Humane AI – Pico Laser Projection – AI Twist on an Old Scam (2023)
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kguttag.com
This is what I get for connecting in San Francisco. The flight attendant did give me a dozen packs of those little ginger-snap cookies, though, so I may be biased.
In truth the coffee there ain’t great, and the prep is a bit hit or miss, but the folks behind the counter are nice, and you can buy all of the cookies and cookie butter you could want; but it’s probably best not to overdo it. I think they even have a cookie butter latte but never tried it since that sounds too sweet.
In the north of France where I lived for a while, it's an absolute staple akin to what peanut butter is to an american maybe or Matcha to a Japanese. Speculoos butter is spread on bread, lots of pastries are speculoos flavoured etc.
Wonderful on planes and wonderful at home. Also great when dunked in milk. Make sure you let a small bit (or one whole) 'accidentally' fall off into the milk and rescue it later. Hmmm....
https://twitter.com/samsheffer/status/1779854070372561184
edit: not sure if the previous comment was edited or I imagined it said it was their marketing guy before, but I'm editing his name out of the comment to not potentially tarnish his search engine results
If I was working on the product, I’d probably feel okay full stopping. If I saw the person representing us full stopping Id probably think something like hey, nobody died here. And also I feel like a full stop is reserved for maybe one or two people at a company.
Ah just like telekinesis, it only works when the skeptics aren't around
It's probably terrible, but oh so hypocritical. I can think of many occasions in the last 15 years these reviewers have cited the potential of gimmicks and latched on to the manufacturers promise to improve.
Though hyperbolic, I thought the reviews were balanced. Products shouldn’t primarily be built on hype and optimism, they should fulfill a job to be done. The software for AI Pin will improve but so will AI capabilities for smartphones in parallel.
Don't have time to go look for one. But can think of many occasions they'd mention the manufacturer has promised to update and improve this and then give them a free pass on whatever gimmicky aspect of the product they're looking at, usually software. Overlooking that aspect rather than lambasting them.
I mean perhaps a slight stretch, but their coverage of the Apple Vision Pro, have they had much reason to use it, aside from the demos? There's also some UX issues mentioned but they're given a free pass as they expect Apple to improve it with time. They'll say "not there yet" rather than "worst product ever".
I’m not saying the AVP will fix all its issues but it is so much more impressive than a cellular device hooked up to OpenAi’s APIs.
Also, let’s not forget that Humane wasn’t even planing to use AI for their product until the last year or two when AI took off. Maybe you can say it was a smart pivot but to me to reeked of just jumping on the AI bandwagon (which, does make some sense I’ll grant you).
I remember the first few times I flew a plane, I simply stared in awe out the window for the entire flight. I remember telling myself "No matter how many more times I fly, I must never forget how amazing this feels", and I like to think that I've kept that amazement alive even though I've probably flown over a hundred times now.
"What began as a primitive box with a light source projecting low quality pictures onto a matte surface, has been developed for over a century into a high resolution, self-illuminating, interactive panel so thin and light, it's easily integrated into powerful mobile devices we can take with us wherever we go.
"And now the developers of the [originally Cicret, here HumaneAI] want to take the next logical step: detaching the image from the mobile device, lowering its quality, and using a box with a light source to project it onto a matte surface."
I will too, in fact.... just one more comment...
On another note: the Humane AI is released. Maybe the scam is that it's damn slow?
Must admit I’m surprised by the aggressiveness of it all. It’s almost like an echo chamber where people have decided it’s ok to pile on
But it is something novel that requires serious research. Even if the result is disappointing, it is novel enough to not make the it a “scam using old te vc projection”. That was the point of my rhetorical question before.
I am defining “serious for a consumer product company”. Putting that in a small device seems quite a feat.
If you define “serious” as “particles colliding” or “drugs that cure some type of cancer”, then no.
Keep in mind that I am using “serious” as opposed to “scammy”. I thin this pin is far from a scam.
You speak with such confidence. Always a reliable red flag that you don’t know what you are talking about.
