Humane's AI pin dies an ignominious death

Here's hoping that its Icarus flight won't scare off others building in this emerging category

The launch event for the Humane AI pin was basically a pageant of hubris, a pantomime of an Apple event that proved almost all style and very little substance. To be clear, I’m not critical of Humane founders Imran Chaudri and Bethany Bongiorno’s ambitions: the concept behind Humane was truly trailblazing, with bold bets on emerging technologies and novel approaches to consumer devices, a category otherwise infected by a rictus of lack of innovation.

What I didn’t love about the Humane approach was the bombast – the slick presentations that cribbed from Apple’s shiny, perfect and fully realized marketing machine. Chaudri and Bongiorno cut their teeth at the iPhone maker, so it was somewhat inevitable that they’d borrow from that playbook. But just about every one of Apple’s consumer devices is a very mature product, from industrial design, to software experience, and everything in between.

Humane’s AI pin was basically the opposite.

Despite the veneer of professional hardware finishes, Humane’s pin was a lab prototype masquerading as a shipping consumer product. It was breaking a lot of new ground with respect to user interaction paradigms, and the fundamentals of what people expect their personal devices to be able to do for them. It was also doing all of this on top of a foundation made up of emerging, non-deterministic AI technology that was itself extremely rough around the edges and shifting in terms of both capabilities and performance on a daily basis.

Compare and contrast Humane’s AI pin launch with that of its closest contemporary, the Rabbit R1. The latter was also a brand new piece of consumer tech, which aimed to ride the wave of generative AI to produce real value for its users in a novel way. Like Humane, Rabbit definitely engaged in some stunt marketing around its launch, with founder Jesse Lyu delivering a vaguely Apple-like ‘keynote’ presentation at CES 2024 when it had its official launch.

The difference was that where Humane’s approach was self-serious and imbued with an unearned level of professional polish, Rabbit’s was playful, purposefully experimental and generally more resonant with early adopters who had at least some grasp on the trade-offs inherent in entirely new product categories.

Rabbit still overpromised and underdelivered. But it had a much lower cost of entry (not to mention a lack of ongoing subscription commitments), less bombastic claims about its functionality at launch, and what seems now like a better course of iteration following its official launch to help its real-world performance more closely resemble its pre-launch claims.

Like I said, I don’t begrudge Humane’s team their big swing: Especially in consumer tech, ambitious, wild and truly novel ideas are precious and few. But my friend and former TechCrunch colleague, Greg Kumparak texted me to express concern that Humane’s failure will dampen interest from others who might otherwise have tried similarly interesting things, and that captures perfectly my primary concern.

Generative AI has been a game-changer in many ways across the broad landscape of tech, but I think it still has massive unexplored potential in consumer devices. Yes, Android and iOS are incorporating it more and more, but it still feels like just another feature addition (and a sometimes very poorly executed one at that). Plaud’s AI note pendant and the similar Limitless AI wearable are perhaps more successful (if less ambitious) examples of AI-first consumer hardware, but there’s still some undiscovered paradigms out there that won’t be found without a healthy appetite for risk from more brave explorers.