Remember the Humane AI pin, which gave the worst people you know a small crisis back in April 2024 when a reviewer gave it a bad review? Well, it’s over now.
Humane announced yesterday that it’s been bought by HP for $116 million, which will purchase Humane’s “AI-powered platform Cosmos, highly skilled technical talent, and intellectual property with more than 300 patents and patent applications.” Those people “will form HP IQ, HP’s new AI innovation lab focused on building an intelligent ecosystem across HP’s products and services for the future of work.”
If you are not an engineer at Humane who is going to become an engineer at HP, but instead an owner of the Humane AI pin, well, tough shit. Humane promptly discontinued sales of the pin, and after February 28 the pin will stop connecting to Humane’s servers and lose what appears to be pretty much all of its functionality except telling you the battery level of a device that doesn’t do anything. Humane writes that anyone whose device is within the 90-day order window can get a refund, but everyone else is out of luck. In response to the FAQ question “What should I do with my AI Pin once it stops working?” Humane encourages buyers to “recycle your Ai Pin through an e-waste recycling program.” If you want to use your AI pin to locate an e-waste recycling center, you’d better act fast.
The Verge notes that “The $116 million HP is paying pales next to the $230 million [Humane] raised since it was founded in 2018. (There was a rumor last spring that Humane was trying to sell to HP for somewhere near $1 billion.)” Going from buzzy tech startup to cramming AI functionality into printers that already barely work is a pretty hard fall from grace, a fall marred by returns outpacing sales and a charger recall to boot. My first thought at seeing the news yesterday was that the remnants of Humane are now going to use AI to make my printer worse, a task I do not think is possible, but if anyone can do it, it’s them.
The early review controversy around the Humane AI pin felt like it centered around all of us regular people not believing in the product enough, not giving AI the benefit of the doubt its hucksters so regally believe they deserve. And in this case, we were right! Whatever marginal improvements the pin made after its launch, it was never a useful product that did anything near what it promised, and reviewers like Marques Brownlee were right to call it out. If there’s a lesson to be learned from this, it’s that we should point out when the emperor isn’t wearing clothes more often.
I’ll start: As I write this, The Guardian has entered into a deal with OpenAI, and The New York Times is pushing AI products on its writers despite the fact that it’s still embroiled in lawsuits over AI. Both join the host of news outlets jumping on the rickety bandwagon so as not to miss out on a future that, as Aftermath pal Ed Zitron wrote earlier this week, keeps not coming. AI companies are burning piles of cash and swathes of the environment to bring us non-functional gadgets and dodgy summaries and useless searches and so much slop, and all of it shows no sign of stopping despite what utter bullshit it is. The Humane pin might be in a different field than all this, its fate having far less ramifications than the destruction of journalism and the loss of journalists’ jobs, but it highlights what happens when AI’s promises don’t come to pass: The tech barons sell what scraps they can to some other sucker, and regular people are left with something not only useless, but worse than before, whether that’s the degradation of local news or a $700 wearable the company has completely washed its hands of.
I don’t know how us regular folks actually stop all this from happening, beyond refusing to engage with these products that are becoming more unavoidable by the day. But we can at least refuse to sing the chorus of “early days” and “obviously it will get better” AI makers need of us and call these products out as the bullshit they are.