This seems to be a really common occurrence recently - I know the internet can be mean, I've been on it since the peak of IRC, but it seems way more intense these days. The moment something is marked as the bad thing, hordes of people absolutely pile onto it out of nowhere.
Is this something I've just not noticed, a more people online thing, long term effects of covid (the virus itself and/or the lockdowns), a result of whatever algorithm tweaks Elon has been making, are people just pissed off in general, etc?
It feels bizarre how aggro the internet has become!
I think psychology might call this Splitting, which honestly seems to describe the business model of social media platforms these days too, so maybe there's a connection there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)
Off topic but using as an example of this: This tweeted photo, showing a pub in the UK that allows dogs, but bans children. Bit edgy, sure, but look at the bloodbath in the replies/quotes! It's absolute chaos!
This isn’t “out of nowhere”. Humane and their AI pin have been marketed an d talked an kur all over Internet tech spaces for a very long time. I’ve been seeing talk about the Humane AI pin in these same channels (YouTube, Twitter, tech websites) frequently since they were funded.
People have been forming opinions and skepticism for a long time. The key thing that changed is that the product finally transitioned from hypothetical to reality, and suddenly everyone’s thoughts were confirmed all at once.
This is nothing like your photo of a pub getting talked about on Twitter for a brief moment. AI and AI hardware have been a hot topic for years and Humane has been pushing marketing materials and demos on social media for a long time.
They made themselves the center of the conversation. Now the rubber hits the road and they have to deal with being the center of the conversation without having the substance to back up their big social media push.
The real mob mentality is all of the people who are arriving late to this multi-year buildup and trying to scorn the reviewers and critics.
Hype artists and bad faith actors thrive on amnesiac audiences, and it’s about time we were all a bit less credulous.
Putting this one down to "words are lossy compression for thoughts"
Like how phone scammers are often themselves trapt in a system beyond their control [1].
Or even case in point with this thing. Maybe the owners aren't malicious, but if not, they are clearly somewhat being scammed themselves by AI hype, to the point they are willing to invest so much in the chatbot box, tie their entire business presumably to one current API or another, however bad an idea we know that is.
There are just many long chains of debt, confusion, hyperstition that are knotting around us, with no clear source. One person's scam turns into another's "innovation" before turning again back into a scam for the end user.
If we are really getting ready for the AI future, we need to get used to being wronged and taken advantage of by technically blameless entities, whose intent is logical, capitalist, and at least nominatively "benevolent."
The era of morality itself might soon turn to something else! In a world so predetermined and calculated, where there is such advanced science around influencing thought, cybernetics, etc, how does it even make sense anymore? Or at least, how is focusing on something like intent here even satisfying anymore beyond saying "bad people do bad things"?
1. https://www.propublica.org/article/human-traffickers-force-v...
That triggers a bunch of memes, from emperor’s new clothes to pride before a fall. Add in a general societal distrust of tech and AI, plus the age-old derision for geeks/nerds, and Humane could not have set themselves up better for fiasco if they had tried.
I do think it was all well meaning and earnest, not at all a scam. But their over-the-top marketing for v1 of an experimental tech gadget was really clueless.
Segway walked so Humane could run.
As a college student I remember the lead up to the Segway reveal on Good Morning America. I was so excited for it that I set my alarm for 6AM to watch it. I remember being so confused and annoyed. Fool me once...
https://www.wired.com/2001/01/ginger-may-be-motorized-scoote...
No.
Their PR and marketing was AWFUL to build the level of hype they did around the product they released.
If you're releasing a scooter for mall cops and tourists you don't go on Good Morning America to advertise it as a world-changing technology.
They advertised the release of a world-changing technology and released nothing like that.
Takes me back to a time when you were still able to shroud things with mystique and excitement. The Matrix, Blair Witch Project, and the PlayStation 2 with the emotion engine were all larger than life. Cloverfield was the last of that kind.
There's no malicious intent in producing glossy promos videos of a device you know a priori does not (and cannot) work, becaue it violates a few laws of physics? I feel like some folks around here have become very innured to false advertising
But it's not a "scam" to release third-rate hardware after overhyping it. Magic Leap and many other startups did the same.
