The First Major AI Gadget in History Is a Dumpster Fire

Editor’s Note 2: 6/6/2024: This story has been extensively updated to reflect recent reporting from The New York Times, The Verge and other media outlets about Humane’s efforts to sell the company as well as their recent warning to customers to stop using the included battery charging case given it “may post a fire safety risk.” The decision apparently came after Humane was informed that a battery supplier’s components could pose a fire risk.

Editor’s Note 4/13/2024: This story has been updated to address responses from Humane’s head of product engineer, Ken Kocienda, concerning the early reception of the AI Pin’s launch, which he recently posted on the social media platform X.

The first reviews of the $699 Humane AI Pin published in early April, and the consensus wasn’t great, at least for a company with a stated mission that includes language like “we all deserve more from technology.”

In case you haven’t heard about the device, it initially made waves as a possible future replacement for smartphones thanks to a TED talk presentation from the company’s co-founder, Imran Chaudhri, delivered almost a year ago, dubbed The Disappearing Computer – and a World Where You Can Take AI Everywhere.

The premise of the talk and Chaudri’s compelling demonstrations sparked fervor around a new subset of consumer hardware dedicated to AI.

The smallish square gadget, which I like to describe as a smart brooch™, promised a variety of potentially useful capabilities. Like Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant, you could ask the pin for answers to general questions, get calendar updates, and receive and respond to text messages. More impressively, you could use the device’s onboard camera to scan objects in front of you to provide helpful information. In his demo, Chaudhri asked the pin to scan a piece of food held in his hand to determine whether eating it might be unhealthy. 

It was discussed as a device finally capable of breaking our smartphone addiction. It just also happened to include a camera, a rechargeable battery, microphones, speakers and a cellular data plan and phone number for making calls. 

More accurately, it teased the potential of ending the game of the app Whac-A-Mole we all currently play on our phones. By pushing our primary interaction with technology away from screens, we could be free again to fully take in the life happening right in front of us.

The entire elevator pitch might as well have been cocaine to some venture capital and technological evangelists. “It uses AI!” “It’s a new hardware form factor!” “Former Apple alums started the company!” “Did we mention AI!?!”

A few months later, leaks began springing in the brand’s hype fuel tanks.

Humane

The company conducted a more traditional unveiling presentation in November, which some online immediately ribbed for its odd, low energy vibes. Word also circulated that several prominent tech media outlets, including The Verge, weren’t invited to the presentation, suggesting Humane was more interested in sharing information with a narrower, and potentially less scrutinizing media cadre.  

Then there was the matter of the Pin doing a very typical AI thing in the middle of the presentation – i.e., bullshitting with extreme confidence. The company also laid off 4% of its staff in January. 

The consumer launch of the product will also likely go down as one of the worst in consumer tech history.

Just look at these review headlines.

From Engadget: “The Humane AI Pin is the solution to none of technology’s problems.”

From The Verge: “Humane AI Pin review: not even close.”

From The Washington Post: “Humane A.I. Pin review: A promising mess you don’t need yet.”

From Wired: “Humane Ai Pin Review: Too Clunky, Too Limited.”

The influential tech reviewer and YouTube creator Marques Brownlee titled his review video The Worst Product I’ve Ever Reviewed…For Now.

Woof. 

When you thought things couldn’t get worse, in an email sent on June 5th, the company asked that Humane Pin owners to stop using the battery charging case that came with the device given it “may pose a fire safety risk.” The decision apparently came after Humane was informed that a battery supplier’s components could pose a fire risk.

And even before this news, in the wake of poor reviews and low sales, which according to The New York Times totaled to just 10,000 in April, the company was already actively looking for a buyer.

In short, it’s been a brutal eight-month stretch for the fledgling brand, and things don’t appear to be turning around any time soon. The situation has devolved so much that the future of the company could be in doubt.

That’s a shocking turn of events for a company that seemed potentially primed for greatness less than 12 months ago and had raised over $200 million dollars from investors including Microsoft and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff among others.

Humane

If I can briefly put all the schadenfreude aside, I’ll admit that I’m personally disappointed that Humane’s first attempt has gone so sideways. I’m not an AI evangelist by any stretch. I work in an industry the technology seems gung-ho on subsuming first. 

But I have, like many other tech fans, grown frustrated with the lack of innovation in mobile computing. And until a competitor arrives with an appealing enough product to challenge the established powers, the industry has few incentives to shake things up. 

I also support at least the part of Humane’s mission statement about building tech that “feels familiar, natural and human.” Like I’m sure many of you, I constantly see competent people struggle to use devices that the tech industry champions as standard bearers for intuitive technology. 

Technology can be life-changing, but only when it’s easily applied to the challenges we all face. And it’s in this real-life use and application layer that most consumer tech desperately needs to improve. 

Many early technologies and first attempts fail. Humane’s domed-shaped hype curve isn’t unprecedented by any means. And voice-based interactions with tech still seem to be an Achilles heel for even the tech giants.

What is striking about this particular tech tale is how unready the device was for prime time. More damning, though not surprising, is that the company understood that the AI Pin had many significant and unresolved issues, but they chose to sell it and ship it to consumers anyway.

Many reviewers shared that the pin got noticeably warm or hot after wearing it. Given they designed the device primarily as a wearable you stick on your chest, you’d think uncomfortable heating results would have triggered “don’t ship this yet” conversations internally.

According to recent reporting from the New York Times, Humane’s leadership was well aware of the overheating problem. Specifically, three different sources shared that “executives often chilled [the AI Pin] on ice packs so it would last longer,” when presenting it to partners and investors.

Employees also apparently voiced their concerns about heating directly to Humane’s CEO. His response was that software fixes in the future would solve the problem.

