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It all sounded so promising. A top team of former Apple designers and managers, with the support of OpenAI boss Sam Altman, had invented a completely recent sort of wearable device for the ChatGPT era.
San Francisco-based Humane raised around $240 million on the promise that its AI Pin could do to the iPhone what Apple did to the BlackBerry. The miniature device packs a microphone, a speaker, a camera and even a tiny laser projector right into a magnetic clip that resembles an Apple-developed Star Trek communicator.
But when the AI Pin was finally released last month after six years of development, it was rejected by reviewers. Marques Brownlee, the YouTuber whose 18.8 million subscribers have made him a top tech trendsetter, explained Calling it the “worst product I've ever reviewed,” adding that it's “bad at almost every thing it mainly all the time does.”
Humane's built-in assistant took too long to reply questions and infrequently answered them incorrectly, Brownlee said, and there have been complaints concerning the Pin's projector, battery life and overheating. Other technology critics largely agreed.
Humane CEO Bethany Bongiorno said the corporate is listening to feedback and plans to repair some issues with software updates. But the early response to the AI pin might be difficult for the startup to beat. It also represents one other setback in Silicon Valley's long-running seek for a tool that may usurp the smartphone as the middle of our computing lives.
Humane has been the standard-bearer for several startups hoping to bottle ChatGPT's lightning with recent forms of AI devices, including Rabbit, IYO, and Brilliant Labs. Meta and Amazon are among the many Big Tech firms developing AI smart glasses. They all hope that a less complicated wearable device that puts virtual assistants in consumers' pockets, ears or faces could break the smartphone duopoly between Apple and Google that has existed for greater than a decade.
The idea of AI wearables is just not recent. Enough time could have passed in Silicon Valley to forget the debacle of Google Glass, the AI-powered headset that the search company launched in 2013 but largely abandoned just two years later. But the response to Humane will only fuel suspicions that recent attempts to reboot Glass are only one other expression of an AI funding bubble.
Hardware, Silicon Valley investors wish to say, is difficult. That's why most individuals prefer to take a position in software. Startups that develop devices as an alternative of apps must contend with supply chains and dealing capital, which poses a financial burden for an inherently dangerous company.
Inventing recent categories of hardware has proven difficult for even the richest Big Tech firms. Smart speakers from Amazon and Google have sold tens of millions of units, but have didn’t develop into greater than a alternative for radios and egg timers. Meta has poured tens of billions of dollars into its virtual reality business with little revenue to indicate for it.
At least virtual reality headsets offer something – complete digital immersion – that smartphones don't. It's less clear whether the most recent AI gadgets offer any real advantage over simply using an app.
Their proponents argue that they provide a panacea for smartphone addiction and doomscrolling – a method to take our eyes off our screens and make ourselves more “present” without sacrificing quick access to information or social connections. They also say that by embedding cameras and microphones into glasses or badges, AI can “see” what the user sees and listen to what they hear. This “multimodal AI” can theoretically answer questions, discover objects and landmarks, or translate texts.
Meta recently praised its Ray-Ban smart glasses, which pack cameras, microphones and speakers into a light-weight frame. Piggybacking on classic Ray-Ban designs is a clever method to smuggle AI devices into the mainstream. But for individuals who don't wish to wear cameras on their faces, the voice-controlled ChatGPT mobile app seems to work just as well for a lot of queries.
Seventeen years after the beginning of the iPhone era, the smartphone has develop into indispensable for greater than half of the world's population. And the increasing prevalence of wireless headphones makes them a more likely interface for AI assistants than smart glasses or badges. The disappointment with Humane shows how far generative AI still has to go before it will possibly replace the limitless utility of a smartphone. For the foreseeable future, the very best AI device is the one you have already got in your pocket.