"Scam" should be reserved for actual fraudulent startups like Theranos and Outcome Health.
Not at all strange. The problem is that scam has certain meaning and if we use scam more liberally we dilute the meaning.
If every company is a scam(as almost everyone intentionally overhypes or does something similar to humane), then no company is a scam. Is google a scam as they scripted the gemini video?
[1]: https://www.nps.gov/teachers/classrooms/the-wright-brothers-...
>Digital Library, “birds of a feather” identified inside sea of information so communities and groups could be tracked in an organized way
"Highlands Forum", DLI (NSF, NASA and DARPA), MDDS program, In-Q-Tel etc
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...
Language is not something you can manipulate so easily and you absolutely cannot fight language changing, but also I promise that no one is diluting the meaning "scam".
But like sure, tilt at that windmill.
That video was more of a fraud than a scam, but I think we're just splitting hairs at that point.
They're all scammers.
And I can't trust that site. An example:
3,129 days since Elon Musk said Teslas would have 1,000 kilometer (621 mile) range within a year or two. (9/23/2015)
"My guess is probably we could break 1,000 kilometers within a year or two. I'd say 2017 for sure."
Q: When will we break the 1000km range mark for an electric car?
M: A thousand kilometers, hmm. Well, it depends under what circumstances for a thousand kilometers. As it is, the record right now for Model S is 800 km. That is the furthest that anyone has driven a Model S...
Q: So we could be close?
M: Yeah, we're pretty close. Now, in order to do that they did drive at a relatively slow speed. So, you know, we're taking, I think they drove maybe at 40 or 50 km/h or something like that. But I think, my guess is probably we could break a 1000km within... a year or two?
Q: Okay, so within 2016 maybe even?
M: I say if you say 2017 I'd say 2017 for sure.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl5vLC3Xlgc&feature=youtu.be...
2: https://electrek.co/2017/08/04/a-tesla-model-s-100d-just-dro...
As one of those people, it's pretty bad, especially at navigation which Navigate on Autopilot was very good at
Can't wait for his BS about record number of activations this quarter after he force activated it on the fleet
That said, if it weren't for all the lies and hype, we'd probably all be blown away by what it can do
If you sell someone a cherry pie to be delivered tomorrow, take nearly a decade, and end up handing them a bag of cherries and a dusting of flour with a label of "cherry pie" on it, you didn't meet your promises.
It's one of the number one reasons I'd never work for him. Every failure is your fault and every success is his. Yet all he contributes is tweets
It's the random people constantly looking for excuses to not believe his successes ("he doesn'thave much to do with SpaceX" or "he stole Tesla"), as well as idiotic article headlines ("Elon Musk's SpaceX does X" etc) that have made up those ideas.
- he can identify incredibly good companies and products, and (usually) is able to lift them up, fund them, and leave them mostly be. It's not him running Tesla day-to-day (nor was tesla started by him), nor is it him running SpaceX, nor...
- at the same time, everything that he's involved in directly is just abysmally stupid
Musk is a lazy ketamine addict. He doesn't do anything other than tweet at himself from his alt accounts and fail upward, disproving meritocracy in the process.
> Why don’t you think it’s fair or accurate to credit founders with the work their companies do?
Also do you have any evidence for the either of the two attacks on Musk?
He places a lot of bets, though, and that some of those bets may pay off in no way takes away from the fact that he engages in pretty scammy behavior.
In my view, his SOP is pretty much exactly what Theranos tried to do: fake it (scam) until you make it.
If you're claiming things about your product or service that aren't true (even if they may become true eventually), and especially if you're faking evidence to support your lies, you're scamming.
3,129 days since Elon Musk said Teslas would have 1,000 kilometer (621 mile) range within a year or two. (9/23/2015)
"My guess is probably we could break 1,000 kilometers within a year or two. I'd say 2017 for sure."
Q: When will we break the 1000km range mark for an electric car?
M: A thousand kilometers, hmm. Well, it depends under what circumstances for a thousand kilometers. As it is, the record right now for Model S is 800 km. That is the furthest that anyone has driven a Model S...
