Another Startup Implosion Set To Brick $700 ‘AI Pins’
from the see-this-fancy-brick-pinned-to-my-shirt? dept
We have been talking about the problem of ownership in the modern world for some time, particularly as it revolves around how digital or internet-reliant products are sold. It’s become such a prevalent problem that there’s something of a generic mantra for it: You don’t actually own the thing you bought. There’s a spectrum to this, though, which spans from the idea that digital video games are licensed rather than sold to companies either removing features sold with a product or suddenly hiding them behind a paywalled app, all the way up to companies going under and rendering products already sold to customers into useless bricks and e-waste as backend servers get unplugged.
None of these outcomes are good for the consumer, but that last category is the one that both creates the most visceral response and is the most plainly absurd. It also very much breeds distrust. You can see some of that in action when it comes to the latest example of a startup’s implosion bricking a product: Humane’s AI pin.
After launching its AI Pin in April 2024 and reportedly seeking a buyout by May 2024, Humane is shutting down. Most of the people who bought an AI Pin will not get refunds for the devices, which debuted at $700, dropped to $500, and will be bricked on February 28 at noon PT.
At that time, AI Pins, which are lapel pins with an integrated AI voice assistant, camera, speaker, and laser projector, “will no longer connect to Humane’s servers,” and “all customer data, including personal identifiable information… will be permanently deleted from Humane’s servers,” according to Humane’s FAQ page. Humane also stopped selling AI pins as of yesterday and canceled any orders that had been made but not yet fulfilled. Humane said it is discontinuing the AI Pin because it’s “moving onto new endeavors.”
Which is another way of saying that the company will be selling off all of its assets to HP and winding down completely. Hundreds of dollars have been spent on these devices by people and they’re just going to stop working. Completely. No refunds for the majority of customers, as they’re only being offered on purchases within the last 90 days. No open-sourcing of the product so that members of the public can stand up their own servers. Just… gone.
And while I will admit I struggle at times to feel a great deal of sympathy for people when they fall for a lot of the AI-hyped-up bullshit that is out there, people are pissed about this and justifiably so.
One Reddit user, for example, wrote on the Humane subreddit that they “feel like we’ve been duped.”
The announcement has also made some apparent users cynical about the intentions of the San Francisco firm, which former Apple executives launched in 2018.
“It’s truly a middle finger. Especially because there is no way around it due to the server reliance. I believe this was their plan all along. Sell and [get out],” one Reddit user said.
Similarly, another Reddit user said the lack of refunds and server access were “a blow” to early adopters, saying, “Humane won by selling. HP won a new tech. All consumers got fucked…”
The comment that sticks out to me is the one indicating that this was the plan all along. Now, I don’t believe that in its entirety. I’m certain that the folks at Humane didn’t want this exact scenario to play out. After all, last year the company was seeking a buyer willing to pay nearly $1 billion for the company. See? They didn’t get exactly what they wanted!
But creating a company to speedrun from an absurd initial valuation to a buyout by a larger tech firm isn’t exactly unheard of in Silicon Valley. Nor in many other places for that matter. And, while I doubt very much that any planning sessions at Humane involved someone saying, “And here’s where we fuck all of our customers completely by shutting down their devices, bwah ha ha!,” I have no trouble believing that this was a company created to be sold all along. And it sure does seem like the company didn’t have its own customers’ best interests in mind as it was seeking a buyer all along.
Humane also continued to push the pins despite reportedly seeking a buyer since May, and it gave AI Pin owners just 10 days to reckon with their expensive devices being bricked. In addition, the limited refund window seems like a slap in the face to people who were willing to spend extra money to be early adopters.
Here again we find that our laws simply have not kept up with the times. There needs to be some structure and rules around this sort of thing, such that the public is at least protected from buying a $700 product only to find out 91 days later that the product is gone and there is no refund coming. That such a situation is untenable is not a controversial opinion.
Maybe someone can take this up with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and… oh, yeah, never mind.
Filed Under: ai pin, humane ai, ownership
Companies: hp, humane
Comments on “Another Startup Implosion Set To Brick $700 ‘AI Pins’”
Sounds like a crypto pump and dump.
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Delete the word “crypto”. This stuff’s been happening in basically all business areas, for decades if not longer, in ways usually unrelated to cryptography.
Although this does match “pump and dump” in many ways, there are also differences that could make a charge difficult. For example, they weren’t accepting public stock investment. “Bait and switch”, “exit scam”, and “pyramid scheme” are other terms that could kind of apply, but not exactly.
