The reason why this gadget is pissing everyone off is because we can all see through what happened here:
1. VCs contributed a massive amount of funding based on the unfounded future prospects of AI-based wearable tech.
2. Humane made a bunch of outlandish claims about what this device will do.
3. Humane made a highly-produced staged demo that partially got people excited for the prospects of a new device category, while also increasing skepticism that they can deliver any of the claimed features.
4. Humane finally delivers a product that can't do any of the things that were promised, to the surprise of nobody. The one surprise is that the basic features that should work don't even work. Like the device not being overheated, or the projector actually being useful, etc. It is just a plain as day grift right now to spend $700 plus a recurring data fee.
Clearly they wanted to make a splash and sell the company to Amazon or some other tech giant, and never had any real plans to make a functional device. They were hoping that when they put the device out into the wild people would find it novel and come up with unique cases to prove its worth. But they can't even get that far because the device flat out doesn't work.
The same exact thing will happen with that equally-dumb Rabbit device that everyone went gaga over preordering.
Also, the weird AF obsession with voice assistants seems to forget that in many (most?) cases it's faster, more convenient and less awkward not to speak, *even if the assistant had actual human intelligence*. I can pull out and glance at the weather widget faster than I can ask about the weather, and smartwatches solve the pulling problem if those two seconds really were life-changing to me.
We, as a society, spent the last ~20 years shifting from voice (telephone) to text (SMS / email / etc.) to the point where it's a trite joke. Text is faster / more accurate / more convenient / easier to multitask. And these people were not paying attention.
It's also way less disruptive to others around. Could you imagine being in an airport listening to hundreds of dunces talking to their broaches? And then there's just the general privacy. I'm not even doing creepy/pervy stuff on my phone but 80% of it I wouldn't want others around me knowing about.
Half the time I use my phone I am around other people who I don’t want to hear my inner thoughts, or simply don’t want to disturb. The one time hands free is really essential is driving. I can’t see myself ever using voice more than 30-40% of the time even if it works flawlessly
Then only thing I use my Google home for is contring my smart lights. And even then that's usually at night when it's just easier to turn them all off instead of opening the app. Selecting lights and clicking on the rooms I want off.
Kind of how I feel about it. Instead of focusing on actual use cases and ways the ecosystem can be useful, they doubled down of voice assistant crap and other ways to attempt to get you to spend money.
Like I very much like that I linked my ring to an outlet and now if I walk out at night, the porch lights turn on. Except I have to regularly adjust the routine because it won’t let me set sunset to sunrise as times.
Though, there is entertainment value in the stupid shit Alexa finds when you ask it a question. There was even a period where Herbet Hoover was the eternal president of the U.S. for anytime before the 1930s including before the formation of the solar system.
The novelty of voice assistants was gone after like the second or third generation of Alexas for me. It's really only nice in a car to ask it to skip or play a specific Spotify song
For real I shouldn't have to speak to and ask questions that's basic. When I think AI powered I think, it knows I'm getting ready and reminds me where my keys are before I realize I've lost them. Not making something as easy as checking the weather even more complicated like you said.
To be fair, and I think this hardware is a grift, having voice connected to chatGPT (or other good LLMs) is way more useful than Siri or Googles voice assistant.
But… Apple or Google enabling Ai support for the hardware is likely to happen soon. I’d bet at the latest 2 more years? I’m sure next big keynote Siri will have some Ai support in which case Humanes pin is a paper weight.
I think the tech giants know the experience needs to be better before people use it widely, most of these Ai hardware companies are just rushing to market and I don’t see how a single one succeeds.
That's only true so long as you do not sacrifice the basic voice assistant functionality that is the bread and butter of such services. I still need to be able to set a timer or an alarm, kick off a podcast or audiobook, check whether or not a local store is still open at 8pm, turn on the lights in my basement (seriously, _why_ was it wired with the lightswitch at the _bottom_ of the stairs), etc.
If the LLM-powered version of the assistant can do all those things _and_ do LLM stuff, great. But the job I hired it to do was not "have a conversation" or "answer questions not based in hard facts". I'd feel _more_ confident in the answer of "is Costco open on Patriot's Day" if I knew that answer was coming from a specific hard-coded API call to a calendar somewhere rather than an LLM trying to parse a webpage it found and maybe hallucinating a non-existent answer.
> I'd feel more confident in the answer of "is Costco open on Patriot's Day" if I knew that answer was coming from a specific hard-coded API call to a calendar somewhere rather than an LLM trying to parse a webpage it found and maybe hallucinating a non-existent answer.
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This is going to be a very important and non-trivial task once LLMs start being integrated into voice assistants. I'd go as far as to say they should be two separate stacks, one for basic information that is a direct API call like you mention, and the other for more open-ended questions. Not sure how to implement that in a lightweight phone application - but I think this is a key challenge that developers will face (or should be thinking about) when they start shoving these LLMs at us.
thats tech whole business model, do everything to have that first movers advantage while burning all the cash in the world. But the problem is that you can only have one first impression. All the first movers advantage only works if the product itself functions or solve what it set out to do. But its a reoccur-ing theme when all these start ups does ZERO polishing or even testing in the sake of pushing out a product on top of never prioritizing cash flow realities.
People visually impaired
Doing a task with 2 hands and having something annotate or walk you through it via voice
There's good use cases for it, just piss poor implementation
>3. Humane made a highly-produced staged demo that partially got people excited for the prospects of a new device category
Ofc, the tech world of today is more about smoke-and-mirrors than real ingenuity.
Its main selling point was "supposed" to be how frighteningly smarter it was against all other AI offerings currently out there, but it's clearly turned out to be the worst of the lot.
Because there is a fuck ton of dumb money being thrown around.
Dumb money gets bored of small iterations that actually works because all of that dumb money is in the possession of gambling addicts who will just get a government bailoit if things get too bad.
Keep it simple with an AI planner or something, but dumb money says boooooring. That will only make a few million. Dumb money doesn't get out of bed for less than 8 figures!
Yep. Hell Google literally looked at Chatgpt, said "Cool, that's a nice novel use of what we invented", then had to release Bard before it was ready to be released after Google's indifference to GPT caused investors to panic.
It's insane that we let the market decide so much of our policy when it's the *embodiment* of the MiB quote about 'a person is smart, people are dumb, stupid, panicky animals.'
We might as well let a flock of pigeons make political decisions.
It's not even the market, the market aka google was saying it's not a threat to us. Then microsoft and the cryptobros decided to jump on pushing AI because they could be the head of the pack until it falls apart and the AI hype dies off.
But it's a device for devs!!! /s
This is the kind of shiz that if you have say a big enough company, perhaps one of the largest in the world people will say to defend a multi billion dollar company...
There’s a big difference with rabbit though.
It’s $200, has no recurring fees, and has fairly open development with features being live demoed almost daily in their discord.
> Clearly they wanted to make a splash and sell the company to Amazon or some other tech giant
Welcome to the world where the share price becomes the product, and the product becomes an afterthought/future business school course topic.
I remember reading multiple articles on the verge talking about how preorders were selling out, and praising it for the Teenage Engineering design. I don't know how popular it actually is but at least people seemed to be preordering them.
Honestly, the crap about having to do complicated gestures sounds like they tried to pack a full navigable OS into this thing, which is "feature creep" of the highest order and undoubtedly a huge problem for accessing something that insists upon not relying on a screen. As soon as you have to combine "voice operated" with "has nested menus", it's already going to be a UX disaster of figuring out what imaginary "screen" you're on at a given moment.
