Humane, which made wearable, AI-embedded pins, is shutting down the devices it had sold and pawning off its software, patents and employees to Palo Alto tech giant HP Inc. The deal, which Humane said in a Tuesday press release will close at the end of February, marks the end of the line for a startup that had used pedigreed founders and a lofty concept to raise more than $230 million in funding. The startup was, in 2023, an archetype of Silicon Valley buzz. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff both invested in it. The company’s married founders had left prominent roles at Apple and described their screen-free AI pin idea as a way to “fundamentally reshape the role of technology in people’s lives.” The pin had a camera and responded to verbal questions like a leveled-up Siri.
But the company’s sleek launch video in November 2023 featured multiple bizarre mistakes by the device, SFGATE reported at the time. And when the pin reached reviewers’ hands, the tide quickly turned on Humane. In fact, the New York Times reported in June that Humane’s founders warned employees to “brace themselves” when reviews came out in April.
Influential gadget YouTuber Marques Brownlee said in a video that the pin was “bad at almost everything it does, basically all the time.”
Poster Comment:
"... somehow we find it hard to sell our values, namely that the rich should plunder the poor." -- former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles