Humane is said to be seeking a $1 billion buyout after only 10,000 orders of its terrible AI Pin

I'm honestly surprised they made 10,000 sales.

Every web outlet and influencer with more than 1000 followers bought one. But that's all they're ever going to sell.
- Isn't it ironic that most likely, all their sales were used to make videos roasting their shitty product?

I am also seeking a $1 billion buy out, to compensate for years of being underpaid! What a coincidence!

I'd buy you out but all I have is my 20 bucks from streaming music revenue and I'm going to spend that on beer.
- If you even made one dollar off your own music, that's fuckin cool. You earned that beer!
  What's your band called?
- A 6 pack of good beer or a 30 pack of piss?

No one wants badly executed overheating slow Google assistant in a pointless little box. You already have a superior assistant in your pocket, reacting to your voice.

okay but what if it could also set you on fire?
- What if I use a Samsung Note 7?
- Checkmate
- Buy an old Samsung S7?
  Edit: Ah fuck. It's the note 7 and I fucked up.
And bluetooth pins that allow you to talk to the AI in your pocket already exist. That's without that projector screen thing but still.
Sure sure, but this one is very close to your skin and vital organs and could burn you or just plain explode, so how about it?
Some try-hard wants to reinvent the wheel to show what a cutting-edge "disruptor" they can be, but they only succeed in making a shittier version of an already extant product

ask for 1B valuation with only ~7M in sales + ~240k/mo subscription revenue… hmmmm gonna be a no for me Dogg

The entire company was a pump and dump scheme. They're gonna continue the pump until dump or bankruptcy.
- ~~Extremely expected for a company that used to be all on in NFTs~~
Don't forget about the dangerous batteries and looming recall (due to court action I'm sure)! They'll soon have ZERO customers, in a way.
So, if we do some sloppy rounding and say that the subscriptions make them 3 million a year . . . it'll only take a bit more than 330 years for anyone buying Humane at the asking price to break even. My cat could figure out that wasn't a good buy. (Of course, he'd prefer to invest in a tuna cannery . . .)
- I’d follow TUNA tips for more hot cat calls

I'm sure there's some MBA douche stupid enough to buy it.

I could see Apple buying it. The form factor makes sense, it's the fact that it relies on AI and has its own cell connection are the main issues. If I could tap it and have Siri take dictation or take a picture of something to get more information it would be pretty neat.
- Apple already have the perfect form factor, it’s called a phone.
- Why on earth would apple buy this shitty android device? And feature wise, they can just make the airpods into an AI device paired with your phone or watch.
- I don’t need any hardware that does something my phone already does.
  I don’t understand this reverse consolidation these companies think people want.
- Does it though? Having it pull down your shirt, having to rely on projecting a GUI on your hand, and being unable to hear it in loud environments all seem like pretty strong limitations of the form factor

"MKBHD takes out another company" /s

I don’t see how the AI assistant won’t eventually just end up on the smartphone. And, given that it’s not always appropriate to talk out loud to your phone, being able to use it with a screen makes it the perfect device for it.

That’s why they made it a pin.
Sure you can sell an app on the App Store, but most people won’t pay more than 5 bucks for an app, and even that’s stretching it. And the subscription market is already over saturated. So how do you make a boatload of cash? Sell overpriced hardware that needs to be “upgraded” every year or 2 to use new features, and include a subscription to use the thing in the first place.
They wanted to pull an Apple and lock people into their hardware ecosystem. I guarantee there was a plan for them to release an AI phone in the next 5 years if this thing did well.
What they missed is Apple products are generally pleasant to use on a daily basis. From what everyone said, this thing was hot garbage and slow to respond to queries.
- It will just come as standard with phones. Apple made a deal with OpenAI so it’s only a matter of time until Samsung does the same. Then it becomes a selling point for the device.
- Yeah, that's all correct, but sometimes you just have to admit that the idea in that form is not good and don't make a product out of it...
- As someone who doesn't wear a watch, having a little fob that I could use to activate Siri without digging my phone out of my pocket would be pretty nice. If it were a phone peripheral it probably would have been a lot better.
There's totally a use case for a peripheral like a watch... But it's only so you don't have to pull your phone out of your pocket.
The ear bud/voice interface we see in the movie Her looks nice too TBH.
If we ever get LLMs or whatever we call AI next that is able to understand us that well and perform complex actions for us, I could see that working great.

How do you actually get the oil from the snake though?

Turn them into bovine fodder, then get the oil from the bullshit.

I’m also be seeking for a 1 billion payout

At least my product is working as intended

Huh - so it turns out people liked how smartphones consolidated all their various devices into one?

I guess the era of the hardware app is over…

You can't conclude that from this. The fact that there was hype and excitement about this supports an interest in the concept. This was simply utterly horrible execution and that is all.
- Which hype? lol. Everyone hated this idea since reveal.
- I actually agree. I would cite the Playdate as a counterexample.

Inevitably. That's the goal of most tech startups; hype themselves up and sell out for as many millions as possible. Meanwhile honest labor, education, and trades workers can't afford houses.

Thinking about the cost of maintenance, liabilities, and ethical/moral decisions

you couldn't pay me enough to take on that company

good luck to anyone else thinking otherwise

HP is reportedly one of the companies that Humane was in talks with over a potential sale

They didn’t learn the lesson with webos? They lost billions even if that was a good os with good phones.

Can’t imagine anyone wanting to buy this company for more than 1million and that’s just because of patents and devs (acquihire - where the buyer is only interested in ip and devs and doesn’t care at all about the actual product)

I could draw a kitten for that kind of money if anyone is interested. At least there are no monthly costs to it.

What an insane valuation, lol. I wonder how gullible their seeders/initial investors were when they pitched the company initially. Needing to get that much money to settle bills and debts just blows my mind. Shit like this is why I sold my AMD shares at its peak a few months ago and why it's probably worth considering selling Nvidia now as it's peaking. The AI boom may peak a bit higher, but I think the frenzy is going to begin waning within the next ~6 months as more and more investors realize the tech is still very limited outside of backend enterprise use (e.g. using LLMs to ingest all your SOPs, regulations, technical documents, etc. and then make it available for employees to query for random work questions).

But who knows, I've been wrong before.

Ed Zitron is going to have a field day with this one.

I listen to Better Offline and I’m as jaded and cynical as the rest of us, but even I find some of his episodes too much to take.
Like he has no impartiality at all, particularly his takes on LLMs. Our small company of software developers and engineers have saved so much time with Visual Studio CoPilot. The fact is there are uses where they’re extremely useful; just maybe not as the MSM portrays it.
- He does get a bit ranty. I still appreciate his take though. Some of the LLMs are super helpful for me for some tasks, but the hype cycle for AI is really a lot to take and it does warrant some actual pushback against it. I can tell I’m becoming more of an old man, but it’s nice to have someone else confirm how bad the Internet is becoming. It’s almost like a hazy dream for me of back in the early days when it was just people sharing weird stuff with each other and not the active battle to fend off ads and scummy sites to find things.

Humane as a company is worth the cost of exactly 10,000 units.

Tell me it's being bought by a data mining company?

10k orders huh... How many returns though?

Given the amount of money they're looking for, guessing it's for the unreleased products in the pipeline and their patents. Anyone who buys them is not purchasing their v1 product.