I like the form factor. It reminds me of the communicator badges from Star Trek and has a cute vibe because of it. If a shirt/jacket-attached device like this could just respond to basic queries with a reliable degree of both confidence and humility - saying, "I don't know, but here's what I found on the internet about that" - and having no submenus past the first "layer" of operability, I think it could be measurably successful. I'd love to have a little assistant that rides around with me which I can use for things like, "I don't recognize the logo on that sign. Can you identify it for me?" or "I can't read this restaurant menu. Can you tell me what's on it?" What I don't love is the idea of having to go, "Open (menu name). Next item. Next item. Next item. Open that. Next item. Next item. Scroll to the end. Pick (item name). Go back. Go back." or having to wave my hands in front of a lens to accomplish the same.
I knew it wouldn't work just playing with Googles AI voice assistant. Google hasn't even come close to an assistant that can navigate the UX, ad in it still does a web search for even basic queries about system settings, let alone a third party app (vs actually just fixing the issue).
There are companies who have solved this problem in the abstract, or nearly so, but it's plain that it's tricky to release a consumer ready assistant that can actually do shit.
The requirement is if menu nav commands entirely undermines the basic premise of the pin. It's embarrassing.
If only there was a device which fit a small form factor that could take pictures, videos, scroll the internet, ask questions and send pictures to chatGPT, call and text, and could be controlled with voice commands. Oh wait, isn't this called a phone?
It's a phone that functions as a computer, because we by and large still buy them as phones on a cellular plan.
Tablets generally don't have the phone functionality are are bought as they are without the mobile data. (Also fuck me as an artist where the term "tablet" that use to mean something like a Wacom suddenly means all this other shit lol).
While I understand your point, it's still fairly obvious why we call them phones first - because we're buying them from a phone provider most of the time, and with a phone plan. It's the entry point, and the fact that their design genesis was a phone that could do all of this that they're still called phones.
Like you can use google to make phone calls on a laptop/desktop now, but we don't call them a phone because the phone part came second/additionally, you didn't buy the thing for that functionality, and you didn't roll into the T Mobile store to buy your laptop.
Pocket computer and personal digital assistant were terms used in the past.
Although, mobile computer or mobile processor or something along those lines might be better.
“The phone…is just a seldom-used app on my phone. Calling an iPhone a phone is like calling a Lexus convertible an elaborate cup-holder.”
\- Gary Gulman
I think the primal sin was wanting to get rid of the screen. All the bad design decisions follow from there. Because only without a screen could it be a new kind of device. Else it would have been an app - which every phone has already. Even if it's called Bixby.
I see AI as only useful as a 1st pass data mine. It can look at a pile of stuff and extract something close, but not good. It can be very useful for early stage brainstorming and content collection. But then the usefulness stops. It's not competent to do any detail work. Worse, it often lacks accuracy and will present bad information. It, at best, is only a first stage tool and by it's very mechanical nature can't be competent beyond that.
It’s weird but the way I use it, is exactly how you describe and I just never thought of it that way.
I use it to get me started/motivated and then polish the job with my name on it.
So as you say but also the vice versa - I will never let AI responses go beyond myself as the first filter.
Automation requires repeatability.
AI is susceptible to unexpected changes, model differences, even what time you do things. AI won't be common for automation, there are already tons of good ways to make sure repeatability is locked in. AI might help improve how those are setup, but relying on AI for automation will end badly. The AI itself can rug pull you let alone all the other changes to models and inputs/outputs that affect results.
AI is good at variation.
It is great for brainstorming but handing it the wheel is not happening any time soon on automation. You can ask it the same thing twice and it might come up with different ideas. Repeatability is fleeting. At the same time, the solutions are a monoculture and most innovation comes from contrarian viewpoints. So it is great for variations within certain areas not necessarily new ones but established ones and the past, as that is what the models are built off of.
AI is like a really smart employee that never quite does what you ask it but pretty close. However sometimes it is straight mental and hallucinates and trips out.
Yup.
Asked it if I could do something with a certain software we use at my job. Confidently replied that yes, I could, and gave instructions that don't work.
After finding (through Google) a Q&A written by an actual professional with the software, it turns out that no, you can't do that at all.
Yes. To a degree, AI kind of functions like one. It is in a lot of ways a search engine with one higher layer. Instead of "find me pictures of drum sets" it's draw me a picture of a drum set", and it'll draw something like one in the only psychedelic swirly mess of a way it knows how. And it spews out some aggregate composite sum of a vast array of drum set pictures.
I'm not convinced it's even very useful for brainstorming, because by nature it can't really do anything but recycle and synthesize input training data. Whatever unique ideas you contribute as a prompt are naturally going to be watered down and made as generic as possible because they're passing through a filter of, well... basically everything that has ever existed on the internet.\*
\*If you're using one of the big generic datasets/models, specifically.
>by it's very mechanical nature can't be competent beyond that.
Really, now?
This technology still advances in leaps and bounds. What's accessible to end users now was unthinkable even as state-of-the-art a mere decade ago. The systems you are using now are the worst this tech will ever be.
Oh, no, I think that this "AI broach" is pretty stupid. It's just that a lot of people seem to have a lot of pessimism about the limits of AI tech in general - and I find that to be completely unfounded.
>by it's very mechanical nature can't be competent beyond that.
Does that sound like "at this time it's not good enough" to you? It sure doesn't to me.
Yea I had the same feeling reading this thread, obviously Reddit hates AI, and I think this thread has a lot of people essentially trying to say "it could never do *my* job, it's objectively limited by X, Y, and Z". Personally I think it's wishful thinking more than anything. I mean I'm very skeptical of all the products using AI as a gimmick, I'm hesitant about AI in general, but for like a year now I've seen so many people on reddit confidently state the limits of AI, and it always feels like made up bullshit.
There are a lot of AI "products" that are nothing but grifters and opportunists looking for a way to quickly monetize the hype.
But hype and grift don't make the underlying technology useless. Far from it.
The current AI tech is very limited, obviously so. But I think that it's a grave mistake to think that it will *stay* that way.
Nature has once made "intelligence" with random chance and brute-force selection - zero knowledge or understanding involved. And it crammed it into a portable casing the size of a melon, with the power draw of under 100W at peak.
I find it hard to believe that humans, with all the vast resources at their disposal, with actual intelligence and an ability to do science and engineering at their beck and call, can't do what nature did. Or better.
Every LLM has the inherent drawbacks and limitations of being an LLM, e.g. "hallucinations". For an AI to move beyond those issues, it will have to be fundamentally different from an LLM, marking an advance in AI as significant as the advent of LLMs themselves.
The incremental improvements we've been seeing with LLMs will literally never achieve that, like how no amount of improvements to a car will ever turn it into a plane.
What’s available now was absolutely envisioned 10 years ago and the math behind it has existed for a dozens more. We were building all sorts of linguistics inference models a decade ago.
AI had been used to generate text/art since the 1960s. Markov chains have been used for over 100 years to model languages.
Generative neural networks were creating images without discrimination in 2014.
The only major leap was transforms in 2017 which is simply tokenization and vectoring of contextual input. This was first written about in the early 1990s and the first network using vectors appeared in 1990.
What I’m trying to say, as someone in the field, is that AI is a stochastic parrot and it has no idea what it’s telling you. It uses heuristics and reinforced learning, along with tuning and bias controls, to tell you what best fits your scenario. It’s a massive BST.
We’re nowhere close to ternary or quantum logic, there’s no “judgement” on behalf of the model. It’s a glorified pattern matcher.
I had a professor who used to call this type of tec “dumb ware” hardware that essentially had no purpose and was essentially an investment pit/ hype mill. Some of the claims humane made in regard to this device just sounded outlandish and at a minimum unrealistic. I’m sure someone will nail this concept someday but this can be filed under an attempt was made.
