Hours after the acquisition was announced, several Humane employees received job offers. Others were not so lucky.
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Roughly 10 months after it was released, the Humane AI Pin, a terribly executed and terrible product is now officially a $700 brick of e-waste after the company sold its software to HP and told its dozens of customers that they are now out of luck.
Every Humane AI Pin ever created will stop functioning at the end of the month. Well, that is not exactly correct. As Engadget has pointed out, Humane told customers that nearly every function of the AI pin will stop working on February 28, but that true diehards can continue to access “offline” features, which primarily seems to be checking whether the battery is charged or not: “After February 28, 2025, AI Pin will still allow for offline features like battery level, etc., but will not include any function that requires cloud connectivity like voice interactions, AI responses, and Center access.” Humane went on to say that “We encourage you to recycle your AI Pin through an e-waste recycling program.”
404 MediaJason Koebler
If you are not familiar, the AI Pin is a $700 piece of junk that was supposed to be an “AI assistant” but instead barely worked, was perhaps a fire hazard, and whose main functionality was triggering fragile venture capitalists on Twitter who self-immolated when the reviews were understandably very bad.
There is very little to say about the Humane AI pin right now other than they are very lucky that the vast majority of tech journalists in the United States are too busy writing about the Elon Musk-led ransacking of the federal government to dunk on this company in the way it truly deserves (we are also doing this but need a break for five minutes).
The company and the tech was wildly hyped, wasted gazillions of dollars (it raised $240 million in funding), made something terrible, existed for less than a year, and are now hazardous e-waste that is a huge pain in the ass to safely dispose of. The saving grace of all of this is that Humane sold so few devices (roughly 10,000) that the number of consumers who are affected is relatively low as these things go and therefore, there are fewer of them that need to be recycled.
The Humane AI Pin is the latest in a long line of internet of things devices that cost a lot and then became e-waste when the company decided to stop supporting it or went out of business.
On recycling: I have been to electronics recycling centers, and small wearables like this are labor intensive to recycle because they have small, difficult-to-remove batteries. An iFixit teardown wondered whether Humane pin was one of the “worst devices ever,” and stated that both the Humane AI pin and the Rabbit R1, another AI wearable, “have batteries that are a pain to remove, hidden behind thoroughly glued-down panels,” and that “making the battery so difficult to reach is perplexing at best.”
Anyways, we must never forget the Humane AI Pin. Good job everyone.
Joan Cros/NurPhoto via Getty Images
AI startup Humane said on Tuesday that it was discontinuing its AI Pin and selling parts of its business to HP for $116 million.
The transaction, which is expected to close at the end of February, will see HP acquire Humane's employees, software, patents, and patent applications, Humane said in a statement on Tuesday.
Humane said on the same day that it would be discontinuing the AI Pin "effective immediately." The company said in an update on its website that it was also halting device sales.
"Your AI Pin will continue to function normally until 12 p.m. PST on February 28, 2025," the company wrote in its update, adding that the devices will stop connecting to its servers thereafter.
Humane said in a separate FAQ on the AI Pin that it will offer refunds to customers whose devices were "shipped on or after November 15th, 2024." All refund requests must be submitted by February 27, the company added.
Following the acquisition, Humane's employees and co-founders, Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri will become a part of HP's new AI innovation lab, HP IQ. Bongiorno and Chaudhri, who are married to each other, were longtime Apple employees before they left to start Humane in 2019.
The new division will be "focused on building an intelligent ecosystem across HP's products and services for the future of work," HP said in a statement on Tuesday.
Representatives for Humane and HP did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Launched in November 2023, the AI Pin was Humane's first product. Humane pitched the pin as an AI personal assistant to customers. Besides taking calls and answering texts through voice commands, users could also interact with the pin via its laser-projected display.
The AI Pin was included in Time magazine's list of best inventions in October 2023, and was hotly anticipated even before its debut.
However, the AI Pin was hit with negative reviews over its design and features. In October, Humane lowered the price of the AI Pin from $699 to $499.
When asked about the criticisms surrounding the AI Pin, Bongiorno and Chaudhri said in a statement to BI in April that it was only the "beginning of the story."
"We have an ambitious road map with software refinements, new features, additional partnerships, and our SDK," Humane's co-founders said. "All of this will enable your AI Pin to become smarter and more powerful over time."
Humane announced on Tuesday that most of its assets have been acquired by HP for $116 million. The hardware startup is immediately discontinuing sales of its $499 AI Pins. Humane alerted customers who have already purchased the Pin that their devices will stop functioning before the end of the month — at 12 p.m. PST […]
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When Humane released its Ai Pin, the San Francisco-based gadget maker envisioned a world with dedicated AI devices — something that you would carry with you in addition to the smartphone in your pocket. However, reviews and sales haven’t been great — returns reportedly begun to outpace unit sales at one point. And Humane recently dropped […]
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