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Comment by bowsamic | Hacker News Reader

Just because the device exists and appears to work doesn't mean it isn't a scam.

For example, if someone sells you a machine that they claim is powered by magic but actually there is a hidden physical mechanism, you can claim the machine still performs the function, but they have misled you about the workings in a way that has huge implications on the capabilities of the product.

That is what is going on here. Look at MKBHD's review, the main potential he pointed out was the LAM functionality and the possible future uses of that. It turns out that entire thing was faked, and the "magic" that was the LAM is a "hidden physical mechanism" of duct tape'd together manual automations

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> That is what is going on here. Look at MKBHD's review, the main potential he pointed out was the LAM functionality and the possible future uses of that. It turns out that entire thing was faked, and the "magic" that was the LAM is a "hidden physical mechanism" of duct tape'd together manual automations

I suspect the plan is/was to replace this with an actual LAM after release or possibly they thought they'd have it ready for release but ran into the 'last 5%' issue that seems to plague AI automation of anything. Definitely not an ethical move, but I can see how someone who bought into the AI hype might think it was a reasonable gamble to become a billionaire.

When I watched the keynote/preordered it seemed obvious the LAM UI training was work-in-progress. The core of the device was a new UI for interacting with an LLM via voice in a way that's better than the phone. It does this.

I think the people calling it a scam are the same group that just complains about anything. The author drawing an equivalence between prolog and LLMs is a lot of evidence in favor of this sort of bullshit, I just have a really low tolerance for this kind of argument and person.

I'm not delusional - I think the Humane device is extremely disappointing (and their marketing was way more misleading imo), but I'm glad they built and shipped something/tried something in this space. I don't believe the rabbit complaints are earnest it's just cool to hate new stuff for some people. It's the same batch that hated the iphone in 2007, just tedious and uninteresting.

> I think the people calling it a scam are the same group that just complains about anything. The author drawing an equivalence between prolog and LLMs is a lot of evidence in favor of this sort of bullshit, I just have a really low tolerance for this kind of argument and person.

Thanks! I`m not a huge fan of people like you too.

You're looking for the Juicero: a real tangible (over)engineered product that certainly did a thing, but nowhere near what the manufacturers said it aimed to do.

Juicero might be an example, though I'm not sure if they made any specific large claim that was totally false, unlike in this case. Perhaps if explicitly Juicero claimed that some special magic was going on during the squeezing process, but I don't think they did

They claimed that you needed the large amounts of force from their machine to squeeze the juice from their packets. People found that you can open them up and squeeze the juice out by hand because the machine isn't actually doing any sort of fresh juice squeezing.

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