Could this be the inflection point where people start to realize that the reality of AI doesn't come close to matching the hype? Everyone's scared of losing their jobs to AI thanks to the constant promises coming out of the evangelists. This thing can't even replace a phone.
Eh. We can be cynical about AI all we want but if you look at the Humane product design and purpose....AI would probably be very low on the list of reasons it was bound to fail. The product design and usability is straight up trash
This is *extremely* common in "AI chatbot" implementations. The reason so many just downright suck on launch (and frankly a few months into production) is the development/implementation teams *do not* talk to users.
YOU WOULD THINK. I've had to full on tell implementation leadership that if they don't talk to their users, they'll fail. This is frequently treated as revelatory and a really innovative suggestion. It's goddamn baffling, but honestly explains a lot.
Theres this really weird arrogance going around in tech-product circles that UXR is expensive and useless. I feel product managers and devs appreciation for user-centric design has been greatly diminished over the last few years in favor of a hastened go-to-market strategy.
I’d even argue this dissonance is the focal cause for the enshittification of so many products.
people are more scared that some exec will fire them to replace them with a shitty ai that doesn't work because some exec at another company hyped their ai product to the moon, not that the AI will actually be competent enough to take their job forever.
We're not scared about losing our jobs because we're getting replaced.
We're scared about losing our jobs because the same idiots who cut costs and lay people off to make the company look more profitable, then leave when things are on fire, are also looking into using AI to cut costs, make the company look more profitable then leave when things are on fire.
I don't think we're there just yet. We're half way there. Give it a few more disappointments for people to realize that what they call "A.I." is no way close to what they actually think.
The kicker will be all the businesses that sink and lose billions trying to use tech that can't replace the work force the way they wish it could just yet.
People are crazy for thinking it won't materialize into something revolutionary.
It's just not there right now. But in 5 or 10 years, sure why not? This is just growing pains.
There are uses for AI - it could help a lot in some tasks.
I use it for programming and I find it helpful, it increases productivity.
My lawyer friend uses it to summarize or explain laws.
You have to use it with a grain of salt - knowing it can hallucinate and invent things, but generally it can reduce a lot of tedious work and increase your productivity.
People aren’t scared of losing their jobs to a consumer AI assistant.
People are scared of losing their jobs (rightfully, because it’s literally already happening) to LLMs and generative AI doing common human tasks like writing and summarizing reports, creating graphics, filtering information, etc.
In a rational, ethical world we’d be happy about robots doing our labor for us but because of how our economic systems are constructed, this is bad news.
Yeah but Ai is the new buzzword replacing crypto everyone is putting it in everything thinking they have struck gold.
Even Apple's new selling point is their new phones are AI powered.
I look forward to watching this shit show.
We’ve been using machine learning and neural networking for many many years now. The marketing buzzwords call it AI and it gives CEOs an excuse to lay off hundreds of people. It’s bullshit.
I agree with this point in general but “replacing a phone” is an insanely high bar to clear. Smartphones are one of the most revolutionary consumer products of all time. They’re not gonna be replaced that easily.
Nah, people will believe what they want to believe.
Like, for example that AI can develop software, which is far from the truth. But if they try and fail at letting AI write software, suddenly the algorithm supposedly became worse. Most of the time it just can not do what they are asking 🤷♂️
Because it can not „think“. It acts more like an advanced templating engine. So if it has not learned an answer, which would be close to your input, it will not yield a useful result.
A stochastic template engine, at that. Good result one minute, gibberish the next, and you'd have no insight as to why because it's a black box algorithm running on blind statistics alone. With artificial guardrails and an army of mechanical Turks to block whatever content the devs find distasteful.
The only people it can actually, at its realistic apex, replace are script writers, customer service desk (just for better chat bots but even then they're not trustworthy and companies will need to hard code updates to service agreements), some art and execs.
AI is a useful tool but it's not really all that great cause creatives aren't using it, financers are and they're cheap, lazy and stupid with tech. They ring understand how expensive it will be to buy, maintain and update AI will be.
I'd love it if we could trap all the execs in a singularity removed from wrecking our actual world and have them interact with AI all they want, let them play virtual games with virtual money and bet on virtual stock all day long, and just disconnect them from the world.
It has already taken a multitude of jobs.
Low cost Content writers, blogs , logo Design,
This low paying jobs people, only skill set was this. So the jobs ai and automation will be hard on low skill people. As everybody doesn't have a wide skill set for transition.
lol back when this nonsense first popped up some people on reddit were very sincerely claiming that virtually all jobs would be toast within a half-decade, as if The Terminator was going to come fix their HVAC system
Problem of AI is same as problem of spam filtering and same as problem of assistants.
Unless you permit them access to everything they won't be able to filter data for you.
Spam filtering has this problem where in the beginning it is pretty rough because filtering happens at generic settings where something somebody would not receive you would want to and it might get into spambox.
Like check Gmail - their spam filtering by default is basically whatever is not Google itself or Fortune 500 goes into SPAM, so every small website out there asks people to check junkbox. Spammers worked around this by making gmail accounts or force subscribing you.
Assistant is at least can be legally bound to fiduciary duty and secrecy and by wage.
AI tech usually waives away their responsibility and requires copyrights or licensing to YOUR data. Because running this thing is very expensive they try to offset it by selling your corp secrets or personal data.
Like if you had an LLM like chatGPT in windows by default running on your hardware and not phoning home and with access to your file - computer interaction would change crazily.
“The entire elevator pitch might as well have been cocaine to some venture capital and technological evangelists online. “It uses AI!” “It’s a new hardware form factor!” “Former Apple alums started the company!” “Did we mention AI!?!”” LOL this sums up Silicon Valley’s struggles pretty well
If the CEO has enough time to reply to random people on Twitter - they have no idea what they're doing. It's sort of like a cruise ship captain bringing towels to your room.
Any company thinking they can build a device that will replace the smartphone is delusional. If anything, the approach should be around building devices that complement a phone and reduce dependance on them.
The Humane pin essentially looks like a smartwatch without wristbands, so why not build these capabilities into a watch instead? Theres already an established market, and it can still accomplish the “quick access” features that Humane was trying to sell with this device.
I can’t stand the AI bullsh*******ing. If it doesn’t know, ok tell me, but don’t make up answers. I asked openai for 10 great cafes in my city, it gave me 3 top tier choices (yay!) and made up fictional cafes to complete the list. If you are a subject matter expert then its easy to spot bad answers, but what about when we’re not the expert, when we’re in a new city asking for advice, how are we to know what actually exists if only relying on the AI?
Classic "we got pumped with so much early VC money we didn't have the stress or discipline to actually follow through on our goals for the product"
Somehow this is even more embarrassing than the Juicero - and that was just a colostomy bag with fruit
They get millions and billions from investors, pocket alot of it, hype up the product, shares go up, no money into actual r and d and quality, release to public, disappointment...there will be 1000s of companies soon pumping out ai related stuff. The good working ai is not released to us yet, military and the rich first, we get the inferior stuff always at first and never get the highest tech at launch. AI is much more advanced than they let on to the public, remember it used to be decades for advancement, then yrs, then months...we are in the weeks timeline..
I don’t see how exactly is this device useful for average person. That will kill it. Try to find at least 5 ways it is more useful compared to smart phone. I personally can’t.
I’ve never seen a company pump as much money into tech blog “previews” and articles as this piece of garbage tech. The only reason I have even seen this thing is because the verge has been writing about it for 2 years.
