company from or just to assimilate the data into your own company.
The price tag has to be over estimated though by quite a lot. If we read a story about the company selling for a few million, I dont think it would seem outrageous.
alright guys I'll take one for the team and buy the company
Relevant username.
I'm gonna buy you too windie
Pretty sure that's been illegal since 1865
Like with everything, only if you do not have enough money.
You obviously don't know who Leroy Jenkins is, the laws of man do not apply.
I'm quite familiar with their namesake lol. But if I remember correctly they all got slaughtered by the boss. So I guess some laws DO apply. Back then at least it was Murphy's. :D
(•_•)
I've got some chores that need to get done, how much can I rent your guys for?
This is the same as Ben Shapiro telling people to sell their houses once Florida goes under water from a climate crisis. To who? Neptune?
Fucking Aquaman
Obviously to the Merfolk...duh!
He really said that? Lol, I'd listen to that gladly, I despise the moron. Do you have a source?
Here. Classic example of yapping too fast and expecting people to not realize how much nonsense it is
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"Spectacular custom built oceanback, home, impressive land views & only a 5 minutes swim to the beach!"
Rabbit R1 will soon to follow
Meh, that one is cheap enough and has a passable update cycle, I'd say it can stay relevant.
It is also created by a crypto-scheme company. So I'm not sure I have too much confidence
it's basically a scam
dramatic music score
Remember when nerds used to be smarter than us? That was awesome.
Nerds still are smarter than us.
Unfortunately a cult of managers has arisen to rule over the nerds and they hype with an iron fist.
Managers realized that the nerds' autism could be exploited for profit
It's important to realize that the nerd you saw on the news has always been someone wearing nerd as a costume and the entire history of technology is loaded with examples of the real nerd being marginalized. It's just that in ages past the VC's would give a smaller amount of money and require the startup to go through concrete milestones to unlock all of it so there was more of a chance for the founder's dreams to smack up against reality before they were $230m in the hole with no product worth selling.
20 years ago, the big question VCs were asking their startups was, "How do we convince Microsoft to buy this company?" Simpler times, back then.
10 years ago it was "how do we convince Google to buy this company?"
Do they accept NFTs?
Maybe you could resale the one nabbit ured to sell to you !
Honestly, it seems like the only appropriate "currency" to pay for this.
Why not? They can only go up in value!
This is hilarious, scrambling to get a golden parachute and live off some trust fund from the sale. The sad part is that they will probably get that.
That's the worst part. They knew the product sucked, everyone knew the product sucked, this was always the plan. Ask for a billion get 200 million. That's 100 for each founder. Go live on a private beach somewhere.
it's just rich people's money that could be used to fund housing for the masses. let me know where that beach is so i can go drop off some karma.
Their adoption plan was just wrong. Few people want to give up their phones, and the general public has had enough of a learning curve struggle with mobile phones. The device didn't make sense, at least not in its current state.
The AI bubble will burst soon, and when it does, real innovation will happen.
They designed a product that doesn't solve a problem that anyone has. On top of that they designed something that doesn't even work well.
Yep, at high price+monthly fee, too.
If they had a couple of unbeatable patents that they just couldn't figure out how to turn into products, that's almost forgivable -- you blew your launch, so you sell out to a company who has the resources to make your ideas into something the public will buy. But as far as I can tell, these guys don't really have any IP worth buying them out for.
And it was overpriced. I can see people buying a useless toy for 50 bucks, but not for $700.
I never looked into it, but assumed it was just like an “echo dot”. May deserves a premium for being smaller and belatedly powered, as much as $30?
Even if they did want to give up their phones, they wouldn't for anything with a two to four hour device. Let alone something that only has a mild neato factor of a low powered laser projector. Smart watches do the same shit with a longer battery life and virtually no one's replacing their phones with those, either.
And even smartwatches found their own niche on the well being and health space. Since being constantly attached to your wrist they can monitor heart-rate, blood pressure, walking cadence and steps taken. A perfect sport training partner. But this thing doesn't have any such hook.
„bethany bongiorno“ is the most made-up sounding name I‘ve ever heard
They got the name from a prototype pin.
Who would have guess that another overpriced solution to a non existent problem that no one wants would have been a commercial failure ....
We are in a capitalist dystopia. We could be using AI to predict energy usage and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, or help in discovering new protein folds ... but no ... Timmy wants to look like a cool futuristic dude and he's willing to pay $600 to look cooler than his peers
That's happening
That too.
There's always been barnacles on the ship of progress. That doesn't mean it's only barnacles.
