> Device Timeline: Your Ai Pin will continue to function normally until 12pm PST on February 28, 2025. After this date, it will no longer connect to Humane’s servers, and .Center access will be fully retired.
> Device Features: Your Ai Pin features will no longer include calling, messaging, Ai queries/responses, or cloud access.
For a $700 device that was on the market for less than a year, that is a not a stellar way to treat your customers. Fortunately it seems there were very few of those.
If the hardware requires software that is not available for self service, then the customer is entitled for full refund at any time.
In other words if the hardware is just an accessory for providing service through software then the money the user pays for the hardware should be considered a refundable deposit.
Hey taxes are MY MONEY and I need that 2 cents back (so I can be scammed hundreds of dollars by corporations that no longer need to comply with the CFPB)
Why is this regulation necessary? You can just choose not to buy products whose future you’re skeptical of.
In this case, Humane would likely go bankrupt rather than pay out the refunds your regulation would require, so it would still be ineffective in protecting consumers.
> You can just choose not to buy products whose future you’re skeptical of.
I had a meeting last week whose sole purpose was for me to re-describe something a couple times which I had already described in text. And which also could be found in vendor documentation.
I also know someone who seems to think that (almost?) anything pushed on the Internet must be true.
Understanding how products works and what are the risks requires a study. It’s not realistic that a layman will study and understand the implications of the architecture of the product.
This regulation will transfer that requirement from the consumer to the maker so that the maker can choose to create products they issue full refund when they can’t guarantee perpetual software availability or they can choose to make all the software available with the product. It also avoids dictating how the product should be designed when doing all that.
In this particular case, this is true, and in any case approximately nobody bought these, but it's not uncommon for large, well-capitalised companies to nuke products when convenient (Google likes doing this, say).
Why have regulations at all then? Why regulate water purity when you can choose to not drink water you're skeptical of, or why regulate food if you can just not eat food that you're skeptical of? Regulations are there not for you, who perhaps knows better, but there for the people who do not. Most people are not tech-savvy. Most people believe whatever marketing is being shoved down their throat.
An average person does not do or know how to do the due diligence of product validation, and I'd argue even the tech-savvy of us are unable to figure out if a product is going to stick around or not since what info is being given to us for analysis is limited, and heavily watered down.
Manifesting the Invisible Hand requires a lot of prerequisites that are obviously untrue in the real world. Like that customers are able to do research and understand the findings.
I don't understand how libertarians look at the current state of things and conclude that fewer regulations would solve the problem.
> Manifesting the Invisible Hand requires a lot of prerequisites that are obviously untrue in the real world. Like that customers are able to do research and understand the findings.
Worse. It requires that doing so is effectively free. Otherwise, a successful strategy is to lower your product quality compared to your competitors by an amount just shy of the cost of discovering the lower quality. This leads to a race to the bottom.
Yes, and? That very “race to the bottom” is what drives progress. Yes, it’s much messier than having a central authority dictate everything. Such is life.
Making a product cheaper to produce without affecting what people care about (or, equivalently, improving the performance without increasing the cost) is what drives productivity growth, and the relentless competitive pressure to do so is what produced the modern world. It’s not fun or easy, and yes, sitting on your ass would be easier. Oh well!
Are you suggesting that the people who could afford $700 for a Humane AI pin last year were not capable of doing research about the company, its history, its prospects? Every one of these people have access to the sum total of all human knowledge in 10 seconds at their fingertips. Come on.
This is a completely new product, in a category that never existed and no one was desperately demanding. It was bought with the disposable income of wealthy people who enjoy trying new technology and knew exactly the risk they were taking. Are you seriously going to dispute that? Why is this a space that needs to be regulated?
Are you saying that all regulation is good, and that regulation can’t ever be misguided, harmful, counter-productive, etc.? And that the best solution to any problem is to enact regulation (which doesn’t even have to be good?)
If you’re not saying that, then what is so hard to understand about the conclusion that we could solve some problems by repealing bad regulations?