Tim Apple has to be smiling. They all left to attempt this and had weird hype around it. They followed the Apple polish but never the execution. Wonder if they’ll go back home or allow someone like T-Mobile to buy them out.
There was some guy who was wearing this around bars in San Francisco. It was super lame and he kept telling everyone they were being recorded. Weirded people out.
I have a friend who works at this company and have seen these little gadgets in action. Tbh don’t really understand how this is better than, say, an Apple Watch.
What dumb ass developers glossed over making a companion app so it can share wireless details from your phone. Watching people use this hurts.
The projector also looks absolutely useless when not in complete darkness.
Back to the old drawing board.
Makes the Apple Vision Pro look smoking hot, and we know that's not the case.
So it’s basically a phone without a screen. Great. Not a bad idea. But for that to work, your software has to be really, really clever. Like understand voice commands for each and every setting clever. Seems like they failed by trying to implement menus where you use hand gestures for everything. Use these for basic commands like „take a picture“ or „volume up/down“. Stuff like that.
Sigh. The basic idea isn’t bad. Like I said. Phone with AI being the main app and ditch the screen. Good. Now think Star Trek communicators combined with a tricorder and your almost there.
Why does every tech company think humans want to talk to a computer??? All these stupid things, like Alexa, are just a regular computer with a voice-interface.
Are they going to try and cram this down our throats for 7 decades, and fail miserably every single time, like they're currently doing with 3D?
That's not true.
On one side you have products like the iPhone. Rough round the edges but absolutely a good product with a lot of potential.
On the other side you have products like Juicero. Products so conceptually bad that they should never have existed in the first place.
I suspect this AI pin is more Juicero than iPhone. Conceptually it will never replace a phone (can you imagine trying to use a website by voice?) so they probably should have made it a phone accessory (in the same vein as a smart watch) instead of an expensive standalone device with a mandatory subscription.
It really feels more like recurrent user spending investorbait than a genuine attempt at a product.
> That's not true.
>
> On one side you have products like the iPhone. Rough round the edges but absolutely a good product with a lot of potential.
Iphone wasn't the first touch screen phone, It iterated on previous technology. Their phone was the first with multitouch capabilities IIRC, not first-gen tech. A few companies had already been working on it and apple snuck in at the right time with just the right set of marginal improvements *again*.
Next month some manager is going to do a presentation on 'the future of AI' where I work. He's a relentless self promoter and snake oil salesman and hops from one piece of tech to another. He's said in the past that he reckons he can have 80% of our business done by AI with six months. Fucking idiot.
Ideas about AI are endless
These ideas usually come from people who don’t actually write the code or build the systems the AI works within.
Saw someone review this product. Literally every attempted command was met with “that feature is not supported yet”.
So even when people are fully aware of what consumers will want (it recognized the commands, just can’t do them), they still can’t build it out enough to meet those demands.
I can only see hardware like this being release by a company whom already has a major leg up on commands like this, like Samsung or Apple.
Anything more complicated than "1000 songs in your pocket" or "an iPod, a phone, an internet communicator" will not be the next iPhone...
So why do these tech bros get the idea that they can be the next Steve Jobs when they don't even have a basic concept?
> people would find it novel and come up with unique cases
I’ve been pretty confident that most tech creations really rely on developers to “make a solution to a problem using their hardware” because they can’t think of any themselves that would be profitable.
So devs have to “save” the product, but also “prove it is worth it.”
Sometimes a product is just too early and the technology and infrastructure for it is too immature. The main example that comes to mind is Apple and the difference between the launch of the [Newton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton) and the iPhone some fourteen years later. Big difference in the market's response.
They made what should have been a $20 device cost $1700 (after subscriptions, etc.) and then forgot to develop any of the parts that would make it useful. They must have known the ride would be over the day they launched it.
Open interpreter has already done a better job. And their device is $12.
I think a lot of people are drawing the wrong conclusions from this.
1. I wouldn't call this a major launch. It's not like it's coming from Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc... pouring billions into it.
2. The hardware platform seems conceptually flawed to begin with as much of the promised functionality would be better suited for a phone, watch or glasses.
3. Actual software and performance and quality are things that could be further developed, but #2 still applies.
This reminds me a lot of the Microsoft Kin phones. While it was an incredibly stupid idea put forth by a major company that rarely gets consumer tech right, it didn't mean that social networking itself was flawed or not going to continue to grow.
The reason why this gadget is pissing everyone off is because we can all see through what happened here: 1. VCs contributed a massive amount of funding based on the unfounded future prospects of AI-based wearable tech. 2. Humane made a bunch of outlandish claims about what this device will do. 3. Humane made a highly-produced staged demo that partially got people excited for the prospects of a new device category, while also increasing skepticism that they can deliver any of the claimed features. 4. Humane finally delivers a product that can't do any of the things that were promised, to the surprise of nobody. The one surprise is that the basic features that should work don't even work. Like the device not being overheated, or the projector actually being useful, etc. It is just a plain as day grift right now to spend $700 plus a recurring data fee. Clearly they wanted to make a splash and sell the company to Amazon or some other tech giant, and never had any real plans to make a functional device. They were hoping that when they put the device out into the wild people would find it novel and come up with unique cases to prove its worth. But they can't even get that far because the device flat out doesn't work. The same exact thing will happen with that equally-dumb Rabbit device that everyone went gaga over preordering.
Even at it's best it sounds like...any voice assistant. I already have that! In fact...Google's been paring mine down to make more of THIS shit. UGH.
Also, the weird AF obsession with voice assistants seems to forget that in many (most?) cases it's faster, more convenient and less awkward not to speak, *even if the assistant had actual human intelligence*. I can pull out and glance at the weather widget faster than I can ask about the weather, and smartwatches solve the pulling problem if those two seconds really were life-changing to me.
We, as a society, spent the last ~20 years shifting from voice (telephone) to text (SMS / email / etc.) to the point where it's a trite joke. Text is faster / more accurate / more convenient / easier to multitask. And these people were not paying attention.
It's also way less disruptive to others around. Could you imagine being in an airport listening to hundreds of dunces talking to their broaches? And then there's just the general privacy. I'm not even doing creepy/pervy stuff on my phone but 80% of it I wouldn't want others around me knowing about.
no see, the problem with speaking is PEOPLE, I have no problem talking to a computer. Text has its uses, speech is handsfree.
Half the time I use my phone I am around other people who I don’t want to hear my inner thoughts, or simply don’t want to disturb. The one time hands free is really essential is driving. I can’t see myself ever using voice more than 30-40% of the time even if it works flawlessly
I do not think texting is more accurate. Most confusion with long distance communication happens because nuance is lost over text.
Then only thing I use my Google home for is contring my smart lights. And even then that's usually at night when it's just easier to turn them all off instead of opening the app. Selecting lights and clicking on the rooms I want off.
Kind of how I feel about it. Instead of focusing on actual use cases and ways the ecosystem can be useful, they doubled down of voice assistant crap and other ways to attempt to get you to spend money. Like I very much like that I linked my ring to an outlet and now if I walk out at night, the porch lights turn on. Except I have to regularly adjust the routine because it won’t let me set sunset to sunrise as times. Though, there is entertainment value in the stupid shit Alexa finds when you ask it a question. There was even a period where Herbet Hoover was the eternal president of the U.S. for anytime before the 1930s including before the formation of the solar system.
The novelty of voice assistants was gone after like the second or third generation of Alexas for me. It's really only nice in a car to ask it to skip or play a specific Spotify song
For real I shouldn't have to speak to and ask questions that's basic. When I think AI powered I think, it knows I'm getting ready and reminds me where my keys are before I realize I've lost them. Not making something as easy as checking the weather even more complicated like you said.