"barnacles in the ship of technology"
I really like that one. Very well put
these people live in a delusion, chasing star trek fantasies while the general population can barely afford rent. we are truly due for the chickens to come home to roost.
i just hope a lot of innocent animals don't get hurt in the process.
Surely the Star Trek fantasy is doing the above stuff. Star Trek is all about how money doesn't exist in the future
The problem is they're not creating a Star Trek future
Yeah their videos were what everyone wants but their actual product was way more clumsy and primitive. Technology isn't there yet for what these guys were trying to make.
$750m? That company worth about three fiddy.
I could see it being useful if it was an accessory to your phone. Not having to dig my phone out of my pocket to take a picture of something to look it up, or having a push-to-talk badge or pendant would make it more convenient, especially for folks like me who don't wear watches. And with Bluetooth it would have decent battery life.
But the damn thing can't even set a timer.
A lot of the form factor is already mostly available in smart watches. They have to, at the bare minimum, conver the bsse functionality of those before moving onto real time ai interaction that is never real time and is hardly a proper interaction.
Progressive enhancement would be great here, smart watch in a pin form factor but with AI powered features when they make sense. Maybe some kind of super fine tuned orchestrator that know when to pass onto siri/assisstant vs. some cloud model (setting a timer requires simple parsing but a complex philosophical question can be offloaded to AI)
There are already copycat products out and I don't feel sympathy for any of them.
I want to say up front that, I don't feel any sympathy for the company, nor do I have any love for the ewaste they created.
That being said, it's a decent idea, and I would have liked to see where it went. Their implementation was completely wrong on do many points, but it was still a half decent idea. Basically having what Google assistant should have been, pinned to your chest like a comm badge sounds pretty cool. The laser projector for your hand was interesting, but very hokey, the data communication was poorly thought out, far too slow to be useful, the design wasn't the worst, but still not great. The battery life was questionable at best....
But the concept of what it was supposed to be able to do, was not terrible. Possibly the last terrible part of the product.
Personally, I want a personal assistant. Since I'm not rich, I can't exactly hire one. Having an AI assistant, that you talk to through a communications badge seems like a decent idea. I'd want it to basically run from my phone, mostly local to my phone, so my data isn't pushed everywhere, but the tech isn't quite there yet. Not enough TOPS, not enough memory, not enough storage for all the models; and certainly not enough battery to power AI running on your phone.
I can see what they were going for but they fell so far short of the goal that it's not really visible in what was delivered.
I imagine the pitch meeting about this being something along the lines of a guy rushing in after watching Star Trek discovery, when they got the holographic comm badges, and going, I want to make that! With the Zora AI and everything! And then people jumping on the bandwagon, knowing full well that they're not even going to come close.
I hope everyone that works there gets new jobs in sectors that aren't using AI as a parlor trick or buzzword to try to move units.
Good bye, company I don't care enough to remember the name of. We hardly knew you, and even that was probably too much interaction.
Absolutely none of this was a good idea.
When you find out you were only good because you drank the trillion dollar brand Kool-Aid.
Here is female founder's LinkedIn background image, web search result top 20, with that thing on.
https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/D5616AQEGTRY3gObKdg/profile-displaybackgroundimage-shrink_200_800/0/1700176960650?e=2147483647&v=beta&t=GoILNFlkyeka_159L39sV2nlT57Phcz9ngiMCGm6eQ8
Demographic is..I mean was?
Here is an awkward photo of both Founders: https://images.fastcompany.net/image/upload/w_596,c_limit,q_auto:best,f_auto/wp-cms/uploads/2020/09/i-Bethany-and-Imran.jpg
They wanted so bad to be the next Jobs-Wozniak duo. They even made their marketing and presentations coded to look Apple like. There's a really cringe presentation of Imran showing the pin, and he literally pauses after grand statements several times waiting for cheers and applause, but the audience is completely silence. Once they applaud out of pity or something after an awkwardly long pause, and the dude says something like “thanks, finally” or something along those lines. They are extremely cringe and awkward all the time.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Despite seemingly having nothing else in the pipeline and the AI Pin being dead on arrival, Bloomberg reports the company is "seeking a price of between $750 million and $1 billion in a sale."
Humane was founded by two ex-Apple employees, Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, in 2018 and has raised $230 million from some big-name investors like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
The Humane AI Pin immediately seemed like an idea that only made sense in a VC pitch room.
The device is a wearable voice command box and camera that you magnetically clip onto a shirt, sort of like a Star Trek communicator.
The device comes in two halves, with a front processing unit and a back battery, and the side clipped together magnetically with your shirt in the middle.
Don't be surprised if history places Humane on the list of "biggest tech startup flops ever" alongside the likes of Juicero and Ouya.
