Humane is said to be seeking a $1 billion buyout after only 10,000 orders of its terrible AI Pin
https://www.engadget.com/humane-is-said-to-be-seeking-a-1-billion-buyout-after-only-10000-orders-of-its-terrible-ai-pin-134147878.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.world510
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I'm honestly surprised they made 10,000 sales.
Every web outlet and influencer with more than 1000 followers bought one. But that's all they're ever going to sell.
Isn't it ironic that most likely, all their sales were used to make videos roasting their shitty product?
I am also seeking a $1 billion buy out, to compensate for years of being underpaid! What a coincidence!
I'd buy you out but all I have is my 20 bucks from streaming music revenue and I'm going to spend that on beer.
If you even made one dollar off your own music, that's fuckin cool. You earned that beer!
What's your band called?
we're called The Three Leonards. We do covers of pop songs in a pastiche of mid-1980's Leonard Cohen, and yes it's pretty different than music other people make today. Folks seem to like our covers of Toxic and Rusted From The Rain quite a bit.
And yeah, we friggin' earned that beer.
You guys rock surprisingly hard
a) Thank you :) That's super nice to see, first thing in the morning.
b) Please tell your friends
c) Which ones do you like best?
A 6 pack of good beer or a 30 pack of piss?
oh jesus, GOOD beer.
how anyone can drink sub-par beer is fucking beyond me. Drinking that stuff is just self-disrespect. I mean, I get it, but, just, no.
I can confidently say as a recovering alcoholic that I would have bought neither. I would gave gone with a handle of the cheapest vodka in the store and a pouch of drum, bugler or Samson. And that would have been my 3 meals for the day.
well bud, I must admit that does sound a bit rough. I wish you well in your recovery.
No one wants badly executed overheating slow Google assistant in a pointless little box. You already have a superior assistant in your pocket, reacting to your voice.
okay but what if it could also set you on fire?
What if I use a Samsung Note 7?
I am contesting this match because you cheated. Something like a vibrating flaming AI insertable had to have helped you.
Buy an old Samsung S7?
Edit: Ah fuck. It's the note 7 and I fucked up.
And bluetooth pins that allow you to talk to the AI in your pocket already exist. That's without that projector screen thing but still.
Sure sure, but this one is very close to your skin and vital organs and could burn you or just plain explode, so how about it?
Some try-hard wants to reinvent the wheel to show what a cutting-edge "disruptor" they can be, but they only succeed in making a shittier version of an already extant product
ask for 1B valuation with only ~7M in sales + ~240k/mo subscription revenue… hmmmm gonna be a no for me Dogg
The entire company was a pump and dump scheme. They're gonna continue the pump until dump or bankruptcy.
Extremely expected for a company that used to be all on in NFTsThat's Rabbit not Humane AI. These two clowns came from Apple and started Humane
Don't forget about the dangerous batteries and looming recall (due to court action I'm sure)! They'll soon have ZERO customers, in a way.
So, if we do some sloppy rounding and say that the subscriptions make them 3 million a year . . . it'll only take a bit more than 330 years for anyone buying Humane at the asking price to break even. My cat could figure out that wasn't a good buy. (Of course, he'd prefer to invest in a tuna cannery . . .)
I’d follow TUNA tips for more hot cat calls
I'm sure there's some MBA douche stupid enough to buy it.
I could see Apple buying it. The form factor makes sense, it's the fact that it relies on AI and has its own cell connection are the main issues. If I could tap it and have Siri take dictation or take a picture of something to get more information it would be pretty neat.
Apple already have the perfect form factor, it’s called a phone.
Or, if you want something smaller, they have a watch.
Or if you want something bigger they have glasses.
What if I don't wear a watch?
Why on earth would apple buy this shitty android device? And feature wise, they can just make the airpods into an AI device paired with your phone or watch.
I don’t need any hardware that does something my phone already does.
I don’t understand this reverse consolidation these companies think people want.
Does it though? Having it pull down your shirt, having to rely on projecting a GUI on your hand, and being unable to hear it in loud environments all seem like pretty strong limitations of the form factor
I'd drop the projector interface, as cool as it is, since you have a phone for that. Maybe make it a pendant as well as a pin.