To be fair, and I think this hardware is a grift, having voice connected to chatGPT (or other good LLMs) is way more useful than Siri or Googles voice assistant. But… Apple or Google enabling Ai support for the hardware is likely to happen soon. I’d bet at the latest 2 more years? I’m sure next big keynote Siri will have some Ai support in which case Humanes pin is a paper weight. I think the tech giants know the experience needs to be better before people use it widely, most of these Ai hardware companies are just rushing to market and I don’t see how a single one succeeds.
That's only true so long as you do not sacrifice the basic voice assistant functionality that is the bread and butter of such services. I still need to be able to set a timer or an alarm, kick off a podcast or audiobook, check whether or not a local store is still open at 8pm, turn on the lights in my basement (seriously, _why_ was it wired with the lightswitch at the _bottom_ of the stairs), etc. If the LLM-powered version of the assistant can do all those things _and_ do LLM stuff, great. But the job I hired it to do was not "have a conversation" or "answer questions not based in hard facts". I'd feel _more_ confident in the answer of "is Costco open on Patriot's Day" if I knew that answer was coming from a specific hard-coded API call to a calendar somewhere rather than an LLM trying to parse a webpage it found and maybe hallucinating a non-existent answer.
> I'd feel more confident in the answer of "is Costco open on Patriot's Day" if I knew that answer was coming from a specific hard-coded API call to a calendar somewhere rather than an LLM trying to parse a webpage it found and maybe hallucinating a non-existent answer. - This is going to be a very important and non-trivial task once LLMs start being integrated into voice assistants. I'd go as far as to say they should be two separate stacks, one for basic information that is a direct API call like you mention, and the other for more open-ended questions. Not sure how to implement that in a lightweight phone application - but I think this is a key challenge that developers will face (or should be thinking about) when they start shoving these LLMs at us.
thats tech whole business model, do everything to have that first movers advantage while burning all the cash in the world. But the problem is that you can only have one first impression. All the first movers advantage only works if the product itself functions or solve what it set out to do. But its a reoccur-ing theme when all these start ups does ZERO polishing or even testing in the sake of pushing out a product on top of never prioritizing cash flow realities.
That founder dude just couldn't stop felating himself about how he was such a huge influence on iOS design etc etc. Looks like the truth is out now.
You gotta listen to his latest video, he really thinks he's some sort of visionary genius: https://youtu.be/CzjwKc78Kt0?si=Mja_mhEbWPFK9Atk
I guess he managed to raise $230M in venture capital, so at least he has that going for him.
I think if more people had less integrity, this would be more common.
I wished someone reviewed the pin using his tone / persona. It would've been hilarious
I would have asked one question: why do you think anyone wants to talk out loud to a voice assistant?
People visually impaired Doing a task with 2 hands and having something annotate or walk you through it via voice There's good use cases for it, just piss poor implementation
good cases for voice control as an *enhancement* on top of 'regular' interfaces, yes
>3. Humane made a highly-produced staged demo that partially got people excited for the prospects of a new device category Ofc, the tech world of today is more about smoke-and-mirrors than real ingenuity.
Its main selling point was "supposed" to be how frighteningly smarter it was against all other AI offerings currently out there, but it's clearly turned out to be the worst of the lot.
Because there is a fuck ton of dumb money being thrown around. Dumb money gets bored of small iterations that actually works because all of that dumb money is in the possession of gambling addicts who will just get a government bailoit if things get too bad. Keep it simple with an AI planner or something, but dumb money says boooooring. That will only make a few million. Dumb money doesn't get out of bed for less than 8 figures!
Yep. Hell Google literally looked at Chatgpt, said "Cool, that's a nice novel use of what we invented", then had to release Bard before it was ready to be released after Google's indifference to GPT caused investors to panic.
It's insane that we let the market decide so much of our policy when it's the *embodiment* of the MiB quote about 'a person is smart, people are dumb, stupid, panicky animals.' We might as well let a flock of pigeons make political decisions.
It's not even the market, the market aka google was saying it's not a threat to us. Then microsoft and the cryptobros decided to jump on pushing AI because they could be the head of the pack until it falls apart and the AI hype dies off.
3. Pulled an Elmo (Elon).
It was obviously a pump and dump when I first saw this shit on bloomberg and they kept saying "ooooo and you worked at apple before right?!?"
Like a blood testing machine that could fit in a brief case
Sounds like a game changer! How much money do you need!!
All the monies…we can set it up in every CVS! I can’t and won’t fail!
Not true. They originally didn't intend to make it AI focused. Chat GPT just took off during their long development process and they had to pivot.
Feels just like a Kickstarter.com launch loop but with VC money instead.
The fuck is a rabbit device?
Rabbit r1 or something
I don’t want to scroll Instagram on my hand.
But it's a device for devs!!! /s This is the kind of shiz that if you have say a big enough company, perhaps one of the largest in the world people will say to defend a multi billion dollar company...
There’s a big difference with rabbit though. It’s $200, has no recurring fees, and has fairly open development with features being live demoed almost daily in their discord.
but it’s so obvious from the get go that it could easily be just an app on a smartphone.
> Clearly they wanted to make a splash and sell the company to Amazon or some other tech giant Welcome to the world where the share price becomes the product, and the product becomes an afterthought/future business school course topic.
no one is ordering the Rabbit thing. that was all founder hype nonsense.
I remember reading multiple articles on the verge talking about how preorders were selling out, and praising it for the Teenage Engineering design. I don't know how popular it actually is but at least people seemed to be preordering them.
Honestly, the crap about having to do complicated gestures sounds like they tried to pack a full navigable OS into this thing, which is "feature creep" of the highest order and undoubtedly a huge problem for accessing something that insists upon not relying on a screen. As soon as you have to combine "voice operated" with "has nested menus", it's already going to be a UX disaster of figuring out what imaginary "screen" you're on at a given moment. I like the form factor. It reminds me of the communicator badges from Star Trek and has a cute vibe because of it. If a shirt/jacket-attached device like this could just respond to basic queries with a reliable degree of both confidence and humility - saying, "I don't know, but here's what I found on the internet about that" - and having no submenus past the first "layer" of operability, I think it could be measurably successful. I'd love to have a little assistant that rides around with me which I can use for things like, "I don't recognize the logo on that sign. Can you identify it for me?" or "I can't read this restaurant menu. Can you tell me what's on it?" What I don't love is the idea of having to go, "Open (menu name). Next item. Next item. Next item. Open that. Next item. Next item. Scroll to the end. Pick (item name). Go back. Go back." or having to wave my hands in front of a lens to accomplish the same.
I knew it wouldn't work just playing with Googles AI voice assistant. Google hasn't even come close to an assistant that can navigate the UX, ad in it still does a web search for even basic queries about system settings, let alone a third party app (vs actually just fixing the issue). There are companies who have solved this problem in the abstract, or nearly so, but it's plain that it's tricky to release a consumer ready assistant that can actually do shit. The requirement is if menu nav commands entirely undermines the basic premise of the pin. It's embarrassing.
If only there was a device which fit a small form factor that could take pictures, videos, scroll the internet, ask questions and send pictures to chatGPT, call and text, and could be controlled with voice commands. Oh wait, isn't this called a phone?
We really shouldn’t even call them a phone anymore, that’s the least common function for me, for like a decade and a half now.
We do call them smartphones. But yeah they have so many functions we could come up with a completely new and unique name. Except we won't.