Regulations are necessary where the harm that we’re protecting against is so severe that avoiding it is worth the cost and lost productivity of administering and complying with the regulation.
Food and water safety certainly fall in that category! Ensuring that early adopters of useless $700 widgets are “protected” against startups going bankrupt or otherwise discontinuing / canceling the product doesn’t seem worth anyone’s concern.
Some people’s reaction to observing anything in society that they don’t like is “that should be banned!” I don’t think that’s an appropriate reaction.
The proposed regulation would dramatically increase the risk of any investment in a new consumer hardware startup. And, there are not that many of these startups in the first place, because they’re risky enough as it is! So, the net result would be less innovation and less startups doing hardware, and I don’t think that would be a net improvement.
Sounds like a good intention with bad consequences. It would incentivise operating systems to become subscriptions too. Plus, it would never happen. If a company goes bankrupt they can’t buy back the devices.
I’d rather they were forced to release their software to the public, making it a requirement without which bankruptcy or sales would be refused by regulatory agencies. That way hobbyists could still get them to work, perhaps even launch a new company to revive the old devices (reducing e-waste). Additionally, we could detect if they had been doing anything shady with the data.
I think going bankrupt can be grounds for making the software open source or at least free to make the users whole. Think of it like a liability, when bankrupt the stakeholders can choose to refund customers or make the software available - whichever suits them.
That might also have bad consequences (not because the idea is bad, but because corps will try to route around it). It'll start with pieces of the software not being able to be released because they were licensed from a third party, and end with software development teams being organized into contract shops that own the code and thus (oh! How sad!) are regrettably unable to supply any code after the bankruptcy of the main entity. Would need very careful rules from regulators to try and anticipate tricks like this.
Then the hardware is not a purchase, but a lease (without time limits). And the vendor would have to refund lease payment if it stops working.
If you want to go the other way, a hardware that requires a paid service should be jail-breakable. If the designated service stops working, then the service should be open-sourced. (We would love this on HN but just imagine the OpenSource overload engineers like us would be overwhelmed with to the point no one would try.)
I'm not a fan of The Verge, but this is extremely lazy. If you're going to accuse, the very least you can do is provide one link. You know that Google "bubbles" results, so your searches can lead to completely different information than someone else's, right?
"Google is your friend" is an inaccurate statement, huh.. if you want proof that the earth is flat, it can provide you with links that you can selectively filter with your confirmation bias to believe that. If you think Covid is a hoax, you can use Google to find webpages to confirm this, but when Google/YouTube disallows Covid-disinformation videos, the average nutter will start screaming "Censorship!". So much for Google being their friend.
The reality is even if one released that operated fully independently within a few years they'll be bought up and you'll be forced into someone's online ecosystem until they inevitably ruin the product.
Until the cycle of release something great so we can exit by selling to big tech is broken, great products are just going to be snuffed out by the giant competitors to be turned into over-monetized products.
it looks like the company was already "transitioning" - $116M for 200 people in AI, and that nowdays when an NVDA or PLTR employee is $70M+ each. It looks like they were trying and failed to get $750M-$1B just half a year ago, and even that would normally be a bargain for 200 people.
It's been different companies at different times, but over the last 20 years HP does seem to have been particularly prolific at buying weird mostly-dead junk.
Gruber[1] posted that Bloomberg reported[2]: "Humane’s team, including founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, will form a new division at HP to help integrate artificial intelligence into the company’s personal computers, printers and connected conference rooms, said Tuan Tran, who leads HP’s AI initiatives."
So they'll hang around as some sort of director-level Thought Leaders or something? Sounds like a safe and lucrative landing.
Heeyy morning Jeff! Looks like we are still low on yellow ink today, so I'm probably not going to be able print anything for you. But if you'd like I could order a new cartridge set direct from HP? Would you like me to go ahead with that order or remind you in 15 minutes with another friendly greeting?
If you like I could call you on your cell to remind you, send you a text, email you, or I could just shout loudly from right here in printer!