Q: So we could be close?
M: Yeah, we're pretty close. Now, in order to do that they did drive at a relatively slow speed. So, you know, we're taking, I think they drove maybe at 40 or 50 km/h or something like that. But I think, my guess is probably we could break a 1000km within... a year or two?
Q: Okay, so within 2016 maybe even?
M: I say if you say 2017 I'd say 2017 for sure.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl5vLC3Xlgc&feature=youtu.be...
2: https://electrek.co/2017/08/04/a-tesla-model-s-100d-just-dro...
One hypermiler reporting a long range under perfect conditions is not how any normal buyer is going to interpret that claim.
If one wants to lie by twisting what he said, what happened or putting purposefully out of context to gain clicks or drive up hate against the guy, that is another thing. You should not do that. Nowhere he said what the site or you are implying.
I'm tired how people are getting radicalized because they hear absurd things ("pizzagate") and instead of doubting it they believe it and become outraged. If you actually hear people talking, they are usually much more reasonable than what they seem if you just take a few of the most negative phrases out of context.
It takes a lot of effort to undo fake news. A few more examples from that website:
"Rocket Fuel Solves Climate Change", an absurd extrapolation on what was probably a tweet about ISRU for Mars.
And this juxtaposition that makes you think he just sold what was paid to them, when instead it is 10% of what they had bought previously if you actually follow the link:
Hodl [Link]
1,120 days since Elon Musk promised to hold bitcoin instead converting it. (3/24/2021)
"Bitcoin paid to Tesla will be retained as Bitcoin, not converted to fiat currency."
Elon Musk in a Tweet
1,087 days since Elon Musk converted $272 million to fiat currency. (4/26/2021)
As reported by Nate DiCamillo in yahoo! finance
Also I doubt Musk had much to do with the brain implant other than being someone to push people forward and being a bag of money for it. Did he design the implant? Did he insert it? Did he code it?
Probably most people are sad he went from cool sci-fi CEO to weird divorced dad energy on bird website CEO.
is it incredibly bad at doing such things? yes.
is a smartphone a much better device at doing all the things the AI pin does? yes as well.
So i wouldn't call it a scam, its just a bad product.
> Humane’s website and other promotional material have a series of fake still images (“Photoshopped” images overlayed on hands). While even these pictures are pretty low-resolution (much less than a true 720p image), they turn out to be much better than what is seen in the videos of the Humane projector.
Now they are getting the Fisker treatment.
Humane AI would never have been able to raise 230+ million had they been truthful about what could be built with the current state of technology. Did the investors understand that you have to recharge the Humane Pin every 2 hours? Did the investors know their laser projection press photos are photoshopped? Did the investors know the laser projector doesn't meet the advertised resolution? The Humane Pin is science fiction.
In many ways the Humane Pin is like Theranos. Holmes probably didn't mean to defraud people. She just raised money for a product that couldn't be built with the current state of technology.
But then, I'm not a VC. I guess they go off vibes?
Get one person to fall for 'just trust me bro' and the hype train follows.
Then she should've stopped at some point. But she didn't. She kept on making claims that she must have known were not truthful. At that point, at the latest, "didn't mean to" becomes a bit of a hollow word.
The hardware itself seems to be decent-ish, albeit suffering from the usual first-gen issues. The AI-focused software stack is currently quite bad, but software is easy to update. Pair it with a smartphone, allow 3rd party apps, and it's essentially an alternative to a smartwatch. You lose the screen, but you gain a camera. I'd probably be quite tempted to buy a gen2 myself, even if all the AI stuff doesn't work out.
Instead of pitching a practical and attainable product, one has to aim for the moon in order to get the VC $$$$. The wilder, the better.
Call me crazy, but as a society we’ve decided that “possible” is too boring.
While many VC funded companies only want to get bought out (instead of actually being a freestanding successful company), I strongly feel there are a sizable subsection of “founders” that don’t even want to get bought out…
They only just want to play the game and collect high salaries along the way…
Sadly, they aren’t even to blame. Too many Fortune-50 executives just try not to embarrass themselves long enough to collect insane levels of compensation.