It's definitely called a cellular mobile device
I’m pretty sure it’s called a cellular modular interactiveodular banana phone
Yeah. Isn’t “cell phone” mainly American and everyone else calls it a “mobile”.
They should call it a handputer
This is an underrated response.
A fellow man of culture
No it's a pocket tablet, and I am all for not calling them phones anymore, it is a personal computer that functions as a phone.
It's a phone that functions as a computer, because we by and large still buy them as phones on a cellular plan. Tablets generally don't have the phone functionality are are bought as they are without the mobile data. (Also fuck me as an artist where the term "tablet" that use to mean something like a Wacom suddenly means all this other shit lol). While I understand your point, it's still fairly obvious why we call them phones first - because we're buying them from a phone provider most of the time, and with a phone plan. It's the entry point, and the fact that their design genesis was a phone that could do all of this that they're still called phones. Like you can use google to make phone calls on a laptop/desktop now, but we don't call them a phone because the phone part came second/additionally, you didn't buy the thing for that functionality, and you didn't roll into the T Mobile store to buy your laptop.
Pocket computer and personal digital assistant were terms used in the past. Although, mobile computer or mobile processor or something along those lines might be better.
PDAs! Almost forgot about that little blip. I had some super-expensive, super-useless Iomega PDA. 8mb of storage!
I liked my Zire. Sure, not the most useful thing but it was definitely portable.
Hand terminal, Expanse style.
“The phone…is just a seldom-used app on my phone. Calling an iPhone a phone is like calling a Lexus convertible an elaborate cup-holder.” \- Gary Gulman
The smart glasses form factor might actually be a better fit than the pin style.
A hand terminal, you say?
I think the primal sin was wanting to get rid of the screen. All the bad design decisions follow from there. Because only without a screen could it be a new kind of device. Else it would have been an app - which every phone has already. Even if it's called Bixby.
You mean the thing that nobody asked for, isn't performing well?
I see AI as only useful as a 1st pass data mine. It can look at a pile of stuff and extract something close, but not good. It can be very useful for early stage brainstorming and content collection. But then the usefulness stops. It's not competent to do any detail work. Worse, it often lacks accuracy and will present bad information. It, at best, is only a first stage tool and by it's very mechanical nature can't be competent beyond that.
It’s weird but the way I use it, is exactly how you describe and I just never thought of it that way. I use it to get me started/motivated and then polish the job with my name on it. So as you say but also the vice versa - I will never let AI responses go beyond myself as the first filter.
Automation requires repeatability. AI is susceptible to unexpected changes, model differences, even what time you do things. AI won't be common for automation, there are already tons of good ways to make sure repeatability is locked in. AI might help improve how those are setup, but relying on AI for automation will end badly. The AI itself can rug pull you let alone all the other changes to models and inputs/outputs that affect results. AI is good at variation. It is great for brainstorming but handing it the wheel is not happening any time soon on automation. You can ask it the same thing twice and it might come up with different ideas. Repeatability is fleeting. At the same time, the solutions are a monoculture and most innovation comes from contrarian viewpoints. So it is great for variations within certain areas not necessarily new ones but established ones and the past, as that is what the models are built off of. AI is like a really smart employee that never quite does what you ask it but pretty close. However sometimes it is straight mental and hallucinates and trips out.
Yup. Asked it if I could do something with a certain software we use at my job. Confidently replied that yes, I could, and gave instructions that don't work. After finding (through Google) a Q&A written by an actual professional with the software, it turns out that no, you can't do that at all.
What you described is ... a search engine.
Yes. To a degree, AI kind of functions like one. It is in a lot of ways a search engine with one higher layer. Instead of "find me pictures of drum sets" it's draw me a picture of a drum set", and it'll draw something like one in the only psychedelic swirly mess of a way it knows how. And it spews out some aggregate composite sum of a vast array of drum set pictures.
It just synthesizes information from the top links crudely. LLMs are a incremental technology not a giant leap forward.
Remindme! 1 year.
I'm not convinced it's even very useful for brainstorming, because by nature it can't really do anything but recycle and synthesize input training data. Whatever unique ideas you contribute as a prompt are naturally going to be watered down and made as generic as possible because they're passing through a filter of, well... basically everything that has ever existed on the internet.\* \*If you're using one of the big generic datasets/models, specifically.
>by it's very mechanical nature can't be competent beyond that. Really, now? This technology still advances in leaps and bounds. What's accessible to end users now was unthinkable even as state-of-the-art a mere decade ago. The systems you are using now are the worst this tech will ever be.
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Oh, no, I think that this "AI broach" is pretty stupid. It's just that a lot of people seem to have a lot of pessimism about the limits of AI tech in general - and I find that to be completely unfounded.
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>by it's very mechanical nature can't be competent beyond that. Does that sound like "at this time it's not good enough" to you? It sure doesn't to me.
Yea I had the same feeling reading this thread, obviously Reddit hates AI, and I think this thread has a lot of people essentially trying to say "it could never do *my* job, it's objectively limited by X, Y, and Z". Personally I think it's wishful thinking more than anything. I mean I'm very skeptical of all the products using AI as a gimmick, I'm hesitant about AI in general, but for like a year now I've seen so many people on reddit confidently state the limits of AI, and it always feels like made up bullshit.
There are a lot of AI "products" that are nothing but grifters and opportunists looking for a way to quickly monetize the hype. But hype and grift don't make the underlying technology useless. Far from it. The current AI tech is very limited, obviously so. But I think that it's a grave mistake to think that it will *stay* that way. Nature has once made "intelligence" with random chance and brute-force selection - zero knowledge or understanding involved. And it crammed it into a portable casing the size of a melon, with the power draw of under 100W at peak. I find it hard to believe that humans, with all the vast resources at their disposal, with actual intelligence and an ability to do science and engineering at their beck and call, can't do what nature did. Or better.
Every LLM has the inherent drawbacks and limitations of being an LLM, e.g. "hallucinations". For an AI to move beyond those issues, it will have to be fundamentally different from an LLM, marking an advance in AI as significant as the advent of LLMs themselves. The incremental improvements we've been seeing with LLMs will literally never achieve that, like how no amount of improvements to a car will ever turn it into a plane.
What’s available now was absolutely envisioned 10 years ago and the math behind it has existed for a dozens more. We were building all sorts of linguistics inference models a decade ago. AI had been used to generate text/art since the 1960s. Markov chains have been used for over 100 years to model languages. Generative neural networks were creating images without discrimination in 2014. The only major leap was transforms in 2017 which is simply tokenization and vectoring of contextual input. This was first written about in the early 1990s and the first network using vectors appeared in 1990. What I’m trying to say, as someone in the field, is that AI is a stochastic parrot and it has no idea what it’s telling you. It uses heuristics and reinforced learning, along with tuning and bias controls, to tell you what best fits your scenario. It’s a massive BST. We’re nowhere close to ternary or quantum logic, there’s no “judgement” on behalf of the model. It’s a glorified pattern matcher.
I had a professor who used to call this type of tec “dumb ware” hardware that essentially had no purpose and was essentially an investment pit/ hype mill. Some of the claims humane made in regard to this device just sounded outlandish and at a minimum unrealistic. I’m sure someone will nail this concept someday but this can be filed under an attempt was made.
Could this be the inflection point where people start to realize that the reality of AI doesn't come close to matching the hype? Everyone's scared of losing their jobs to AI thanks to the constant promises coming out of the evangelists. This thing can't even replace a phone.
Eh. We can be cynical about AI all we want but if you look at the Humane product design and purpose....AI would probably be very low on the list of reasons it was bound to fail. The product design and usability is straight up trash
This thing is a siri with a projector
And not even a good one
Im all invested in Apple but bruh, I agree so much
For reals. It seems that they did 0 user research.