The original article contains 441 words, the summary contains 154 words. Saved 65%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
who could have forseen that "the app, as a hardware device" wouldnt sell well.
Surprised Pikachu
It's cool tech that is ahead of its time. 5-10 years from now, a big tech company will make something like this and everyone will cry Huzzah!
Magic Leap went the same route.
Edit:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Leap
Judging by the downvotes, I didn't state my point well enough. Magic Leap took a LOT of money, got a lot of hype, and nearly went out of business multiple times.
But they were also the first ones to demonstrate and kick off overlaying data on top of real world, what we now call Augmented Reality. Their implementation was clunky and the device was expensive, but it showed people a glimpse of what was possible in a head-mounted, immersive form factor. 10 years later, Apple released the Vision Pro which used different tech, but did pretty much what ML1 was trying to do.
I think the Humane AI pin tried some interesting concepts, but is heading in the same direction. The idea of a small, wearable, AI device is interesting. Ten years from now, when you can run it all on-device and have a hands-free, GPT-8 level conversation with it with no cloud connection may well be a yawn.
The difference would be that they have a device that actually works...
If you watch any of the reviews on this device it's virtually unusable. 5 to 10 years from now, LLM models might actually fit on the device itself and then it could become actually usable. 5-10 years is a FUCKTON of time in the computer space.
What now successful tech is this Magic Leap? I don't think I have heard of them.
Edited my post to explain better.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Leap
Judging by the downvotes, I didn't state my point well enough. Magic Leap took a LOT of money, got a lot of hype, and nearly went out of business multiple times.
But they were also the first ones to demonstrate and kick off overlaying data on top of real world, what we now call Augmented Reality. Their implementation was clunky and the device was expensive, but it showed people a glimpse of what was possible in a head-mounted, immersive form factor. 10 years later, Apple released the Vision Pro which used different tech, but did pretty much what ML1 was trying to do.
I think the Humane AI pin tried some interesting concepts, but is heading in the same direction. The idea of a small, wearable, AI device is interesting. Ten years from now, when you can run it all on-device and have a hands-free, GPT-8 level conversation with it with no cloud connection may well be a yawn.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Leap
Judging by the downvotes, I didn't state my point well enough. Magic Leap took a LOT of money, got a lot of hype, and nearly went out of business multiple times.
But they were also the first ones to demonstrate and kick off overlaying data on top of real world, what we now call Augmented Reality. Their implementation was clunky and the device was expensive, but it showed people a glimpse of what was possible in a head-mounted, immersive form factor. 10 years later, Apple released the Vision Pro which used different tech, but did pretty much what ML1 was trying to do.
I think the Humane AI pin tried some interesting concepts, but is heading in the same direction. The idea of a small, wearable, AI device is interesting. Ten years from now, when you can run it all on-device and have a hands-free, GPT-8 level conversation with it with no cloud connection may well be a yawn.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Leap
Judging by the downvotes, I didn't state my point well enough. Magic Leap took a LOT of money, got a lot of hype, and nearly went out of business multiple times.
But they were also the first ones to demonstrate and kick off overlaying data on top of real world, what we now call Augmented Reality. Their implementation was clunky and the device was expensive, but it showed people a glimpse of what was possible in a head-mounted, immersive form factor. 10 years later, Apple released the Vision Pro which used different tech, but did pretty much what ML1 was trying to do.
I think the Humane AI pin tried some interesting concepts, but is heading in the same direction. The idea of a small, wearable, AI device is interesting. Ten years from now, when you can run it all on-device and have a hands-free, GPT-8 level conversation with it with no cloud connection may well be a yawn.
I understand your point but there is a huge difference between the 2 products.
Right now, we are basically asking AI pin companies "Why can't this be an app?" And they are giving us vague dodgy corporate answers. Magic leap is a fundamentally different product from a standard smartphone. It failed because the hardware wasn't there yet even though there was a lot of interest.
In 2023, even with a company like Apple, Apple Vision is seeing slow adoption rates of the product. Why? Bulky + power hungry + expensive, similar issues from back then, albeit to a lesser degree. Till the technology becomes accessible, it will remain as a niche. It has the potential to change a lot of things in healthcare and manufacturing but it still has a long way to go.
The metaverse is also suffering from a similar problem. What can the metaverse do that 2nd Life/Minecraft can't do? It needs be better than the existing solutions while still having a low barrier to entry price-wise. Do note I'm completely skipping the fact that it's being heavily pushed by a privacy nightmare of a company.
It would be pretty useful to have one of those com badges from Star Trek. That seems to be the form factor.