Is a wonder that VC founders do the same?
Too many startups are really just “playing house” — really flashy website, monochrome headshots of executive team, multiple officies, plethora of partner logos… Only missing substance and a real product.
No one is literally saying that an individual contributor at Humane is a "scammer" just because they happened to have worked on a project that arguably takes perfectly good sand and subtracts value from it. That happens. A lot. Sometimes you intend to make a product, and you end up working on an empty product-shaped object. Heck, sometimes, say in healthcare, the drug or device you hoped would help people not only does nothing, but actually causes harm. That doesn't mean you were foolish to have started work, but simply because you started with "good intentions" doesn't mean a product belongs on the market.
Humane is charging $700 for a device with $24 monthly subscriptions. If someone thinks that such an offering is worthless, or nearly so, it is hardly surprising if they use "aggressive" language to warn people away.
If there is anything unusual or unsettling it is that some people in tech seem to feel that it is "unethical" to treat tech companies as anything less than bold innovators, irrespective of what that they ship. If someone is despairing over past week's discourse, one only can imagine how they'd deal with something like Apple's "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" commercials.
I know that he's adding him, to compare against the fraudsters, but I'm not so sure the positioning is accidental.
For the record, I think that SJ was one of the most successful bulshitters that has ever walked the Earth. He could not only convince a room full of geologists that the world was flat, but also sell them all tickets on a boat ride to the edge.
It's just that he actually ended up (after numerous false starts), having an actual product. Several, in fact.
I see no reason the others are not doing the same.
Looking the part is half of actually being the part.
Totally agree with your comment, there are several images like this and that note should've been in one of the captions.
On a separate note, even Steve faked the 2007 iPhone demo [1]. It couldn't play entire songs or videos without crashing. It constantly crashed unless tasks were performed in a specific sequence. The team programmed the phone to display five bars, and brought in a portable cell tower, for the demo.
When the iPhone came out, all these bugs had been smoothed over, and the news of the demo didn't break until 2013. I guess that's the difference—people were using the iPhone, loving the screen and interface, and tolerating the flaws (no copy and paste!).
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/and-then-steve-s...
But they were able to release something that ended up changing the world.
It’s always a bit jarring to watch pre-smartphone movies and TV shows.
These things have become ubiquitous.
I liked the “flick-pen,” from Geostorm, though.
Crashing Happened a lot in demos back then, nowadays it's not so common.
> The 55 miles from Campbell to San Francisco make for one of the nicest commutes anywhere.
There are a thousand people every day who get the train from my little town into London. 80 miles. 125mph. Someone else does the driving. There's wifi and a power point and a refreshment trolley that will sell you a coffee. Watch a movie, read a book, browse HN or Reddit or whatever.
"Nicest commutes anywhere"? Least terrible car journeys in the US, perhaps.
Not to mention blue is the hardest color to see already. These people are idiots.
They should have more than enough brightness to be clearly visible in those light conditions on almost any visible wavelength they chose for the laser, so it's weird if they optimize for this instead of the outdoor performance.
However, apparently I'm the idiot because red, not blue is hardest to see due to various reasons. At night we are all but blind to it.
* raise your hand in front of device to activate the projection
* move hand to increment/decrement a number
* close hand to tap
1. It's a green laser (it isn't)
2. It's projected onto a white surface, (again, it isn't)
3. 9cm^2 of projected surface area (3cm x 3cm)
Maybe they can modulate the brightness by the amount of stuff present on the projected screen, and maybe even have an outdoor mode, where they use light fonts, that are displayed on a higher brightness, so the overall energy emitted still classifies the device to be class 2. Still, 1mW must be very very limiting here, a 120 nits display is nowhere near usable outdoors, let alone a 120 nits display that reflects the outdoor light just as well as the projector's.
Why on earth they aren't using a green laser if they are limited to class 2 is beyond me though.
That said, like most AI startups right now it is a cash grab that might pan out as a longer term product, but likely not.