HP Printer: "I'm sorry Jeff, I'm afraid I can't do that...not only have you not ordered your required yellow cartridge refill, your page account is empty. Until you put down your credit card buy some HP approved paper and right to print credits we're stuck. I suggest the 500 page bundle which is on sale 1% off with coupon code UTOOL25. While we're at it, I see your book report is about 'The Sun Also Rises'? Did you know that just like Jake, 4 out 10 men experience ED and I can order something to help you with that from our partners at HIMS..."
Which means they'll be shoved into an office for a year before being encouraged to move on. There's not really a role there for them, they were a company that made a chatgpt wrapper, the idea that they have a clue how to run an actual AI based operation is laughable.
We are looking at another gold rush where the US patent office lets you patent absolutely anything
I still remember a few of the previous ones, like ”A mundane everyday thing…on a computer!” and ”The same thing every company has been doing for decades…but over the internet!”
Be mentally prepared for a few decades of stifled innovation, as every perfectly-ordinary-thing-but-with-ai patent is suppressing the market
Remember when Apple patented a "ornamental design for a portable display device" and tried to sue Samsung? I'm sorry but the idea that you can patent a shape is just super depressing.
I mean, if you look at Imran Chaudhri's personal homepage (http://www.imranchaudhri.com) I think you'll get a sense of how valuable those patents might be.
I didn't care about looking at the individual patents, and I can't have a qualified opinion on Imran Chaudhri as a person or as an engineer. But I did have to snicker when I saw the Aphex Twin reference on his homepage.
Interesting they thought they could disrupt phones: devices with almost 20 years of iterative improvements, extremely mature app stores, tons of functionality, fast ubiquitous internet, etc.
You couldn't even connect the Ai Pin to your phone ?! Lock-in makes sense but it was a very risky bet.
Huh, it is weird to think of smartphones as entrenched incumbents. Of course, they are. But it is weird (they are the first type of device where I was familiar with a world before them).
There's some revisionism here: having the internet in your pocket anywhere you went was a clear upgrade. Projecting a screen on your palm with low resolution was a clear downgrade.
Disruption is incredibly difficult but this product was giving off Juicero vibes from the start.
I remember streaming Pandora in summer of 2008 and thinking how amazing is it that I can listen to whatever music I want on the go. And it got better and better by the week, it seemed. I don’t recall ever having issues with insufficient bandwidth, almost everything I expected to work, worked when I needed it to (in NYC).
It wasn’t long before we had Maps, Latitude, Yelp, Four Square, Twitter, so many possibilities due to combo of camera + mobile broadband + GPS + battery technology to allow on the go computation and communication.
3G smartphones (mostly Nokia N60 platform) were a thing from about 2002 in some European markets, with rather limited uptake. The real killer feature of the iPhone, at least initially (remember the first one didn't have 3G in any case) was a browser that didn't make you want to throw the thing out the window in frustration every time you used it.
The iPhone was pleasant to use, or at least not actively infuriating. That was, to a large extent, all it took.
Nokia really messed up, here; there was nothing stopping them making an iPhone-ish thing (perhaps without multitouch) a few years previous to the iPhone coming out, and there was even a semi-decent third party browser for their platform (Opera) which they could have taken cues from or bought, but they were always far more excited about the featurephone market, seeing smartphones as a niche.
3G connectivity was available for several years before the first iPhone launched. I had 3G phones in the US in 2005.
iPhone was late to the 3G game. It was one of the complaints of the original iPhone, that it didn't have 3G despite so many other devices out there already having it.
I don’t remember anyone using mobile broadband though, is it possible the networks weren’t ready for high usage in the earlier years? All people were doing is checking email and BlackBerry messenger texting.
I guess it could also have have just been a superior business strategy to compel ATT to offer unlimited data so that people could freely explore the possibilities without worrying about overage charges.
I used my phone for USB tethering a good bit on the go. I also had a version of Google Maps in 2005ish timeframe on 3G. I would often be able to stream music from internet mp3 and aac streams. I also had Opera Mini in 2005 over 3G internet.
