Ai Pin’s True Story (Not a Scam, But…) - Krazy Ken’s Tech Talk
- The Ai Pin is not a scam, but it's also not very good and the company is already looking to sell. However, there were a few features that did surprise me, and I think the story of Humane and its $230 million failure should be shared with everyone. So let's dive in.
(upbeat music) Hey everyone, how are you all doing? If you're new here, welcome. My name is Krazy Ken, and the story of Humane starts with this gentleman, Imran Chaudhri. Imran joined Apple as an intern in 1995, and he worked on QuickTime VR under the Advanced Technology Group. But then Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 in a comeback so big, there's been multiple movies made about it, but that's a story for another time. Upon Jobs' return, he shut down the Advanced Technology Group and Imran became part of the Human Interface Team.
He was a designer and inventor for various Apple platforms: the Mac, iPod, Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. In fact, his name is on at least 1,000 US patents. Basically, if you touched any Apple products since 1997, you have experienced his work. And remember the dashboard that used to be in macOS? He was the lead designer on that too. While at Apple, he met some passionate and talented folks who would eventually play a role at his future company Humane.
But one of these people in particular was extra special to him. Meet Bethany Bongiorno, who also had an impressive resume. After wrapping up her consulting work at PwC in 2008, she joined Apple as a project manager for iPhone software, and a month later, she became the lead project manager for iPad software.
And this is where she met Imran. Imran and Bethany continued working at Apple into 2016. And if you're an Apple event addict like myself, you might remember them demoing the new iMessage features in iOS 10 at WWDC.
But this year would be their last year at Apple as Bethany left in October 2016. And as for Imran, he stayed until December. But a month before he planned to leave Apple, he emailed his colleagues. And in that email, he maybe got a little too poetic.
He wrote, "When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in, you a joy. Sadly, rivers dry out, and when they do, you look for a new one." Two higher ups at Apple, Alan Dye and Jony Ive, were alarmed by this, fearing the message could imply Apple's best days have passed, so they fired him and he lost his equity shares. I don't want to sound like an A-hole towards these superiors, one of which who's not even at Apple anymore anyway, but that seemed like a (bleep) move. Am I allowed to say (bleep)? I'm not sure if there were other issues going on behind the scenes.
You know how it can be. But in the end, Imran was gone and his shares were gone. So what now? Family. After leaving Apple, Imran and Bethany spent more time with their eight-year-old daughter. And in December 2016, the couple married, and the passion for technology was still there.
Now that Imran and Bethany weren't consumed by a thriving and busy company like Apple, they were able to take some time off and go to CES 2017 and explored the tech world outside of the Big Fruit. Then one day, Bethany came home and saw Imran taking apart a projector and writing and drawing on a piece of paper. "What are you doing?" asked Bethany. Imran said, "This is what we need to build." This one-pager outlined what would soon be the Ai Pin and a finalized version of it was used for one of the first patents for this product.
Around the same time, Imran and Bethany went out for dinner one night, and at the table next to them was a family of five, two parents and three kids. All of them were on their phones, not acknowledging each other's presence. Although Bethany was proud of the work she did at Apple, she has also said, "You can't not acknowledge there may have been some negative effects from the proliferation of smartphones."
- I said I'm just really curious if they've ultimately made us happier. - Ultimately, the husband and wife team started researching happiness and they realized that presence is a huge factor in being happy. With this research in mind, Imran thought, "We don't have a computer that is incredibly personal that learns about you and gets out of the way. Can we stay in the moment but still be connected?" That's the hole this new device will fill, but now you need to start making the physical product.
So, they're gonna need a company. Humane was the name chosen for this new company. In fact, this company was initially incorporated as Humane, LLC on November 17th, 2016.
So this company was already existing just in stealth mode. In 2018, Humane launched a teaser website revealing the Solar Eclipse logo, coupled with a hero video. The site was pretty vague, claiming Humane is the next shift between humans and computing.
But hey, you can't reveal too many details too early, right? But on February 6th, 2019, Humane was officially incorporated in the state of California. So now they have the name we know them by today. Humane Incorporated.