Granted, they indeed don't write anything about brightness, apart from the class 2 classification, which they could very well meet. Just not bright enough to be very usable.
The one thing Humane seems to have done good is make a nice piece of hardware with a sleek, Apple-like industrial design. It's functionally a paperweight that can read some LLM hallucinations to you from the convenience of your sagging shirt lapel, but it IS nice-looking and reviewers have said it feels sturdily-made.
Aside from that, it seems like the main things that might have made this thing seem impressive or stand out aren't even developed by them. I haven't seen any indication the laser is anything revolutionary they made themselves, and as much as they'd like to pretend they've developed some crazy AI, it seems to be OpenAI doing all the heavy lifting and everyone and their grandma has been using this technology for over a year now.
Perhaps it's my jaded view seasoned by the observation of decades of tech bullshit, but that could go one of two ways:
1. The laser tech is full of trade secrets that we dare not reveal just yet.
2. We don't want anyone to find out that we bought these laser things off AliExpress.
(Or maybe it's tech you could buy off Amazon ten years ago, who knows? https://www.amazon.com/Brookstone-FBA_mp-796246-Projection-V...)
On topic, if the product is real but their marketing demos still show unrealistically different capabilities, then it's fair to call it a scam. Looking at the material provided, the marketing images show a usable device, and the real ones an unusable one in terms of contrast, resolution, and projection deformation. But because they do show real images I'd stop short of calling it a scam. You can after all make your own opinion based on reasonably realistic demos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyPxwp3SxdU
If there's anything about their work atmosphere I've gleamed from seeing employees talk about the company over the past few months it's quite the opposite of a cold, brutalist tech company. It's cult-like if anything. They've been acting way too impressed by their own product, and now that it's out and reviews have panned it, they tweet about how we all need to be more "optimistic about the future" and similar handwaving. It takes real faith-like buy-in to be shipping something like this and not feel totally embarrassed.
Narcissistic personalities are constantly rewarded in tech, they play right into the greed of VCs and unmask the fact most investors are completely incompetent.
That doesn't sound Humane. (sorry, I'll see myself out)
The interaction is awful. you have to touch it to operate it via voice commands? that means you cant use it in public. There's also a notification light? how is someone wearing it on their chest supposed to see that? I dont think this is a scam for the consumer, because no one in their right minds is going to watch this and want one. They are just cashing in on the AI crazy happening right now.
I wonder if the result is more of a product management/focus failure than a technical one? Perhaps the outcome would have been better if they had just picked one or two hard problems instead of trying to make the everything device right at launch.
10 years is just the right amount of time for a new generation of victims who never heard about it. $200 million is impressive, those arent rookie numbers anymore.
a) That a palm-size laser projector could work as a display.
b) That awkward hand gestures are a great way to navigate UI
c) That voice could work as a primary input.
d) That people would be willing to pay $700 and a monthly subscription for a device that barely works.
It's at par or even worse than Juicero. The team and its supporters should stop hiding behind "it's v1", and "we were trying to invent a new paradigm." The device has to be promising now, not in some imaginary future. And trying to invent shouldn't mean you're going to forgo questioning the basic foundational ideas.
The problem with it as a product was that it was worthless. Yes, it did what was claimed, but the machine and all that great engineering was completely unnecessary to get the insanely overpriced juice out of the bags.
> It's at par or even worse than Juicero.
Sounds like a scam to me.
That said, the Humane marketing reminded me of Magic Leap and I find it irritating. Particularly the big build up to what was going to be 'new information' and then it was an ad with no information. When the marketing is so divorced from what's delivered I think people are often nastier about it.
The irony to me is that in a lot of ways they're trying to be Apple, but without Apple's strategic thinking - it's more cosplaying Apple. Ben Thompson had a good write up today in Stratechery that touched on some of this: when the iPhone came out it worked with Mac and windows - the dominant computing platforms of the day! They didn't try to immediately create a standalone device from the get go and they had iterated on a narrow use case with the iPod for several years already to perfect some things.
Also - people love their phones! They may make overtures otherwise, but observe their behavior.
