Eshu Marneedi

Brody Ford, reporting for Bloomberg:

HP Inc. will acquire assets from Humane Inc., the maker of a wearable Ai Pin introduced in late 2023, for $116 million.

The deal will include the majority of Humane’s employees in addition to its software platform and intellectual property, the company said Tuesday. It will not include Humane’s Ai pin device business, which will be wound down, an HP spokesperson said.

Humane’s team, including founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, will form a new division at HP to help integrate artificial intelligence into the company’s personal computers, printers, and connected conference rooms, said Tuan Tran, who leads HP’s AI initiatives. Chaudhri and Bongiorno were design and software engineers at Apple Inc. before founding the startup.

For people who spent $700 on an Ai Pin like a sucker, Humane published a nice knowledge base article effectively announcing its devices will become the world’s most expensive paperweights in just 10 days:

• End of Consumer Availability: Effective immediately, new purchases of the consumer Ai Pin will be discontinued.

• Device Timeline: Your Ai Pin will continue to function normally until 12pm PST on February 28, 2025. After this date, it will no longer connect to Humane’s servers, and .Center access will be fully retired.

• Device Features: Your Ai Pin features will no longer include calling, messaging, Ai queries/responses, or cloud access.

• Data Access: We strongly encourage you to sync your Ai Pin over Wi-Fi and download any stored pictures, videos, and notes from .Center before February 28, 2025. If you do not do this, your data will be lost upon deletion on February 28, 2025 at 12pm PST.

• Data Deletion: On February 28, 2025 at 12pm PST all remaining consumer data will be permanently deleted.

But the best part of the announcement that truly made me burst out laughing is unfortunately hidden in a frequently-asked-questions page on Humane’s support website:

Can I still use my Ai Pin for offline features?

Yes. After February 28, 2025, Ai Pin will still allow for offline features like battery level, etc., but will not include any function that requires cloud connectivity like voice interactions, AI responses, and .Center access.

It’s good to know that I’ll be able to occasionally ask my useless hunk of plastic and metal what its battery level is. It’s genuinely hysterical. Bear in mind that this is entirely Humane’s fault for stubbornly — and perhaps cunningly — pawning off all processing to the cloud and hiding it behind a mandatory “Humane Plan” subscription. Before Humane even went out of business, anyone who failed to renew the eye-watering $25 monthly subscription would have their pin disabled. It couldn’t even take photos because doing so required access to the “Humane.center” cloud portal. Humane didn’t even stand on the same moral footing as Rabbit’s R1 — an even worse cryptocurrency scam — which doesn’t require a subscription to connect to large language models. (Speaking of Rabbit, I reckon that, too, will meet its maker in six months, right in time for its partnership with Best Buy to die due to a lack of sales.)

I knew this was going to happen; we all knew this was going to happen, and the only company stupid enough to buy such a worthless firm for millions of dollars is HP. Some people online are seemingly surprised Humane was able to “make” $116 million out of the deal with HP, but it’s just an astonishing failure. Humane raised approximately $230 million beginning in September 2020, according to Tracxn, a website that collects venture capitalist funding data, so the $116 million deal is only about half of what Humane needs to pay its investors back.¹ I don’t think the Ai Pin’s sales came remotely close to over $100 million, which means HP is probably buying most of Humane’s debt — however much there is. It makes complete sense, actually: HP is renowned for its Instagram-caliber acquisitions and sky-high consumer satisfaction, so I believe it’ll turn Humane around into a successful, multibillion-dollar wing of the company by the end of the year, just like its printer subscription business.

In the meantime, Imran Chaudhri, the company’s founder who apparently is known as an “utter fraud” by Apple employees who used to work with him during his time there, can get back to his Buddhist monk meetings while laying off presumably his entire staff. I truly can’t tell what HP is acquiring here — the technology is being sunsetted, the staff is laid off, and I can’t imagine HP would want to drag around the defaced Humane branding for much longer. How is this company worth $116 million when its debt alone is double that? For heaven’s sake, whatever’s left of the company didn’t even have the moral compass to allow buyers to jailbreak their pins, so if anything, HP is acquiring a rotten carcass of braindead engineers and a pompous narcissist as department head. Sounds like a winning strategy.

Not to beat a dead horse, but I knew all of this would happen just weeks after the Ai Pin was officially revealed. Here’s what I wrote in November 2023 about the company’s future:

I have major concerns about how Humane will be able to keep this product up and running far into the future. What happens if OpenAI sunsets its API? What happens if Humane goes out of business? What if an Ai Pin breaks; what does the service procedure look like? What if Humane retires its MVNO? These are all concerns anyone who buys a product from a scrappy Silicon Valley start-up shares. But this time, it’s different. The Humane Ai Pin is not cheap; it’s $700. For $700, Humane has to have its stuff figured out.

Narrator: It did not, in fact, have its stuff figured out. I ended my piece by saying that I was rooting for Humane but thought this product just missed the mark. That was before the outstanding reviews that would come the following spring:

• The Verge: “Not even close.”
• Marques Brownlee: “The worst product I’ve ever reviewed.”
• Engadget: “The solution to none of technology’s problems.”

It didn’t just miss the mark; it was a scam. It did nothing it was advertised to do, it became a worthless paperweight after less than a year in production, and the company had no direction after its launch. The Humane Ai Pin was a poorly conceived effort to show investors Humane was worth spending money on after the original 2018 concept failed and large language models were introduced to pick up the slack. Nobody could convince me Humane’s original vision for the project in 2018 was based on LLMs because OpenAI had barely existed as a company and the foundational “Attention is All You Need” paper that invented transformer models (the T in “GPT”) was only written months earlier. I don’t know what Chaudhri’s original concept was for the Humane Ai Pin, but what actually shipped was a hastily cobbled-together concoction of web calls for an outrageous $700.

I feel bad for Humane customers, but I don’t have any sympathy for Humane itself. I don’t feel like I’m dancing on its grave. Its founders knew what they were doing with full intention to deceive investors and buyers. The plan all along was to sell enough units to make some media headlines, cut losses, and sell a hefty amount of debt to the first idiot who offered. The plan worked.