Humane continued operating in stealth mode while raising seed funding. In July 2019, it was estimated they raised almost $12 million from multiple investors, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. By March 2020, Humane's team grew to 18 people, including Apple's former cloud services exec, Patrick Gates. He was Humane's new chief technology officer for now.
Okay, time to count some money. September 25th, 2020. Series A. They raised $30 million led by Sam Altman. Oh, the OpenAI guy. That's probably a good fit.
September 1st, 2021. Series B, $100 million. In August 2022, they also hired content creator Sam Sheffer as head of new media. You'll see him in the setup tutorials. March 8th, 2023. They raised another $100 million in a Series C round. Factor in the $12 million seed funding estimate, and we're looking at almost $242 million in funding.
And on the same day they announced that investment round, Imran gave a little hint as to what the first product will actually be. "Our first device will enable people to bring AI with them everywhere. We are at the beginning of the next era of compute." Humane also announced they were collaborating with Microsoft and OpenAI to make this product possible, but all of these announcements didn't show anything tangible.
There was no official hardware reveal yet, so people had to speculate and some people were thinking, "Hmm, this might be a wearable." Remember that one-pager I showed you earlier? It was actually circulating in October 2020. It could have leaked even earlier. I'm not sure. This leak was covered by "This Week in Startups," but I cannot confirm where the official leak source came from as he covered it anonymously.
So the tech community kept piecing all these clues together to formulate what this product might actually be. But to their luck, they wouldn't have to wait much longer. On April 20th, 2023, Imran took the stage at the annual TED conference and showed terrible AI generations of tech products and babies with XR headsets.
Really? - [Imran] He's cute though. - Not with those hands. Anyway, Imran talked about technology one day becoming invisible, referencing Walt Mossberg's writing. And cleverly, his wife called him while he was on stage, so he proceeded to demo the mysterious product's laser projector and phone features. We don't get to see much of the device, but I think that's kind of the idea.
The presentation is literally called "The Disappearing Computer." A lot of the presentation to me felt like Imran was trying to get us away from screens. - But for the human technology relationship to actually evolve beyond screens, we need something radically different. - And I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but in a video Humane posted less than a year later on March 20th, 2024, they say something a little bit of the opposite. - It's never been about replacing.
It's always been about creating new ways to interact with what you need. - It just seems like those points of view conflict with each other. And I don't know, maybe the whole screenless thing is something that Imran wants this to go toward in the future, but we're not there yet because this is just a stepping stone. During the TED Talk, Imran showed off the phone feature, language translations, and object identification all without needing a smartphone.
And on June 30th, Humane officially revealed the name of this new AI-powered wearable, Ai Pin. And in October 2023, Time Magazine featured the Ai Pin in their best inventions of 2023. Wait! The product hasn't come out yet. Review units haven't even been sent out yet.
How is this fair? Oh, Marc Benioff, a Humane investor, owns Time. Now I get it, but hey, at least they disclosed that. And speaking of disclosing, I'll just be blunt and say today's episode is sponsored by TripleTen. Take a look at the tech products around you. Think of the big companies like Apple and Google who made tech products billions of people use every day, and these companies can offer great work opportunities for you, just like Apple did with Imran. And the good news is you don't need to be some genius wizard with an IQ of 200 who went to an Ivy League school.
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Okay, let's see if Humane can launch this pin. On November 9th, 2023, Humane published an article titled "Humane launches Ai Pin." And you can order it starting on November 16th. Great. So that means it's gonna arrive soon, right? Right? No! How about December? Nothing. January? No.
February! Nothing. What the heck was going on? It appears there were some complications going on behind the scenes at Humane. I reached out to personnel to see if I could get clarification on anything, but no response. So we may never know specifics, but what I do know is that a restructure at the company was needed.