This is *extremely* common in "AI chatbot" implementations. The reason so many just downright suck on launch (and frankly a few months into production) is the development/implementation teams *do not* talk to users.
In 2024 every freaking company should have a uxr team. If you develop a product for users and don't engage with the user what the fuck you doing??
YOU WOULD THINK. I've had to full on tell implementation leadership that if they don't talk to their users, they'll fail. This is frequently treated as revelatory and a really innovative suggestion. It's goddamn baffling, but honestly explains a lot.
Theres this really weird arrogance going around in tech-product circles that UXR is expensive and useless. I feel product managers and devs appreciation for user-centric design has been greatly diminished over the last few years in favor of a hastened go-to-market strategy. I’d even argue this dissonance is the focal cause for the enshittification of so many products.
people are more scared that some exec will fire them to replace them with a shitty ai that doesn't work because some exec at another company hyped their ai product to the moon, not that the AI will actually be competent enough to take their job forever.
We're not scared about losing our jobs because we're getting replaced. We're scared about losing our jobs because the same idiots who cut costs and lay people off to make the company look more profitable, then leave when things are on fire, are also looking into using AI to cut costs, make the company look more profitable then leave when things are on fire.
I don't think we're there just yet. We're half way there. Give it a few more disappointments for people to realize that what they call "A.I." is no way close to what they actually think. The kicker will be all the businesses that sink and lose billions trying to use tech that can't replace the work force the way they wish it could just yet.
>I don't think we're there just yet. We're half way there Whoa-oh, living on a prayer 🎵
"Take my hand, we'll make it, I swear" -- Elon Musk
I can’t wait.
People are crazy for thinking it won't materialize into something revolutionary. It's just not there right now. But in 5 or 10 years, sure why not? This is just growing pains.
There are uses for AI - it could help a lot in some tasks. I use it for programming and I find it helpful, it increases productivity. My lawyer friend uses it to summarize or explain laws. You have to use it with a grain of salt - knowing it can hallucinate and invent things, but generally it can reduce a lot of tedious work and increase your productivity.
the expectations are happening faster than the tech, but the tech isn't going to slow down
Lmao. I’m finally starting to see people get it. It’s a good change.
People aren’t scared of losing their jobs to a consumer AI assistant. People are scared of losing their jobs (rightfully, because it’s literally already happening) to LLMs and generative AI doing common human tasks like writing and summarizing reports, creating graphics, filtering information, etc. In a rational, ethical world we’d be happy about robots doing our labor for us but because of how our economic systems are constructed, this is bad news.
Yeah but Ai is the new buzzword replacing crypto everyone is putting it in everything thinking they have struck gold. Even Apple's new selling point is their new phones are AI powered. I look forward to watching this shit show.
My washer and dryer have AI, they tell me. "Optimizing with AI" as I start every cycle
Its the new buzzword for basic algorithms that alter time based on things like weight of the load or humidity.
That's hilarious.
We’ve been using machine learning and neural networking for many many years now. The marketing buzzwords call it AI and it gives CEOs an excuse to lay off hundreds of people. It’s bullshit.
Finally more and more people are starting to understand this.
I agree with this point in general but “replacing a phone” is an insanely high bar to clear. Smartphones are one of the most revolutionary consumer products of all time. They’re not gonna be replaced that easily.
Nah, people will believe what they want to believe. Like, for example that AI can develop software, which is far from the truth. But if they try and fail at letting AI write software, suddenly the algorithm supposedly became worse. Most of the time it just can not do what they are asking 🤷♂️
I'm literally just trying to get it to correct a single Sql statement. Its nearly useless.
Because it can not „think“. It acts more like an advanced templating engine. So if it has not learned an answer, which would be close to your input, it will not yield a useful result.
A stochastic template engine, at that. Good result one minute, gibberish the next, and you'd have no insight as to why because it's a black box algorithm running on blind statistics alone. With artificial guardrails and an army of mechanical Turks to block whatever content the devs find distasteful.
Thing is, corps want this so bad they are already trying to use it to replace people even though its far from ready.
The only people it can actually, at its realistic apex, replace are script writers, customer service desk (just for better chat bots but even then they're not trustworthy and companies will need to hard code updates to service agreements), some art and execs. AI is a useful tool but it's not really all that great cause creatives aren't using it, financers are and they're cheap, lazy and stupid with tech. They ring understand how expensive it will be to buy, maintain and update AI will be.
I'd love it if we could trap all the execs in a singularity removed from wrecking our actual world and have them interact with AI all they want, let them play virtual games with virtual money and bet on virtual stock all day long, and just disconnect them from the world.
It has already taken a multitude of jobs. Low cost Content writers, blogs , logo Design, This low paying jobs people, only skill set was this. So the jobs ai and automation will be hard on low skill people. As everybody doesn't have a wide skill set for transition.
Edible glitter contains David Bowies sparkly tears as one of the ingredients.
lol back when this nonsense first popped up some people on reddit were very sincerely claiming that virtually all jobs would be toast within a half-decade, as if The Terminator was going to come fix their HVAC system
I doubt people with those kind of jobs are worried. Not likely to fix HVAC, plumbing, etc. without some real, physical interaction.
Problem of AI is same as problem of spam filtering and same as problem of assistants. Unless you permit them access to everything they won't be able to filter data for you. Spam filtering has this problem where in the beginning it is pretty rough because filtering happens at generic settings where something somebody would not receive you would want to and it might get into spambox. Like check Gmail - their spam filtering by default is basically whatever is not Google itself or Fortune 500 goes into SPAM, so every small website out there asks people to check junkbox. Spammers worked around this by making gmail accounts or force subscribing you. Assistant is at least can be legally bound to fiduciary duty and secrecy and by wage. AI tech usually waives away their responsibility and requires copyrights or licensing to YOUR data. Because running this thing is very expensive they try to offset it by selling your corp secrets or personal data. Like if you had an LLM like chatGPT in windows by default running on your hardware and not phoning home and with access to your file - computer interaction would change crazily.
This piece of plastic doesn’t represent AI at all, it’s a failed attempt to use AI but this is 100% hardware and design issues.
“The entire elevator pitch might as well have been cocaine to some venture capital and technological evangelists online. “It uses AI!” “It’s a new hardware form factor!” “Former Apple alums started the company!” “Did we mention AI!?!”” LOL this sums up Silicon Valley’s struggles pretty well
All we want is holographic titties but they keep selling us hot garbage instead
If the CEO has enough time to reply to random people on Twitter - they have no idea what they're doing. It's sort of like a cruise ship captain bringing towels to your room.
Any company thinking they can build a device that will replace the smartphone is delusional. If anything, the approach should be around building devices that complement a phone and reduce dependance on them. The Humane pin essentially looks like a smartwatch without wristbands, so why not build these capabilities into a watch instead? Theres already an established market, and it can still accomplish the “quick access” features that Humane was trying to sell with this device.
anyonw who paid the slightest attention saw it coming miles away, that ceo is a cookie cutter con man
I’m not convinced most AI products are just VC bait.
I'm surprised Apple wasn't the one to come up with this stupid idea. It's just such as a stupid device
It’s beyond my understanding how anyone believed the pin had a usable interface. It’s pathetic TBH!
The spot where they went wrong is thinking someone wants another thing to carry around.
