this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
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Despite seemingly having nothing else in the pipeline and the AI Pin being dead on arrival, Bloomberg reports the company is "seeking a price of between $750 million and $1 billion in a sale."

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 5 months ago (2 children)

This is hilarious, scrambling to get a golden parachute and live off some trust fund from the sale. The sad part is that they will probably get that.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago

There are already copycat products out and I don't feel sympathy for any of them.

[–] [email protected] 80 points 5 months ago (2 children)

alright guys I'll take one for the team and buy the company

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Least I got shit pin!

[–] [email protected] 35 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 months ago (6 children)

I'm gonna buy you too windie

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

I've got some chores that need to get done, how much can I rent your guys for?

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Rabbit R1 will soon to follow

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Meh, that one is cheap enough and has a passable update cycle, I'd say it can stay relevant.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 5 months ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 68 points 5 months ago (6 children)

This is the same as Ben Shapiro telling people to sell their houses once Florida goes under water from a climate crisis. To who? Neptune?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

Obviously to the Merfolk...duh!

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

When you find out you were only good because you drank the trillion dollar brand Kool-Aid.

Here is female founder's LinkedIn background image, web search result top 20, with that thing on.

https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/D5616AQEGTRY3gObKdg/profile-displaybackgroundimage-shrink_200_800/0/1700176960650?e=2147483647&v=beta&t=GoILNFlkyeka_159L39sV2nlT57Phcz9ngiMCGm6eQ8

Demographic is..I mean was?

Here is an awkward photo of both Founders: https://images.fastcompany.net/image/upload/w_596,c_limit,q_auto:best,f_auto/wp-cms/uploads/2020/09/i-Bethany-and-Imran.jpg

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Their adoption plan was just wrong. Few people want to give up their phones, and the general public has had enough of a learning curve struggle with mobile phones. The device didn't make sense, at least not in its current state.

The AI bubble will burst soon, and when it does, real innovation will happen.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Even if they did want to give up their phones, they wouldn't for anything with a two to four hour device. Let alone something that only has a mild neato factor of a low powered laser projector. Smart watches do the same shit with a longer battery life and virtually no one's replacing their phones with those, either.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 5 months ago (4 children)

They designed a product that doesn't solve a problem that anyone has. On top of that they designed something that doesn't even work well.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

And it was overpriced. I can see people buying a useless toy for 50 bucks, but not for $700.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

If they had a couple of unbeatable patents that they just couldn't figure out how to turn into products, that's almost forgivable -- you blew your launch, so you sell out to a company who has the resources to make your ideas into something the public will buy. But as far as I can tell, these guys don't really have any IP worth buying them out for.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

Yep, at high price+monthly fee, too.

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 147 points 5 months ago (6 children)

So this is scam right? Overpromise on a product that doesn't work then sell the company for some huge price because it's cutting edge technology? Because it feels like a scam.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago

It's just how the us economy works

[–] [email protected] -4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Scam how? Selling pre-launch could have been a scam. Money taken from investors could have been a scam, depending on what they pitched. But selling after a complete and known flop of a release? There's no cards left on the table to be scammy about. "Here's our brand name. Here's our patent collection. We'd like to think our patents are worth a ton of money, but we know we'd be lucky getting twenty million."

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 5 months ago (4 children)

remember how over the past few years almost everything brand new had the word "blockchain" shoehorned into it for no good reason?

This is the same kind of thing. It's an atrocious boondoggle. There must still be a serious amount of cocaine floating around Venture Capitalist parties, because one of those boys is gonna drop 500M on this company and think they bought the dip, when in fact they, themselves, are the dip.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Anything with "AI" in the title is a cash grab with very little actual technical worth except the models and training data.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago

They're all scams. This one's just more obvious.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 5 months ago

Yeah, the product was a boondoggle. Trying to sell the company after that launch, with nothing else in the pipeline, is a scam.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Despite seemingly having nothing else in the pipeline and the AI Pin being dead on arrival, Bloomberg reports the company is "seeking a price of between $750 million and $1 billion in a sale."

Humane was founded by two ex-Apple employees, Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, in 2018 and has raised $230 million from some big-name investors like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

The Humane AI Pin immediately seemed like an idea that only made sense in a VC pitch room.

The device is a wearable voice command box and camera that you magnetically clip onto a shirt, sort of like a Star Trek communicator.

The device comes in two halves, with a front processing unit and a back battery, and the side clipped together magnetically with your shirt in the middle.

Don't be surprised if history places Humane on the list of "biggest tech startup flops ever" alongside the likes of Juicero and Ouya.


The original article contains 441 words, the summary contains 154 words. Saved 65%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 50 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Remember when nerds used to be smarter than us? That was awesome.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It's important to realize that the nerd you saw on the news has always been someone wearing nerd as a costume and the entire history of technology is loaded with examples of the real nerd being marginalized. It's just that in ages past the VC's would give a smaller amount of money and require the startup to go through concrete milestones to unlock all of it so there was more of a chance for the founder's dreams to smack up against reality before they were $230m in the hole with no product worth selling.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

20 years ago, the big question VCs were asking their startups was, "How do we convince Microsoft to buy this company?" Simpler times, back then.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

10 years ago it was "how do we convince Google to buy this company?"

[–] [email protected] 75 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Nerds still are smarter than us.

Unfortunately a cult of managers has arisen to rule over the nerds and they hype with an iron fist.

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