According to an anonymous Humane employee who spoke with The Verge, leadership announced budgets would be lower for 2024. Meanwhile, Humane parted ways with 10 people, which was 4% of their staff, and their CTO Patrick Gates transitioned to an advisor role. Bethany posted about this update on LinkedIn, explaining these difficult decisions are in preparation for their next phase of growth. Finally, Ai Pin started shipping on April 11th, 2024. And as you can probably guess, I went ahead and bought one.
At first, I was really skeptical about this thing and that's why I was hesitant to drop the $812 on it. So I didn't click the buy button right away, but eventually I caved. Now, this is normally the part of the show where we explore the hardware and I break it down for you, but we have so many other important topics to discuss. So we're gonna blast through this next part.
Welcome to the lightning round. On the outside, touchpad, dual microphones, speaker, camera, trust light, beacon LED, and laser ink display. Three colors, two prices, $699 and $799. And it comes with a bunch of included accessories: Charge Pad, Charge Case, cable and adapter, and two Battery Boosters, which attach magnetically to charge the Ai Pin through induction, and also attach to clothes.
For software, Ai Pin runs CosmOS on device and in the cloud. And at the core of CosmOS is the TAO framework, Thought Action Observation, which enables Humane's AI to deliver what the user needs. And you can connect to the cloud with Wi-Fi or cellular. Ai Pin requires a $24 a month service plan for the phone number, unlimited data, cloud storage, and AI services. So that leads us to what does this thing actually do? And I can show you a few things.
I do have to attach it to my shirt to use it properly. I mean, you can use it just laying on a surface, but it's made to go like that, but this shirt is really lightweight, so it's a little saggy looking. Yeah, let's adjust that just a little bit. So in short, it's a virtual assistant like Siri on your iPhone, but the way they advertise it makes it seem like it should be way smarter. And the more you use it, the more it will learn about you.
And because the Ai Pin is, well, a pin, it's already positioned near your eyes so it shares a similar field-of-view, so it can see what you're looking at with Vision. So for example, you can look at a flower and ask it, "What kind of flower is this?" And it will maybe answer you. Now, I can already hear you saying, "I can already do that on my phone." Yes, you can. But Humane's philosophy is to stay more present in the moment.
They make it in such a way where you can just act on something. You don't have to pull something out of your pocket and look at a screen. And you don't have to find an app, install the app, learn how to use it, make a new account. You don't have to do any of those manual things, it's just tap and speak. So on paper, this thing seems pretty amazing. It has advanced technology in it.
It's got a freaking cool laser beam, and not gonna lie, the design of this thing is really sexy. I really like how it looks and feels. And even the small details like the shiny eclipse logo on the back are a nice touch. So why is the Ai Pin failing? Why are the reviews really bad? To put it bluntly... the Ai Pin sucks.
- Thanks, Ken. - No hard feelings, Imran, I like you. I'm really trying to keep an open mind here, but truthfully, I can't find many redeeming things to say about the Ai Pin and I've been testing it for multiple days in multiple different locations. The execution is atrocious.
I don't know how anybody at the company thought this was a finished product. In my opinion, I think there were several people at Humane who thought it wasn't done, but they're afraid to speak their minds. I mean, they don't wanna lose their jobs, right? The New York Times interviewed 23 people connected to Humane and many current and former employees said the co-founders disregarded warnings about battery life issues. And a senior software engineer was dismissed after raising questions about the pin. Side note, I won't take a ton of time to talk about this, so I'll link it in the description, but there's this phenomenon called the Abilene Paradox, and it describes when a bunch of people go along with a single decision, even though not everyone in that group agrees with that decision. And in the workplace, that can be very destructive.
And I'm certain that's going on at Humane to some degree. Also, I can't imagine the sales of this thing are really high. The New York Times estimated it to be about 10,000 in early April. So that begs the question, how well does this thing actually work? Before I go over the bad things, let me at least go through my list of the good things. In addition to how cool the design and the laser are, some features did delight me. For example, I told the Ai Pin I'm lactose intolerant and I wanted to see if it would remember.
