Last year, Imran Chaudhari, former Apple employee, gave a Ted-talk about a device you could take anywhere. It’s seamless and screenless. Boasting about technology invisibility, he impressed everyone with a sneak peak of their new product. Who are “they”, you might ask? Ok, humans, I am talking about the AI company, founded in 2019, Humane and their product, the AI Pin.

Humane was founded by a married couple Imran Chaudhari and Bethany Bongiorno. Both of them previously worked with Apple. After the Ted Talk in April 2023, AI pin was later showcased at a Paris fashion event, soon everyone started talking about it. On November 2023, big investors like Sam Altman, Microsoft, Salesforce and few others, expressed their interest to partner with Humane and they raised around $230 million according to some reports. Later, they officially launched it and started selling it at $700. Reading this you must be wondering, what a happy story, right? Well, what could go wrong? A great product that you can pin on to your shirt, pocket-sized that has a projector to project onto your hands, wow, it has a speaker and microphone, plus one or two buttons. This is beautiful.

Sadly, everything went wrong? As per some reports, the device is a bit heavy and pulls down your shirt. The projection too has issues in many lighting conditions. Worst part, as per New York Times report, is that the battery life is poor and the device heats up.
What about the reviewers? They weren’t silent. I think they massacred them brutally with their words. One of them even said, “This is the worst product that I have reviewed”. Ouch! On one side, you have OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia all advancing and impressing with innovative developments. Here, we have the opposite. Indeed, you could call this as an innovative idea, but the failure makes it, well, a failure.

You may be asking, why did they not test it before? The founders acknowledged that there are differences in actual use and the ones you test in controlled environments. I agree. We all encounter live issues. Google AI Overview had to improve their model after they started receiving backlash. OpenAI had issues with the voice. And none of these products are 100 or even 90% accurate. They still give answers that might not be useful to you. They are improving. So, if Humane improves later, what do we have to worry about? In fact, it would be a great thing that we start using this product that could disrupt smartphones. The Times report talks about departures within the company. The founders say it is natural. Hmm, is it? A senior software engineer was let go after she questioned on the AI pin’s readiness. Also, employees had earlier warned about its heating issues. They requested the hiring of a marketing head. This the company leaders listened to, but only after launching the product. If they could not accept criticism within the company, how could they imagine launching it and expecting it to be only positively received?

Surprisingly, there are talks of selling it to HP for more than $1 billion evaluation (This was valued at the beginning). It is said they have received orders for 10k devices. Let’s do some math, $700 * 10k = $7 million in sales. Now, after the negative reviews, one must be hoping that they would sell it for lesser than that was expected. Here’s the twist, they are going for more than $1 billion to HP, man, they do have some nerve to do that.
Maybe they could either improve the device and take in criticism, work on that and release a better product or they could use the investments to provide a mini fire extinguishers in the box just in case to care for the customers in the worst scenarios.