It was only like $15/mo for unlimited data to add to my dumb phone plan. I didn't use the free dumb phone with the plan, I just popped the SIM into other devices.
It's not actually.
The problem was not marketing. The problem was the product itself.
No marketing could have helped them, as the product was so bad.
The good reminder here, is to build something people actually want.
My prediction is that HP will make some half-hearted attempts to do something with it for a while, and then will sell it at a loss to LG. LG will use it in one or two of their smart TVs and then release it as open source, at which point it will be forgotten. (ref: WebOS)
If it's functional, I'd love to use a laser projection on my couch when I misplace my TV remote. Especially if it's able to adapt to my TV's current context
imagine an ai tv that was given the prompt to continuously encourage viewers to sign up for LG/HP instant pixel delivery service and that it should be noted that many viewers feel great satisfaction with the service, and are frequently considered the most attractive people within your area.
> Humane’s AI platform Cosmos, backed by an incredible group of engineers, will help us create an intelligent ecosystem across all HP devices from AI PCs to smart printers and connected conference rooms. This will unlock new levels of functionality for our customers and deliver on the promises of AI.
“It looks like you are printing out a document that our AI detected ans urgent. Please subscribe to our Urgent Document print plan for $30/month (billed centennially) to re-enable printing.”
if it is doing battery level, I guess it is also doing power on, and leds.
It doesn't say it does charging anymore, so maybe it does battery level until it goes to 0?
> After the shutdown, offline features like “battery level” will still work, Humane says, but “any function that requires cloud connectivity like voice interactions, AI responses, and .Center access” will not.
I'd really like to know if the Humane PR flack typed that with a straight face.
Hopefully it will also improve the product design engineering quality at HP. While the AI pin is a bit useless the industrial product design is at a high level. From what I remember it’s mostly an core of Apple engineers
The charging case had to be recalled because it was a potential fire hazard, and the pin itself had a tendency to overheat during normal use. Hardly a success story on the hardware front.
>The end of an AI hardware experiment. Lots of reasons this didn’t do well, from trying to get people to do something they don’t already do (wear a computer on their clothes) to poor execution. The research @IrenaCronin and I do shows glasses are the form factor but they are still years from having decent all color displays. Until then it will be hard to get people to use much other than their phones.
> Lots of reasons this didn’t do well, from trying to get people to do something they don’t already do (wear a computer on their clothes) to poor execution.
Huh, has Scoble... matured and grown? Got to admit I haven't been paying attention to him for a long time, but the above is discordant, coming from Google Glass Superfan Number One.
On his Twitter account he seems to have rebranded, from Metaverse/Spatial computing enthusiast to a general AI person.
Frustrating, because his "Next year Apple will..." predictions in his AR/VR phase were wild and utterly out there. I remember he predicted Apple Glasses the size of small sunglasses were coming next year. There was also a prediction of a completely transparent iPhone, just a pane of glass. I still wonder how that would have worked in his mind.
He spends his days on Musk's Nazi platform preaching the "VR any minute" gospel to the 50K people still using their Apple Vision Pros. It makes for the funniest circle jerk in tech circles. Robert is 1/6th the man he was as a paid Microsoft shill. He never recovered his credibility after his Google Glass shower scene made the social media rounds, and now has no one to sit at his feet listening to his deep tech wisdom except the VR die hards and the engagement farmers.
I have no idea what Apple was thinking with the Vision. It is priced for professionals but then all the promo material was regarding various ways to isolate yourself from your family.
I wish they'd slim it down and make it affordable for a normal human so they can iterate on it. But even then I would not buy it unless someone gets us to an unlocked bootloader and Linux.
If any VCs who "invested" some of the $230 million into the dumbest product ever from obvious morons would like to instead invest with me, I'm pretty confident I can do better than a 0.5x return!
I mistakenly thought they generated a totally of $116 million in revenue.
I meant to ask "If you were to get $230 million, how would you plan to generate as much money as Humane was able to generate during the length of its existence". Do you have an answer?
> an AI which emits a binary yes/no to, “Should I invest some of this $230 million such that it becomes $115 million 5 years from now.”
If you were pitching that to me, I'd ask: what is the AI's confidence in its answer, and how can you verify that?
> how would you plan to generate as much money as Humane was able to generate during the length of its existence". Do you have an answer?
Humane generated negative $114M. They turned $230M into $116M.
My prospectus is to buy a $1M house, throw $1M parties every day for a month, and burn the house down at the end and sell the charred remains for $1. I'll take a million dollar salary for these services. Then I'll shut it all down and return the leftovers to the investors.
So total expenses for this endeavor: $1M + 31 * $1M + $1M in salaries so $33M. That's $81M better than Humane did, and I'll do it in less time!
You meant to write "generate $-115 million" I think. I'd start by putting all the money under a mattress which is already doing way better than Humane. Then I'd try to think of something fun to make.
Their investors are well known. May be you can give it a try? Easy money.
> Humane raised $240 million in funding from high-profile investors, including Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, and his counterpart at OpenAI, Sam Altman
I think you’re taking the joke too seriously. The user you’re replying to clearly doesn’t think their idea would raise money, they’re taking a dig at how obviously bad of an investment Humane was.
Ah, I mean that is the theory, but the practice, today, is that you have to say the magic word to get money. This is actually fairly normal VC behaviour; the market as a whole has always been rather fad-driven.
The parent is right, investors would almost certainly have 1x preference, which means they get back the first $230M in an acquisition. The valuation doesn't matter if you exit for less than money in.
Founders and employees would get nothing out of this (aside from whatever HP is giving them directly as incentive to stick around).
That's the most interesting thing because if those folks managed to get a parachute for their 1x pref investors with this abysmal final price, what does it mean for the several companies at the same situation?
It's a pity that we do not have a version of "Who's holding the bag?"[1] for LP and VC funds, but with all challenges to raise money, it would be interesting to see how many funds are losing money at the moment.
This is the inherent feature from VC funds but still, one thing is raise cheap money and having a "circular" money flowing (from A -> B - (...) -> IPO -> A) but if they do not arrive even in the IPO how this ecosystem will work if a US 5 Year Coupon pays 4.40%?
It's incredible how easy it was to raise money in that time frame and how hard it is to raise money now. They would throw huge sums of money at you for the dumbest ideas.
It's important to note that the AI Pin powered by ChatGPT was a bit of a pivot. If ChatGPT never came out, they wouldn't have even had that. It would have been more like having a dedicated Siri or Alexa device to do really basic stuff with. I can't imagine how much worse the product was going to be. What investor say that early pitch and work and was like, "sign me up?"
> It's incredible how easy it was to raise money in that time frame and how hard it is to raise money now. They would throw huge sums of money at you for the dumbest ideas.
Humane's series C was in 2023, long after the end of ZIRP. They will still throw huge sums of money at you for the dumbest idea, provided that you say the magic term 'AI' enough.
Did anyone think the ai pin would go any other way? This was bound to happen the moment it was announced. The rabbit and others are also probably heading in that direction. The hardware just isn’t quite there yet and so is the software
It's also, well, unclear that it is a thing that anyone much _wants_. "What if a phone but with no screen and Siri listens to you constantly" just isn't an attractive proposition for most people.
This is really an advertisement for on-device ML. If shutting down the servers bricks your device, I’m less interested in expensive fledgling products.
I would absolutely love to know how many API requests they get a day from users who don’t work at the company and aren’t related to people who work at the company.
While the device and company were clearly flawed and there wasn't even a tiny niche that seemed to love the product, some part of me admires their audacity in trying to do something transformational.
There's a lot to post-mortem here, but failures like these are part of an entrepreneurial culture.
286 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] thread> Device Features: Your Ai Pin features will no longer include calling, messaging, Ai queries/responses, or cloud access.