Then, there are the basic gestures the device requires users to master to navigate its various menus and functions. The early feedback was that the hand maneuvers appeared to be very difficult to master and replicate consistently. 

The company’s media engagement team handled the initial launch review phase oddly too. And like the heating issue, this was a potential problem that at least some members of the AI team foresaw before launch.

According to the The New York Times, Humane team members “repeatedly asked [leadership] to hire a head of marketing.” However, the role was not filled before the product’s release.

Reviewers found that several Humane AI Pin features weren’t available or shipped obviously broken. Early bugs are common for a cutting-edge technology release. What’s strange is that the reviewers weren’t pre-briefed by Humane about capabilities that stilled need more time in the oven, which is a widespread practice in tech marketing relations. It was as if Humane just hoped the AI Pin’s rough edges would go unnoticed. 

At the highest-levels though, the Humane AI Pin has suffered from one obvious and all too common mistake that plagues companies, societies, and all of us as individuals – failing to listen to outside perspective.

What’s more infuriating and cliche is Humane’s leadership appears to have been actually hostile to critical feedback. The New York Times reports that Humane let go of a senior software engineer who questioned whether the device was ready by April.

Humane

After reviews started surfacing online, Ken Kocienda, Humane’s head of product engineering, who, according to his bio on X, previously was the “inventor of iPhone autocorrect,” posted a lengthy response to the criticisms on the platform on April 11th.

He attributed part of the issues swirling around the AI Pin to the usual growing pains that typically shadow innovative technology. In his eyes, his team had been effectively using the AI Pin for quite some time, and others would too once they got the hang of it. 

“Years ago, I made the autocorrecting keyboard for the first iPhone. There was considerable doubt about the very concept of the touchscreen keyboard. And yet, when I built the tech, I felt that it was learnable. I saw how there were people among that initial cohort inside Apple when the product was still a deep dark secret: they got it. It became easy for them with just a little time and effort. Obviously, in time, this also became easy for most humans on the planet.”

His response also hinted at frustrations about the high bar seemingly set for the Humane AI Pin to meet right out of the gate by the media at large. As he saw it, the narrative that this hardware was gunning to replace other technologies outright and, therefore, should only be judged as a success based on that idea, set the AI Pin up for tougher scrutiny than it deserved. If reviewers just keyed more into how the AI Pin’s unique functionality supplemented the “daily flow” we have already with technology, then perhaps judgments on its execution would have been more reasonable. 

“I feel that today’s social media landscape encourages hot takes… and the spicier the better! Indeed, it’s so easy to find people online who are willing to jump on the skepticism bandwagon to gape at the same things you’re pointing at and poke holes in every little detail” Kocienda wrote at the time. 

He pointed out that being frustrated with consumer technology is part of the territory. “Is the Ai Pin frustrating sometimes? Yes. Is my laptop and smartphone frustrating sometimes? Yes! There is no perfect product.”

Kocienda was right about social media encouraging hot takes, but the idea that criticism of the pin stemmed only from poking holes at “little detail(s)” or just not understanding how to use the device’s novel interfaces was a generous read on the situation. 

Early reviewers of the Humane AI pin at launch commonly encountered issues with the device simply not working as intended – i.e., being unable to respond to seemingly basic questions or, worse, providing wrong answers and not reacting to gestures. They also found it was too inconsistent to rely on – sometimes it successfully responded to specific requests well, and sometimes it failed to handle the same ask. Looming over all these complaints was reviewer commentary about how generally very slow the AI Pin was to respond, which, in turn, noticeably degraded the Pin’s overall utility in daily use.

These were not complaints about “little detail(s)” or early learning bumps on the eventual road to mastery. These were the core services the Humane AI Pin was supposed to provide consumers who choose to pay $699 for the hardware and $24 in monthly subscription fees, and even months after launch, it appears the AI Pin can’t offer all these promised benefits effectively and consistently. 

It’s one of the most prominent hardware examples in a growing trend of beta products from Silicon Valley in search of an early wave of paying guinea pigs to learn from. 

If there’s a silver lining for tech enthusiasts like me hoping to see more companies with new ideas having success in consumer tech, it’s that Kocienda also shared that his team had never expected to sit still post-launch. “We are ready to change and evolve the product quickly to capitalize on this potential,” he said in the same April 11th post on X.

And at least some improvements were made after launch in the form of additional voice navigation options and sound effects. Company leadership also told The New York Times that OpenAI’s newest chatbot system could improve battery life by 25 percent and make the device’s response time significantly faster.

In light of the recent battery charging fire hazard news and the company’s efforts to sell, the question now is whether Kocienda’s team will have any runway left to make the Humane AI Pin fully deliver on its initial promises.

Future reporting may reveal that decisions by the company’s leadership were motivated by survival.

Perhaps they had to appease impatient or irrational investors and were forced to launch a product that was so clearly not ready. Maybe the company simply couldn’t afford to keep operating without at least some hard, market-based evidence, that they could successfully sell consumer products.

At least to date, the company’s founders haven’t cited either of these possible reasons as explanations for their actions. To be fair though, this may just reflect another survival instinct. Throwing one’s investors under the bus would certainly make securing future funding much more difficult.

Once all the rationalizing is exhausted though, all that’s temptingly left to explain how this could have happened is unrestrained hubris, which the AI industry has already supplied the world enough of.

We only know for sure now that Humane’s decision to ship the device has set a new precedent. Convincing an already weary AI world that AI-centric consumer hardware would be great was a tough enough sell.

After this failed launch, Humane’s, and possibly better-executed hardware concepts in the future, will all face a different challenge ahead. They must convince us that their product isn’t just another Humane AI Pin.

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