I’m surprised we haven’t just started calling it something like the “internet-of-things scam”, as they pretty much all seem to end this way. (I do have some sympathy for the Reddit user who feels to have been duped. On the other hand… come on, at this point, it seems like some serious gullibility, doesn’t it?)
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I included crypto because the AI pin and crypto are specifically new tech hype vehicles for making money from idiots and vultures who are either wowed by things they don’t understand or who see it as an opportunity to sucker others as long as you’re not left holding the bag. Sure, some stock pump and dumps involve claims about a new innovation, but they don’t have to.
A fool and his money are soon parted.
Calling this an implosion is misleading.
It was scam product from the start. It was only every meant to run off the AI hype.
This is a self nuke to their own customers as they get both a payout and new jobs with HP.
I asked ChatGPT to detail a plan as POTUS, and it said to create an executive order, so now I know where trump got his ideas from.
For the engineers? Certainly they didn’t want things to go this way.
For the people who founded and ran the company, though? They absolutely did plan for things to go this way. Sure they wanted to sell for a higher price than they eventually did, but they planned to sell right from the start. As for planning to screw over their customers, that assumes they thought about their customers at all beyond being walking ATMs. I’m pretty sure they didn’t. The laws make it so what happens to their customers after the sale is Not Their Problem, and Not The Buyer’s Problem either, and that’s as far as their thinking needed to go. So their not planning explicitly on screwing over their customers is irrelevant, they planned for an outcome where the screwing would be inevitable.
Consumer Action Taskforce
I’m not affiliated with this wiki in any way but it’s a good resource and I’m just spreading the word. This is a wiki that was started in order to inform consumers about these companies shitty practices. It was started by a Youtuber called Louis Rossmann, who also advocates for right to repair. It’s a great idea to name-and-shame companies that do this kind of thing and keep consumers informed. It’s really blown up since it was recently started. People are sick of this!
Save This Life shutdown
A similar thing has happened to pet owners throughout the U.S. earlier this month.
A Texas company called Save This Life, which registered microchip info for pets, shut down earlier this month. It means that pet owners’ information might be lost since it no longer links to a major national lookup database. Many might not know the chips used in their pet or even the ID info on the chip.
They now have to visit a vet or an animal shelter to have this info scanned and re-entered for their pet.
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This seems kind of ridiculous. Why would a national database have been needed anyway? To store the owner’s name and address would take like 80 bytes of data. Any standard rewritable NFC tag could do that. Or just attach an SD card to the pet’s collar, or, you know, use a pen and some waterproof paper.
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Pet microchips typically don’t include owner information in plaintext. They contain numbers for database references because the owner may change, the contact info and address may change, and not every owner wants a random person scanning their pets to get their home addresses and telephone numbers.
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“Or just attach an SD card to the pet’s collar, or, you know, use a pen and some waterproof paper.”
Collars can easily fall off / be deliberately taken off. Especially if you have a cat that hates wearing collars.
Ask me how many collars I’ve purchased over the years and never seen again.
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It’s somewhat frowned upon, these days, to let cats roam outdoors unsupervised. But, yeah, there are potential reasons why one might want something a bit different. What about those anklets that are so popular with the Canada geese?
And is there really much risk that personal information will be leaked by people scanning nearby pets? It seems more likely that the entire national database would leak due to incompetence.
At least this “AI Pin” is doing something that cannot currently be done on a tiny non-networked device.
You know how there was a federal database of bad cops, until they nuked it, perhaps it is time to start one for tech.
Oh well 2 of the founders have a history of bricking devices, this one one uses the surprise paywall for basic features 6 months in.
Imagine if it was easy to find out if the team behind the device were the type of people who screw customers to line their pockets.
No one else is going to help the consumers, so self help it is.
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you are fare more optimistic than I am.
This approach necessarily means a large number of people need to be screwed over before we can start helping people.
And it also depends on the number of people willing to fuck others over is small compared to the pool of people who have both the capability and motivation to hand the task.
I think a list of people known NOT to screw others over might be a more appropriate choice.
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I don’t think we need either of these things. Just ask yourself, or the company, whether the product is designed such that it can continue to work when the company no longer exists. Don’t buy stuff that depends on a central server.
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Yes. That’s good advice. It’s been available for decades now. And yet here we are. Since the first attempt and all of it’s many encores were largely unsuccessfully, another approach is being attempted.