For a $700 device that was on the market for less than a year, that is a not a stellar way to treat your customers. Fortunately it seems there were very few of those.
[0] https://support.humane.com/hc/en-us/articles/34374173951373-...
If the hardware requires software that is not available for self service, then the customer is entitled for full refund at any time.
In other words if the hardware is just an accessory for providing service through software then the money the user pays for the hardware should be considered a refundable deposit.
In this case, Humane would likely go bankrupt rather than pay out the refunds your regulation would require, so it would still be ineffective in protecting consumers.
I had a meeting last week whose sole purpose was for me to re-describe something a couple times which I had already described in text. And which also could be found in vendor documentation.
I also know someone who seems to think that (almost?) anything pushed on the Internet must be true.
This regulation will transfer that requirement from the consumer to the maker so that the maker can choose to create products they issue full refund when they can’t guarantee perpetual software availability or they can choose to make all the software available with the product. It also avoids dictating how the product should be designed when doing all that.
An average person does not do or know how to do the due diligence of product validation, and I'd argue even the tech-savvy of us are unable to figure out if a product is going to stick around or not since what info is being given to us for analysis is limited, and heavily watered down.
I don't understand how libertarians look at the current state of things and conclude that fewer regulations would solve the problem.
Worse. It requires that doing so is effectively free. Otherwise, a successful strategy is to lower your product quality compared to your competitors by an amount just shy of the cost of discovering the lower quality. This leads to a race to the bottom.
Making a product cheaper to produce without affecting what people care about (or, equivalently, improving the performance without increasing the cost) is what drives productivity growth, and the relentless competitive pressure to do so is what produced the modern world. It’s not fun or easy, and yes, sitting on your ass would be easier. Oh well!
This is a completely new product, in a category that never existed and no one was desperately demanding. It was bought with the disposable income of wealthy people who enjoy trying new technology and knew exactly the risk they were taking. Are you seriously going to dispute that? Why is this a space that needs to be regulated?
If you’re not saying that, then what is so hard to understand about the conclusion that we could solve some problems by repealing bad regulations?
Food and water safety certainly fall in that category! Ensuring that early adopters of useless $700 widgets are “protected” against startups going bankrupt or otherwise discontinuing / canceling the product doesn’t seem worth anyone’s concern.
Some people’s reaction to observing anything in society that they don’t like is “that should be banned!” I don’t think that’s an appropriate reaction.
The proposed regulation would dramatically increase the risk of any investment in a new consumer hardware startup. And, there are not that many of these startups in the first place, because they’re risky enough as it is! So, the net result would be less innovation and less startups doing hardware, and I don’t think that would be a net improvement.
If a service it depends on goes away within X years (5? 10?) you're owed a prorated refund.
I’d rather they were forced to release their software to the public, making it a requirement without which bankruptcy or sales would be refused by regulatory agencies. That way hobbyists could still get them to work, perhaps even launch a new company to revive the old devices (reducing e-waste). Additionally, we could detect if they had been doing anything shady with the data.
*or they were violating open source licenses like some startups just do.
But in either case a reasonable fine could be appropriate.
Yes, but in this specific scenario the purchasing entity is far from bankrupt at least financially.
If you want to go the other way, a hardware that requires a paid service should be jail-breakable. If the designated service stops working, then the service should be open-sourced. (We would love this on HN but just imagine the OpenSource overload engineers like us would be overwhelmed with to the point no one would try.)
> Humane’s daily returns are outpacing sales
https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/7/24211339/humane-ai-pin-mor...
I'm not a fan of The Verge, but this is extremely lazy. If you're going to accuse, the very least you can do is provide one link. You know that Google "bubbles" results, so your searches can lead to completely different information than someone else's, right?
One that’s dependent on the company’s servers to operate? Almost no f’ing way.
Until the cycle of release something great so we can exit by selling to big tech is broken, great products are just going to be snuffed out by the giant competitors to be turned into over-monetized products.