So later I went to the store and held up a gallon of milk and I asked, "Can I drink this?" And it said no, and it explained why. And then later I held up a carton of almond milk, asked the same question, and it said, "Yes, you can drink this." So the memory features seemed quite impressive so far. I also thought the translation feature was neat.
I was checking it with Google for accuracy and it seems to be pretty good. Okay, now that we got the good stuff out of the way, let's talk about the bad. Number one, it's not easy to use. The more I use it, the faster I get at certain tasks. The voice stuff is usually pretty intuitive, but the laser ink display is just very cumbersome.
For example, to unlock your Ai Pin, you have to use this hand moving gesture to type in your passcode. I mean, yeah, it's... Nope, it turned off, hang on. It turned off again.
This takes so long to type in four numbers. I don't care anymore. And even worse, the Laser Ink Display is not visible in daylight. It was already hard to see in the shade, but in direct sunlight, it's impossible to see on my hand. Another huge usability issue is the Ai Pin does not work with your existing phone number. You have to have a completely different phone number for it.
You can import your contacts to an extent and you can manually add other ones. But that first time you text someone from your pin, it's just kinda awkward because the recipient gets a completely different phone number, one that they don't know and that they don't initially trust. Problem number two, it's unreliable. On multiple occasions, Ai Pin would just not answer a question. Sometimes it would verbally give me an error and sometimes it would just straight up say nothing. So I had no idea what was going on.
And I also tried some things like looking at a cat and asking, "What type of cat is this?" And it would take three tries sometimes just to get an answer. Or in some cases, it would get the answer right on the first try, but it would take so long to process, I just ended up using the Google app with my iPhone's camera to get an answer in about half the time. And I actually didn't realize this without consulting the ground control documentation, but Vision is in beta. That explains the problems, but seriously, what is it with companies treating paying customers like beta testers? Here's another thing that happened. One night I was at a small social gathering.
We were around a campfire and I wanted to take some pictures of it, you know, to be present and stay in the moment, but the camera would just not work. It would keep purring at me making like a "prr" sound and just saying, "Try again," verbally. And then I held up my hand to see if I could get more information and it would just give me an error. Take a photo. - [Ai Pin] Try again.
- Okay. - [Ai Pin] Try again. Trying the two finger gesture. - [Ai Pin] Try again. Problem number three, the speaker is quiet.
Now, you can wear a wireless earbud and that should rectify the issue. But if you're in a noisy environment inside or outside and you're trying to use the translation feature, I don't think other people are gonna be able to hear you very well. Where's the nearest train station? - [Ai Pin] (speaking in Japanese) - Yeah, that's as loud as it gets.
- [Brad] I can barely hear you standing there. - Yeah. - Problem number four, it overheats, like way too much. I lost track of how many times this thing overheated on me. It gets really hot really fast. When it does overheat, it warns you verbally. There's even a specific beacon light color that is for thermal warnings, and this happens when the touchpad surface hits approximately 45 degrees Celsius.
I remember when I was on a phone call with Brainiac Brent, it was my first time testing the phone feature and it overheated twice and it just abruptly hung up the phone call. And problem number five, and this may not be a surprise to some of you, the battery life is horrible. When I first got this thing, I left it in the Charge Case and the case was plugged in for more than a full day. The internal battery was completely charged, and so was the Booster Battery and the case battery. The next day, I unplugged the Charge Case because I had to charge something else, and I thought, nah, it won't be a big deal. But a day later when I went to officially start testing this thing for the first time, the battery was already dead just from idling.
And yes, there is the swappable Battery Booster thing where you can put the other one on, but even when doing that, it didn't help that much. It just died. Yeah, I think it lost power. Of course, it doesn't do anything now. But at least it can't get any worse, right? I said at least it can't get any worse, right? There we go.
On June 5th, Humane issued a warning about the Charge Case saying they detected a battery quality issue from a single report involving a third-party USBC cable and third-party power source. And Humane is no longer working with third-party vendor which supplied the batteries due to a potential fire risk. I mean, if Apple and Samsung could still survive after those big battery issues, I'm sure Humane will be fine too, but it's just not looking so good right now. So the Ai Pin really seems like a big pile of garbage. So why don't I think it's a scam? Look, I know I sometimes debunk tech scams on the show.
