Meta acquires AI-wearables startup Limitless | Hacker News Reader

Meta acquires AI-wearables startup Limitless

reuters.com

28 pointsPStamatiou12 comments

I got an email the day before saying that they updated their privacy policy.

This story should be bigger news on HN not maybe just for the aquihire but for the statement of intent market signal the future has Johnny Ive's vibes both OpenAI and Meta have now poached top people from Apple AVP teams + Meta is increasing focus on the Ray Ban formfactor + neither has a mobile phone hardware ecosystem to fall back on as source of compute so next couple of years progress in VLM, DETR, Splats, etc might be shaped by the new interfaces and I am well psyched up to see where this puck is going !!

Too bad about the reWind Mac app, which they've kneecapped with the latest update starting on Dec 19th even though it could probably have continued to function as a local-only thing. It was kind of nice as a local everything-memory, made some of my compliance work easier and stuff. Now deleting all the data and uninstalling it.

I also bought the Pendant but more out of techno-curiosity, never really used it much, so not much loss there. I'm sure a lot of people will be upset with the discontinuation of that, though.

Sqlite database on your local macbook is encrypted so there is no way to export data as far as I'm aware, I want to get access to it, and migrate to screenpipe. If anyone knows how to do an export of local database, please let me know.

You can use sqlcipher on the command line along with the global password which can be found here https://x.com/m1guelpf/status/1854959335161401492

I looked at Screenpipe but it doesn't fill me with confidence. The ideal solution would be a device-agnostic self-hosted service for archiving and searching screenshots. Would make data migration super simple. And then the app snapping the screenshots could be almost trivial.

Full disclosure: The submitter of this post, PStamatiou, is a former co-founder of Limitless fka Rewind. He left a year or so ago.

Shutting down the service. Blocking new users. Preventing existing users in the UK and many other countries from continuing to use the product. Giving everybody who is still a user the free unloaded plan.

Basically feels like a failure, a startup failure.

Presumably there's an acqui hire thing going on. Certainly the technology is going to meta. They probably don't give a care about the user base, since it's meta they have the ability to address the entire planet on a much grander scale than the Limitless company was able.

Overall a very big disappointment and the slack community is just railing against Dan Siroker and the decision. The community feels betrayed and like the opportunity cost was a huge waste for them.

A number of alternative communities is sprung up and competitors in the market have started to join the slack form to offer their own alternatives. Notably the omi.me company is offering a bounty for hacking the Limitless pendant hardware to work with their own open source AI reminder stack.

I know 2 people that work there. There is zero proprietary tech they have. The hardware is just a standard microphone and bluetooth. The app is just feeding the recordings to GPT and Claude API. This is a failure of the business to grow and pulling the rip chord to make it seem like a good exit. Highly doubt the investors even got their money back.

By all accounts the CEO was not good at his job

This is unsurprising. What would be nice is if they can open source it so that we can connect the (fairly nice) hardware to our own backend and get some use out of it.

This is so puzzling. If they’re not selling a user base, a brand or proprietary tech, then it does make it look like an acqui-hire as someone mentioned. But why acqui-hire a team that hasn’t built anything special? This makes me think there might be IP on the pendant product design that Meta wants.

Message from Dan Siroker, Co-Founder & CEO https://www.limitless.ai/

I gotta start making LLM-Wrapper companies

Reply on news.ycombinator.com