You have to be a right knob to describe this as a “transition”
Plus monthly subscription.
(Since 1999 that is)
So they'll hang around as some sort of director-level Thought Leaders or something? Sounds like a safe and lucrative landing.
1: https://daringfireball.net
2: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-18/hp-116-mi...
If you like I could call you on your cell to remind you, send you a text, email you, or I could just shout loudly from right here in printer!
HP Printer: "I'm sorry Jeff, I'm afraid I can't do that"
Our bright, shiny future...
What, did the state of California ask them to develop a new punishment for tech workers convicted of murder? Is Hans Reiser being tortured with this?
In version 2 it will be able to nag^W persuade you to buy genuine HP ink, by reminding you repeatedly the benefits of genuine HP ink.
I don’t see how they have anything of value at all other than patents.
It's possible they think the OS and the team that built it could have value if put to better uses than building an AI pin.
I still remember a few of the previous ones, like ”A mundane everyday thing…on a computer!” and ”The same thing every company has been doing for decades…but over the internet!”
Be mentally prepared for a few decades of stifled innovation, as every perfectly-ordinary-thing-but-with-ai patent is suppressing the market
https://consor.com/apple-patents-a-rectangle
> Device, method, and graphical user interface for accessing an application in a locked device
> Ornamental design for a user interface for a computer display
I have no idea what the invention (or design) is in this one.
You couldn't even connect the Ai Pin to your phone ?! Lock-in makes sense but it was a very risky bet.
Essential viewing: Review of the Ai Pin - The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed... For Now (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TitZV6k8zfA)
Disruption is incredibly difficult but this product was giving off Juicero vibes from the start.
Pre and post 3G mobile broadband were different worlds.
But it did what it needed enough to be extremely compelling. And it improved very fast in the early years.
It wasn’t long before we had Maps, Latitude, Yelp, Four Square, Twitter, so many possibilities due to combo of camera + mobile broadband + GPS + battery technology to allow on the go computation and communication.
The iPhone was pleasant to use, or at least not actively infuriating. That was, to a large extent, all it took.
Nokia really messed up, here; there was nothing stopping them making an iPhone-ish thing (perhaps without multitouch) a few years previous to the iPhone coming out, and there was even a semi-decent third party browser for their platform (Opera) which they could have taken cues from or bought, but they were always far more excited about the featurephone market, seeing smartphones as a niche.
iPhone was late to the 3G game. It was one of the complaints of the original iPhone, that it didn't have 3G despite so many other devices out there already having it.
I guess it could also have have just been a superior business strategy to compel ATT to offer unlimited data so that people could freely explore the possibilities without worrying about overage charges.
It was only like $15/mo for unlimited data to add to my dumb phone plan. I didn't use the free dumb phone with the plan, I just popped the SIM into other devices.
Pretty sure the person means HP bought a joke of a company/product because of the marketing.
I feel its more a cargo cult mentality among the executives.
But yeah what you said is way worse
The LG version never looked like anything Palm/HP put out, which makes me wonder what LG actually bought, but it's still around.
I can't wait for an HP AI printer
Their smart magic control is best in class too.
> https://support.humane.com/hc/en-us/articles/34243204841997-...
The only feature they could think of was “battery level”? That’s hilarious
“What is my purpose?”
“You say your battery level.”
“Oh my God.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine
https://support.humane.com/hc/en-us/articles/34243204841997-...
I like that it says “battery level, etc”. I’d really like to see the full list of features.
"What's the most pointless matter-of-fact thing we could say/do in any given situation, just for the sake of the checkmark of having said/done it?"
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40598742
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/6/24172718/humane-ai-pin-sel...
https://www.theverge.com/news/614883/humane-ai-hp-acquisitio...
> After the shutdown, offline features like “battery level” will still work, Humane says, but “any function that requires cloud connectivity like voice interactions, AI responses, and .Center access” will not.
I'd really like to know if the Humane PR flack typed that with a straight face.
