So this is scam right? Overpromise on a product that doesn't work then sell the company for some huge price because it's cutting edge technology? Because it feels like a scam.
this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
407 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
59534 readers
3143 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Yeah, the product was a boondoggle. Trying to sell the company after that launch, with nothing else in the pipeline, is a scam.
remember how over the past few years almost everything brand new had the word "blockchain" shoehorned into it for no good reason?
This is the same kind of thing. It's an atrocious boondoggle. There must still be a serious amount of cocaine floating around Venture Capitalist parties, because one of those boys is gonna drop 500M on this company and think they bought the dip, when in fact they, themselves, are the dip.
load more comments
(4 replies)
Anything with "AI" in the title is a cash grab with very little actual technical worth except the models and training data.
Pretty much anything with AI on the tin is a scam. Because when an AI product gets a useful valuable application, it immediately changes name to something else.
They're all scams. This one's just more obvious.
It's just how the us economy works
load more comments
(2 replies)
alright guys I'll take one for the team and buy the company
Relevant username.
I'm gonna buy you too windie
Pretty sure that's been illegal since 1865
Like with everything, only if you do not have enough money.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
This is the same as Ben Shapiro telling people to sell their houses once Florida goes under water from a climate crisis. To who? Neptune?
Rabbit R1 will soon to follow
Meh, that one is cheap enough and has a passable update cycle, I'd say it can stay relevant.
It is also created by a crypto-scheme company. So I'm not sure I have too much confidence
dramatic music score
Remember when nerds used to be smarter than us? That was awesome.
Nerds still are smarter than us.
Unfortunately a cult of managers has arisen to rule over the nerds and they hype with an iron fist.
Managers realized that the nerds' autism could be exploited for profit
It's important to realize that the nerd you saw on the news has always been someone wearing nerd as a costume and the entire history of technology is loaded with examples of the real nerd being marginalized. It's just that in ages past the VC's would give a smaller amount of money and require the startup to go through concrete milestones to unlock all of it so there was more of a chance for the founder's dreams to smack up against reality before they were $230m in the hole with no product worth selling.
load more comments
(2 replies)
This is hilarious, scrambling to get a golden parachute and live off some trust fund from the sale. The sad part is that they will probably get that.
That's the worst part. They knew the product sucked, everyone knew the product sucked, this was always the plan. Ask for a billion get 200 million. That's 100 for each founder. Go live on a private beach somewhere.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Their adoption plan was just wrong. Few people want to give up their phones, and the general public has had enough of a learning curve struggle with mobile phones. The device didn't make sense, at least not in its current state.
The AI bubble will burst soon, and when it does, real innovation will happen.
They designed a product that doesn't solve a problem that anyone has. On top of that they designed something that doesn't even work well.
Yep, at high price+monthly fee, too.
If they had a couple of unbeatable patents that they just couldn't figure out how to turn into products, that's almost forgivable -- you blew your launch, so you sell out to a company who has the resources to make your ideas into something the public will buy. But as far as I can tell, these guys don't really have any IP worth buying them out for.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Even if they did want to give up their phones, they wouldn't for anything with a two to four hour device. Let alone something that only has a mild neato factor of a low powered laser projector. Smart watches do the same shit with a longer battery life and virtually no one's replacing their phones with those, either.
load more comments
(1 replies)
„bethany bongiorno“ is the most made-up sounding name I‘ve ever heard
load more comments
(1 replies)
Who would have guess that another overpriced solution to a non existent problem that no one wants would have been a commercial failure ....
We are in a capitalist dystopia. We could be using AI to predict energy usage and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, or help in discovering new protein folds ... but no ... Timmy wants to look like a cool futuristic dude and he's willing to pay $600 to look cooler than his peers
We could be using AI to predict energy usage and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels
That's happening
or help in discovering new protein folds
That too.
There's always been barnacles on the ship of progress. That doesn't mean it's only barnacles.
load more comments
(1 replies)
these people live in a delusion, chasing star trek fantasies while the general population can barely afford rent. we are truly due for the chickens to come home to roost.
i just hope a lot of innocent animals don't get hurt in the process.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
$750m? That company worth about three fiddy.