Apple's got a lot of experience with using tiny speakers in loud places, so I bet they could figure out something maybe using directional microphones. Plus, again, you've got the phone so you can use the headphones.
If you drop the projector, then airpods already do it better when paired with the watch. There's no point in such a device at all, then.
Airpods don't have a camera though. 90% of my photos are of things I need to remember, like a shopping list or a specific product I need to get Having to dig out (or find) my phone to do that is a pain.
And I don't have Airpods because I'd lose them, one by one, and the replacements are twice the price as another pair of perfectly workable Bluetooth headphones.
If they wanted to companies could put a camera in a smart watch easily. Samsung was doing it ages ago.
My kids have a crappy watch ($30-40) that has a camera. It's not a technical problem, it's just a stupid idea, it's not an ergonomic place to use a camera.
Which would be great if I wore a watch, but I don't
What about the Meta Ray bands?
The time before I lose a pair of glasses is inversely proportional to how much I pay for them. If I spent $400 on glasses they would likely disappear off my face before I left the store
That’s why they made it a pin.
Sure you can sell an app on the App Store, but most people won’t pay more than 5 bucks for an app, and even that’s stretching it. And the subscription market is already over saturated. So how do you make a boatload of cash? Sell overpriced hardware that needs to be “upgraded” every year or 2 to use new features, and include a subscription to use the thing in the first place.
They wanted to pull an Apple and lock people into their hardware ecosystem. I guarantee there was a plan for them to release an AI phone in the next 5 years if this thing did well.
What they missed is Apple products are generally pleasant to use on a daily basis. From what everyone said, this thing was hot garbage and slow to respond to queries.
It will just come as standard with phones. Apple made a deal with OpenAI so it’s only a matter of time until Samsung does the same. Then it becomes a selling point for the device.
Yeah, that's all correct, but sometimes you just have to admit that the idea in that form is not good and don't make a product out of it...
As someone who doesn't wear a watch, having a little fob that I could use to activate Siri without digging my phone out of my pocket would be pretty nice. If it were a phone peripheral it probably would have been a lot better.
There's totally a use case for a peripheral like a watch... But it's only so you don't have to pull your phone out of your pocket.
The ear bud/voice interface we see in the movie Her looks nice too TBH.
If we ever get LLMs or whatever we call AI next that is able to understand us that well and perform complex actions for us, I could see that working great.
"MKBHD takes out another company" /s
How do you actually get the oil from the snake though?
Turn them into bovine fodder, then get the oil from the bullshit.
I’m also be seeking for a 1 billion payout
At least my product is working as intended
Huh - so it turns out people liked how smartphones consolidated all their various devices into one?
I guess the era of the hardware app is over…
You can't conclude that from this. The fact that there was hype and excitement about this supports an interest in the concept. This was simply utterly horrible execution and that is all.
Which hype? lol. Everyone hated this idea since reveal.
I don’t know about that. That a LOT of people liked that reveal TED talk.
If this was half the price, could hold a charge, didn’t start fires, and didn’t pull your shirt down, then it would still be dumb, but you’d probably have enough people buying it to keep the company alive.
That was a year ago, with 2 million views and 39k likes. That is not sign of hype. Specially when contrasted directly to the reality of sales.
Dear lord, you can see on the TED talk when he does the obviously planned big reveal, Imran Chaudhri doesn't even get an applause. He actually pauses a few times in the conference waiting for the audience to applaud and nothing happens a couple of times. When he makes jokes almost nobody laughs. There's even a point where he jumps the gun and says thank you before the spontaneous applause™ happens. That has to be the most cringe TED talk in history (and that's hard because almost all of TED in the past 5 years is cringe), other than the fact it was just an obvious ad.
I just disagree and/or read different sources. There was considerable hype regarding this device across numerous tech sources and many people liked and still do like the idea. Clearly you don't think everyone hated it do you? Using words like everyone or no one almost always means your sample is off or your are projecting an opinion.