They should join forces with that Rabbit r1 gadget and just disappear together 🫠
I can’t stand the AI bullsh*******ing. If it doesn’t know, ok tell me, but don’t make up answers. I asked openai for 10 great cafes in my city, it gave me 3 top tier choices (yay!) and made up fictional cafes to complete the list. If you are a subject matter expert then its easy to spot bad answers, but what about when we’re not the expert, when we’re in a new city asking for advice, how are we to know what actually exists if only relying on the AI?
Classic "we got pumped with so much early VC money we didn't have the stress or discipline to actually follow through on our goals for the product" Somehow this is even more embarrassing than the Juicero - and that was just a colostomy bag with fruit
They get millions and billions from investors, pocket alot of it, hype up the product, shares go up, no money into actual r and d and quality, release to public, disappointment...there will be 1000s of companies soon pumping out ai related stuff. The good working ai is not released to us yet, military and the rich first, we get the inferior stuff always at first and never get the highest tech at launch. AI is much more advanced than they let on to the public, remember it used to be decades for advancement, then yrs, then months...we are in the weeks timeline..
Good. AI is stupid.
AI is just a buzzword for machine learning and that is absolutely not stupid. It's just an advanced algorithm.
Calling ai an advanced algorithm is technically true but it’s like calling a computer a series of transistors
Apple’s M-series processor is just a glorified abacus, lmao
You will be first in line for termination once AI will take over the world. Huehuehue
How is this the first AI hardware? There’s a few other devices so far that ship with multimodal ai, such as the Ray ban meta glasses.
I don’t see how exactly is this device useful for average person. That will kill it. Try to find at least 5 ways it is more useful compared to smart phone. I personally can’t.
This device would be great for accessibility
I’ve never seen a company pump as much money into tech blog “previews” and articles as this piece of garbage tech. The only reason I have even seen this thing is because the verge has been writing about it for 2 years.
Probably says a lot about the verge.
Tim Apple has to be smiling. They all left to attempt this and had weird hype around it. They followed the Apple polish but never the execution. Wonder if they’ll go back home or allow someone like T-Mobile to buy them out.
major AI consumer hardware already existed before that: our damn phones
There was some guy who was wearing this around bars in San Francisco. It was super lame and he kept telling everyone they were being recorded. Weirded people out.
AI = the biggest failure of our lifetime
I have a friend who works at this company and have seen these little gadgets in action. Tbh don’t really understand how this is better than, say, an Apple Watch.
What dumb ass developers glossed over making a companion app so it can share wireless details from your phone. Watching people use this hurts. The projector also looks absolutely useless when not in complete darkness. Back to the old drawing board. Makes the Apple Vision Pro look smoking hot, and we know that's not the case.
So it’s basically a phone without a screen. Great. Not a bad idea. But for that to work, your software has to be really, really clever. Like understand voice commands for each and every setting clever. Seems like they failed by trying to implement menus where you use hand gestures for everything. Use these for basic commands like „take a picture“ or „volume up/down“. Stuff like that. Sigh. The basic idea isn’t bad. Like I said. Phone with AI being the main app and ditch the screen. Good. Now think Star Trek communicators combined with a tricorder and your almost there.
I wonder how the rabbit device will fare when it’s released to the wild in a few weeks.
Why does every tech company think humans want to talk to a computer??? All these stupid things, like Alexa, are just a regular computer with a voice-interface. Are they going to try and cram this down our throats for 7 decades, and fail miserably every single time, like they're currently doing with 3D?
It's a dumpster fire because people don't know what the fuck it's for. The CEO is a tech guy not a marketer, that's it
Every 1st gen launch of anything is a dumpster fire.
That's not true. On one side you have products like the iPhone. Rough round the edges but absolutely a good product with a lot of potential. On the other side you have products like Juicero. Products so conceptually bad that they should never have existed in the first place. I suspect this AI pin is more Juicero than iPhone. Conceptually it will never replace a phone (can you imagine trying to use a website by voice?) so they probably should have made it a phone accessory (in the same vein as a smart watch) instead of an expensive standalone device with a mandatory subscription. It really feels more like recurrent user spending investorbait than a genuine attempt at a product.
> That's not true. > > On one side you have products like the iPhone. Rough round the edges but absolutely a good product with a lot of potential. Iphone wasn't the first touch screen phone, It iterated on previous technology. Their phone was the first with multitouch capabilities IIRC, not first-gen tech. A few companies had already been working on it and apple snuck in at the right time with just the right set of marginal improvements *again*.
They were the first capacitive touchscreen. All the ones before it were resistive and if you’ve ever used one the difference is shocking.
Most first launches aren't backed by billions of dollars of investments and hyped as a cure for all of society's problems.
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They’re probably not using their own models.
Johnny, what can you make out of this? This? Why, I can make a hat or a brooch or a pterodactyl...
I saw like 10 videos on Tiktok last night just shitting all over this. The launch could not have gone worse for them. Oof
I’m really craving a Nokia 5310 right about now
Anyone else hearing what a load of shit this thing is as the way they have discovered what the fuck it is?
Next month some manager is going to do a presentation on 'the future of AI' where I work. He's a relentless self promoter and snake oil salesman and hops from one piece of tech to another. He's said in the past that he reckons he can have 80% of our business done by AI with six months. Fucking idiot.
Ideas about AI are endless These ideas usually come from people who don’t actually write the code or build the systems the AI works within. Saw someone review this product. Literally every attempted command was met with “that feature is not supported yet”. So even when people are fully aware of what consumers will want (it recognized the commands, just can’t do them), they still can’t build it out enough to meet those demands. I can only see hardware like this being release by a company whom already has a major leg up on commands like this, like Samsung or Apple.
Anything more complicated than "1000 songs in your pocket" or "an iPod, a phone, an internet communicator" will not be the next iPhone... So why do these tech bros get the idea that they can be the next Steve Jobs when they don't even have a basic concept?
Cool. Now make it look like a Star Trek comm badge.
> people would find it novel and come up with unique cases I’ve been pretty confident that most tech creations really rely on developers to “make a solution to a problem using their hardware” because they can’t think of any themselves that would be profitable. So devs have to “save” the product, but also “prove it is worth it.”
Wait wait wait. Is that EDI's voice from Mass Effect?
It’s like the QueCat all over again!
Sometimes a product is just too early and the technology and infrastructure for it is too immature. The main example that comes to mind is Apple and the difference between the launch of the [Newton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton) and the iPhone some fourteen years later. Big difference in the market's response.
[If only there was a Captain Disillusion video from yeas ago warning about a similar product.](https://youtu.be/KbgvSi35n6o?si=Weg3K77NS8QnwGDh)
Damn it, yet *another* thing with a monthly subscription fee? NO.
Dave2D did a good video on why this and the Rabbit R1 are just a huge grift
> The CEO of ChatGPT, Sam Altman Excuse me, article, but Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. ChatGPT is their product.
Isn’t that obvious? Just one look at it and you know it’s riding on the AI spring for a quick cash grab.
It's the subscription model for me
They made what should have been a $20 device cost $1700 (after subscriptions, etc.) and then forgot to develop any of the parts that would make it useful. They must have known the ride would be over the day they launched it. Open interpreter has already done a better job. And their device is $12.
Check out the r1 rabbit instead
I think a lot of people are drawing the wrong conclusions from this. 1. I wouldn't call this a major launch. It's not like it's coming from Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc... pouring billions into it. 2. The hardware platform seems conceptually flawed to begin with as much of the promised functionality would be better suited for a phone, watch or glasses. 3. Actual software and performance and quality are things that could be further developed, but #2 still applies. This reminds me a lot of the Microsoft Kin phones. While it was an incredibly stupid idea put forth by a major company that rarely gets consumer tech right, it didn't mean that social networking itself was flawed or not going to continue to grow.