This is a lot more akin to what rewind aka limitless is doing. Start small/focused with a good product that solves a well tested use case while working with the existing platform (mobile) then leverage that to grow and build an ecosystem as you go.
There's so much about the Humane product that is strategically poor/user poor: a separate phone number, terrible battery, the extreme cost, etc. etc. even if the product actually worked (it doesn't) it's strategically DOA.
You don't get to mars by starting a company and building a mars rocket - you have that as the end goal and a path to get there that requires doing a ton of other stuff first so you have a shot at achieving that goal.
Any company that achieves great things builds a machine to build the machine - otherwise you just get a expensive art project if the product even works at all.
Still they did build and ship something and I like their industrial design so they deserve kudos for that. Plus I like to see people experiment so it's good when people try even if they fail, but I don't think it's helped by pretending something isn't a failure.
I hope this is the main lesson people will take from Humane. Not the "scam", "AI hype", "laser bullshit" angles. The top execs fundamentally deluded themselves into thinking that "the process is the product". During their stealth startup years their marketing was almost entirely "we're from Apple, we're perfectionists, we believe tech should feel like magic". They did Jony Ive-style videos. They talk about "intent", "craftsmanship", "design". And now they're adopting the reality distortion field. But they're merely cosplaying Apple, without the substance. They made a "less-intrusive" smartphone-killer that relies on the most intrusive input method ever! No product-market fit, no viable go-to-market ($700 + $24/mo).
It's Helene Deutsch's "as-if personality", but as a startup. The execs confuse appearances with reality. Liz Holmes copied the clothing, they're copying "the philosophy", but misunderstood its essence. They're almost Shakespearian characters, but the employees should leave now before it meets a tragic end.
It’s tragic, but also a little amusing how people copy the outside looks without understanding the inside value.
These products are clearly built by people who live in the SV bubble.
Nobody is going to use this pin in their day to day if you can't wear a seatbelt with it. Nobody is going to be able to easily use it outside. This is obvious to anyone who has been outdoors in the last decade.
And probably poisoning the well for other, simpler and laser-less personal AI devices as a side effect.
Btw, you can buy a 60g wearable device whose hardware is prepared for 24/7 microphone listening, has ML accelerator, 24h battery life, and has, for some reason, kept free 16GB of storage that the user can't access and the OS doesn't use.
It is called Apple Watch.
Like we’ve seen with all the shitcoins, rug pulls etc in the crypto space.
This is just bad product management in effect.
Sounds like it's used for data collection and surveillance.
I use nearly all of those GBs of storage on mine with synced music and audiobooks for running.
> Apple Watch limits the amount of music which can be stored on the watch and is typically limited to 24% of the available space on the watch, so given you have a watch with 32GB of total space, 8GB would the maximum you can store.
Handheld projectors won't catch on until the next breakthrough in physics
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KbgvSi35n6o love with your heart, use your head for everything else
They want a AI world where that becomes the UI but it turns out to look like a pain in the ass to use. Maybe in 5 years and if they add an AR google. You still need visual input and reading on your hand is worse than holding a phone, you need AR
MKBHDs for Everything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40059835 - April 2024 (173 comments)
this is just the usual Silicon Valley bias, with leather jacket weather year round (I'm only half joking)
I actually was tempted to pre-order one of these devices many months ago but decided my Apple Watch was a practical solution to the problems this device is meant to solve.
Anyway, I guess we will never get to see what version 2 of this product would have been.
If they’re guilty of anything it’s likely not adequately learning from why all the previous attempts in this space were big flops. That, plus the halo of arrogance that one feels from the marketing materials and presentations, setup a perfect storm for the likely unrecoverable PR dumpster fire they now find themselves in.
Wow wtf.
How?
This company was not even in business of developing new laser display tech. So who would improve it for them? And why would they have not in the previous decades?
Because on smart phones you can't do always on recording or control the lock screen. The real game changer AI devices will bring is when they always on record which you can't do without controlling the hardware.
Would have thought this was completely obvious.
Once they figured out how their new AI assistant needs to look like their own rules for 3rd party apps won’t matter anymore.