Yeah, I don't doubt there were people who were really hyped out of their minds for this. But it's my impression they were a minority. Almost all press around the device was extremely skeptical, and only a few were cautiously excited. I follow a lot of tech circles in social media and there wasn't really a buzz about the pin. But, I think the proof is in the pudding. 10,000 sales is not exactly evidence of an extremely popular device. Even if the end result was bad, if there was a lot of hype, one would expect higher sales. After all we knew the price and conditions of sales (subscription) for a long time before release.
I don't think that's the pudding. The device had a high bar for entry with its price and was a very novel tech device. Most people interested in the concept likely were reticent to pre-order and wanted to wait for early adopter reports to surface. I maintain that there is a viable market and sufficient enthusiasm for the technology / concept that the company promised, but obviously not the one they delivered.
I mean, sure. Several startups are making bank selling AI, not to individuals, but to companies. There is no money to be made long term on mediocre chatbots. No matter in what form factor they come, and unfortunately, this and the rabbit thing poisoned the market and clearly marked anything AI as a scam on buyer's minds.
Edit: also, if the hype were really that high for such a device, then the rabbit should've sold a lot more units, since it was the budget version of the humane pin. But that wasn't the case either. And now everyone knows both companies were just pump and dump scams.
Rabbit r1 garnered $10million in pre-order sales. How many should it have sold to impress you? The first 5 batches I think sold out within a day or days, production of the units appeared to be the bottleneck until people actually got a hold of them and reported on how awful they were.
You just seem bent on this whole issue. Is there a point you want to make? Or are you just upset about AI stuff in general?
I actually agree. I would cite the Playdate as a counterexample.
Inevitably. That's the goal of most tech startups; hype themselves up and sell out for as many millions as possible. Meanwhile honest labor, education, and trades workers can't afford houses.
Thinking about the cost of maintenance, liabilities, and ethical/moral decisions
good luck to anyone else thinking otherwise
They didn’t learn the lesson with webos? They lost billions even if that was a good os with good phones.
Can’t imagine anyone wanting to buy this company for more than 1million and that’s just because of patents and devs (acquihire - where the buyer is only interested in ip and devs and doesn’t care at all about the actual product)
I could draw a kitten for that kind of money if anyone is interested. At least there are no monthly costs to it.
What an insane valuation, lol. I wonder how gullible their seeders/initial investors were when they pitched the company initially. Needing to get that much money to settle bills and debts just blows my mind. Shit like this is why I sold my AMD shares at its peak a few months ago and why it's probably worth considering selling Nvidia now as it's peaking. The AI boom may peak a bit higher, but I think the frenzy is going to begin waning within the next ~6 months as more and more investors realize the tech is still very limited outside of backend enterprise use (e.g. using LLMs to ingest all your SOPs, regulations, technical documents, etc. and then make it available for employees to query for random work questions).
But who knows, I've been wrong before.
Ed Zitron is going to have a field day with this one.
I listen to Better Offline and I’m as jaded and cynical as the rest of us, but even I find some of his episodes too much to take.
Like he has no impartiality at all, particularly his takes on LLMs. Our small company of software developers and engineers have saved so much time with Visual Studio CoPilot. The fact is there are uses where they’re extremely useful; just maybe not as the MSM portrays it.
He does get a bit ranty. I still appreciate his take though. Some of the LLMs are super helpful for me for some tasks, but the hype cycle for AI is really a lot to take and it does warrant some actual pushback against it. I can tell I’m becoming more of an old man, but it’s nice to have someone else confirm how bad the Internet is becoming. It’s almost like a hazy dream for me of back in the early days when it was just people sharing weird stuff with each other and not the active battle to fend off ads and scummy sites to find things.
This is an assumption but he’s just preaching to the choir at this point. I don’t see him having a mainstream audience and the only people that listen are people that already know how fucked everything is.
Also, so many ads. Like sure he’s got to make a living but he’s doing it in the very system he opposes.
Humane as a company is worth the cost of exactly 10,000 units.
Tell me it's being bought by a data mining company?
10k orders huh... How many returns though?
Given the amount of money they're looking for, guessing it's for the unreleased products in the pipeline and their patents. Anyone who buys them is not purchasing their v1 product.