But no, I wouldn't be able to write that sentence myself without wanting to find the closest hole to hide out of embarrassment.
Teenage Engineering also helped with that, so it makes sense.
The basic premise that people would want to wear a device as a pin is an industrial design failure.
The entire product is bad industrial design. Being built with nice materials is not automatically good industrial design.
It was a scam destined to fail and HP is making a stupid acquisition of worthless tech.
:%s/Cloud/AI/g
The only reason a dinosaur like HP is even buying out this no-name player.
>The end of an AI hardware experiment. Lots of reasons this didn’t do well, from trying to get people to do something they don’t already do (wear a computer on their clothes) to poor execution. The research @IrenaCronin and I do shows glasses are the form factor but they are still years from having decent all color displays. Until then it will be hard to get people to use much other than their phones.
Ignoring the massive industry of people actively having their eyeballs cut open and lasered just to avoid wearing glasses.
Huh, has Scoble... matured and grown? Got to admit I haven't been paying attention to him for a long time, but the above is discordant, coming from Google Glass Superfan Number One.
Frustrating, because his "Next year Apple will..." predictions in his AR/VR phase were wild and utterly out there. I remember he predicted Apple Glasses the size of small sunglasses were coming next year. There was also a prediction of a completely transparent iPhone, just a pane of glass. I still wonder how that would have worked in his mind.
I wish they'd slim it down and make it affordable for a normal human so they can iterate on it. But even then I would not buy it unless someone gets us to an unlocked bootloader and Linux.
Start with: an AI which emits a binary yes/no to, “Should I invest some of this $230 million such that it becomes $115 million 5 years from now.”
I meant to ask "If you were to get $230 million, how would you plan to generate as much money as Humane was able to generate during the length of its existence". Do you have an answer?
> an AI which emits a binary yes/no to, “Should I invest some of this $230 million such that it becomes $115 million 5 years from now.”
If you were pitching that to me, I'd ask: what is the AI's confidence in its answer, and how can you verify that?
Humane generated negative $114M. They turned $230M into $116M.
My prospectus is to buy a $1M house, throw $1M parties every day for a month, and burn the house down at the end and sell the charred remains for $1. I'll take a million dollar salary for these services. Then I'll shut it all down and return the leftovers to the investors.
So total expenses for this endeavor: $1M + 31 * $1M + $1M in salaries so $33M. That's $81M better than Humane did, and I'll do it in less time!
> Humane raised $240 million in funding from high-profile investors, including Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, and his counterpart at OpenAI, Sam Altman
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/technology/hp-humane-ai-p...
Why would it need to be AI? VC investors care about making money, not how.
Founders and employees would get nothing out of this (aside from whatever HP is giving them directly as incentive to stick around).
It's a pity that we do not have a version of "Who's holding the bag?"[1] for LP and VC funds, but with all challenges to raise money, it would be interesting to see how many funds are losing money at the moment.
This is the inherent feature from VC funds but still, one thing is raise cheap money and having a "circular" money flowing (from A -> B - (...) -> IPO -> A) but if they do not arrive even in the IPO how this ecosystem will work if a US 5 Year Coupon pays 4.40%?
[1] - https://pscmevents.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Who-Is-Hol...
It's important to note that the AI Pin powered by ChatGPT was a bit of a pivot. If ChatGPT never came out, they wouldn't have even had that. It would have been more like having a dedicated Siri or Alexa device to do really basic stuff with. I can't imagine how much worse the product was going to be. What investor say that early pitch and work and was like, "sign me up?"
Perplexity investors probably think it will get acquired some day by some big co.
Humane's series C was in 2023, long after the end of ZIRP. They will still throw huge sums of money at you for the dumbest idea, provided that you say the magic term 'AI' enough.
$700 hardware can't do more than that?
Maybe I missed something though.
Humane rep: Here’s what we can do. We can just shut it down. The fine print says we can.
HP rep: Excellent! You’ll fit right in here at HP!
There's a lot to post-mortem here, but failures like these are part of an entrepreneurial culture.