That's part of my shtick, and I appreciate everyone who watches, but not everything I talk about is a scam no matter how bad it might be. We have to keep in mind there is a difference between a scam and poor execution. The scams I debunk are filled with false advertising, fake backstories, doctored product images, stolen footage, and so many other unethical practices. Humane's Ai Pin is not that. Real Humane staff present the real product, or at least a demo unit, and their videos show disclaimers when a demoed feature is not yet available.
They're being honest. Their videos aren't perfect, but they are way more professional than a lot of the scam stuff I've investigated. Sure, they got the protein count wrong for the almonds in a prerecorded demo, and they got the location of the total solar eclipse wrong again in a prerecorded demo. I don't know how you F that up, especially when your logo is a freaking partial solar eclipse! But hey, at least they fixed the issues. So in my heart, even though Humane is far from perfect, I believe they care and they are legitimate. I just think they bit off way more than they could chew with this Ai Pin, and they released it unfinished.
The good news is Humane can push software updates. In fact, they document the updates at Humane.com/changelog. Also, Humane published a video on March 20th, 2024, showing upcoming features, like being able to use touch gestures to unlock the pin instead of the numbers interface. And the most important update in my opinion is the SDK.
So developers can implement their own software and services into the pin. So it appears Humane is making a constant effort to improve and they're being transparent about it. Here is my concern though. On May 22nd, 2024, during another sleepless night in my lair, I was doomscrolling through Facebook, not recommended, and I saw an article from The Verge. Humane is looking for a buyer for a price between 750 million and $1 billion. Only one month into Ai Pin sales and Humane already wants to sell? The Verge article references the report from Bloomberg, which gives a few more details, including Humane's last year valuation at $850 million, and a New York Times article on June 6th said about a week after the reviews came out, Humane started talking to HP about selling itself for more than $1 billion.
So Humane's future is uncertain. Their website still has 10 open jobs, so maybe they're still looking to hire people and fix these problems. We'll have to wait and see. Now, that leads us to one final question. Who the heck is this product for? Especially when we already have smartphones and we're so used to how they work.
And I'm not talking about who it can be for once it's more perfected. I'm talking about who is it for right now? There's a concept called the Technology Adoption Curve, which breaks down a product's user base over time into five categories. We're here right now. In my opinion, this product is too expensive and unfinished for early adopters to buy it, let alone the early late majority, the mainstream market.
As the Ai Pin stands today, it's for the folks who don't mind experimenting with new technology despite it maybe not working. And it's only for people in that part of the curve that have the disposable income, where they're comfortable enough buying a product that may not be finished yet. And that's where the chasm comes in.
If the Ai Pin can't prove its worth to the mainstream market and make that leap to the early majority, it falls into the chasm. And generally, that's the point of no return. If Ai Pin falls into the chasm, it will likely never recover and sell to enough consumers to turn up profit.
Now, if you're a consumer who's looking to spend less time on their phone, whether it's for personal preference or you're trying to battle smartphone addiction, there's plenty of practical solutions out there. You can set screen time limits on your phone settings or just use a smartwatch during certain parts of the day, or you can try a Light Phone or a NoPhone. But unless you're on the innovator side of the curve right now, I cannot recommend the Ai Pin at all. But Humane, Imran, I am rooting for you. I want to see you be successful. And who knows, maybe down the road, they'll release a 2.0
and it will be one heck of a comeback story. Hey, if Apple can bounce back from near bankruptcy and become a $3 trillion company, anything can happen, right? Right now, the Ai Pin is kind of like a teenage son. It doesn't always talk to me, and it doesn't always do what it's supposed to, but I still love it and I wanna see it grow up and become a better version of itself. And hopefully, Humane can deliver on that one day. Catch the crazy, and pass it on. (upbeat music) When will Half -Life 3 come out? (High-pitched ringing) (Ai Pin exploding)
2024-06-22 18:18
