Imran Chaudhri / Twitter

An Introduction

The Humane Ai Pin (yes, with a lowercase “i”), a smart-phone replacing, wearable, screen-less, standalone device built from the ground up for Ai, was launched back on November 9th, 2023, to much fanfare (see my article here) but it was reported yesterday by Bloomberg that the company is up for sale.

About the Humane Ai Pin:

• costs $699,
• has a $24-a-month subscription fee,
• magnetically clips to one's clothes or other surfaces with the clip also serving as a battery pack so you can swap in new batteries (the device ships with two “battery boosters”) throughout the day to keep the Pin running,
• is primarily a voice-based device, but the green laser projector can project information onto your hand and you can also hold objects up to the camera and interact with the Pin through gestures, as there’s a touchpad on the device,
• isn’t always recording or even listening for a wake word, instead requiring you to manually activate it and it has a “Trust Light,” which blinks on whenever the Pin is recording.
• can write messages that sound like you,
• has a feature that will summarize your email inbox for you,
• can translate languages,
• can identify food to provide nutritional information,
• provides an “Ai DJ” that picks music for you 
• and provides a way to manage the device to set up and customize your device before you start wearing it.

A Product Review

David Pierce of the verge.com, has panned the Ai Pin given its slow responses and a user experience that falls well short of what its founders promised in an article entitled Humane AI Pin review: not even close. At best, Pierce says, the Ai Pin doesn't "feel remotely close to being done. It’s a beta test, a prototype, a proof of concept that maybe someday there might be a killer device that does all of these things [but] I know with absolute certainty that the Ai Pin is not that device. It’s not worth $700, or $24 a month, or all the time and energy and frustration that using it requires. It’s an exciting idea and an infuriating product...I’ll take my phone back now, thanks."

Humane Is For Sale

Humane, after just over 6 months on the market with its Ai Pin product, is already hunting for a potential buyer for its business and, according to Bloomberg, is “seeking a price of between $750 million and $1 billion”. According to Chris Welch of the verge.com, however, the poor reviews of the Ai Pin make that unlikely. He points out that the list of potential buyers for Humane seems quite small given the asking price and that its unclear how much value Humane’s intellectual property would really bring to companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft who are all making significant pushes into the Ai realm.

Conclusion

Luke Lango, the editor of Hypergrowth Investing, has expressed the opinion that the internet didn’t go mainstream and "truly change the world" until the iPhone launched and, similarly, that Ai won’t go mainstream and "truly change the world" until it has its own iPhone moment. He thought that moment would be with the introduction of the Ai Pin (or a competitive device) which puts the power of AI in everyone’s hands, just as the iPhone did for the internet 15 years ago. With today's news about Humane, however, it would seem that their Ai Pin product, unfortunately, is not the device that will "truly change the world". 

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