I could see it being useful if it was an accessory to your phone. Not having to dig my phone out of my pocket to take a picture of something to look it up, or having a push-to-talk badge or pendant would make it more convenient, especially for folks like me who don't wear watches. And with Bluetooth it would have decent battery life.
But the damn thing can't even set a timer.
A lot of the form factor is already mostly available in smart watches. They have to, at the bare minimum, conver the bsse functionality of those before moving onto real time ai interaction that is never real time and is hardly a proper interaction.
Progressive enhancement would be great here, smart watch in a pin form factor but with AI powered features when they make sense. Maybe some kind of super fine tuned orchestrator that know when to pass onto siri/assisstant vs. some cloud model (setting a timer requires simple parsing but a complex philosophical question can be offloaded to AI)
There are already copycat products out and I don't feel sympathy for any of them.
I want to say up front that, I don't feel any sympathy for the company, nor do I have any love for the ewaste they created.
That being said, it's a decent idea, and I would have liked to see where it went. Their implementation was completely wrong on do many points, but it was still a half decent idea. Basically having what Google assistant should have been, pinned to your chest like a comm badge sounds pretty cool. The laser projector for your hand was interesting, but very hokey, the data communication was poorly thought out, far too slow to be useful, the design wasn't the worst, but still not great. The battery life was questionable at best....
But the concept of what it was supposed to be able to do, was not terrible. Possibly the last terrible part of the product.
Personally, I want a personal assistant. Since I'm not rich, I can't exactly hire one. Having an AI assistant, that you talk to through a communications badge seems like a decent idea. I'd want it to basically run from my phone, mostly local to my phone, so my data isn't pushed everywhere, but the tech isn't quite there yet. Not enough TOPS, not enough memory, not enough storage for all the models; and certainly not enough battery to power AI running on your phone.
I can see what they were going for but they fell so far short of the goal that it's not really visible in what was delivered.
I imagine the pitch meeting about this being something along the lines of a guy rushing in after watching Star Trek discovery, when they got the holographic comm badges, and going, I want to make that! With the Zora AI and everything! And then people jumping on the bandwagon, knowing full well that they're not even going to come close.
I hope everyone that works there gets new jobs in sectors that aren't using AI as a parlor trick or buzzword to try to move units.
Good bye, company I don't care enough to remember the name of. We hardly knew you, and even that was probably too much interaction.
load more comments
(1 replies)
When you find out you were only good because you drank the trillion dollar brand Kool-Aid.
Here is female founder's LinkedIn background image, web search result top 20, with that thing on.
Demographic is..I mean was?
Here is an awkward photo of both Founders: https://images.fastcompany.net/image/upload/w_596,c_limit,q_auto:best,f_auto/wp-cms/uploads/2020/09/i-Bethany-and-Imran.jpg
They wanted so bad to be the next Jobs-Wozniak duo. They even made their marketing and presentations coded to look Apple like. There's a really cringe presentation of Imran showing the pin, and he literally pauses after grand statements several times waiting for cheers and applause, but the audience is completely silence. Once they applaud out of pity or something after an awkwardly long pause, and the dude says something like “thanks, finally” or something along those lines. They are extremely cringe and awkward all the time.
who could have forseen that "the app, as a hardware device" wouldnt sell well.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Despite seemingly having nothing else in the pipeline and the AI Pin being dead on arrival, Bloomberg reports the company is "seeking a price of between $750 million and $1 billion in a sale."
Humane was founded by two ex-Apple employees, Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, in 2018 and has raised $230 million from some big-name investors like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
The Humane AI Pin immediately seemed like an idea that only made sense in a VC pitch room.
The device is a wearable voice command box and camera that you magnetically clip onto a shirt, sort of like a Star Trek communicator.
The device comes in two halves, with a front processing unit and a back battery, and the side clipped together magnetically with your shirt in the middle.
Don't be surprised if history places Humane on the list of "biggest tech startup flops ever" alongside the likes of Juicero and Ouya.
The original article contains 441 words, the summary contains 154 words. Saved 65%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
view more: next ›