We Shouldn't Be Surprised That the AI Pin is Bad

The Humane AI Pin is bad. The writing was always on the wall for this one. Any product whose core promise builds on the current state of generative AI is going to be bad. And it's going to stay that way until we can trust the robots to not lie to us.

Not to mention, you have to clip the freakin' thing to your shirt.

The problem with voice assistants in general is that there is no way to know for sure if they did what you asked without checking for yourself. Once you go through the effort to double check, you could have simply done the task on your own. While you can generally predict the way that Siri or Google Assistant will fail (usually by simply not completing the task), AI throws a massive wrench into that problem since it will fail in strange new ways and act upon false information.

John Gruber on Daring Fireball:

I don’t know where Humane goes from here but this might be impossible to recover from reputationally. It seems borderline criminal that they shipped it in this state.

Humane massively overpromised and underdelivered here, and this whole thing had a Kickstarter-scam vibe from the very beginning. We learned over the last decade or so that startups with big ambitions are generally not to be expected to deliver. Media in general is far too bullish on AI, but tech media should have known better than to hype this launch to the levels they did.

It's not clear to me that Humane's ideal AI Pin is a genuinely useful thing, and the pin in its current state is clearly a shell of that potential. Last year, when the pin was revealed, we didn't know the extent of the train wreck that this launch would be, but the warning signs were there.