Humane

There’s a lot to take away from Humane’s story, but first, I want to share something I said on Twitter in July 2022, a full year before Humane revealed their product, the Ai Pin:

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Even prior to posting this, in response to any skepticism I had about Humane, people told me—publicly and privately—to “wait and see.” Some of these people knew Imran Chaudhri, Humane’s founder. Others had no idea who he was. Either way, a lot of people were giving him and Humane the benefit of the doubt from the start. I think we have to stop doing that in this industry.

Next time, let’s not “wait and see.” Instead, let’s spot the red flags more easily and have them be addressed.

• Claiming credibility through patents
• Paying editors to create Wikipedia articles about you
• Manufacturing hype before manufacturing products
• Pivoting the product to AI, even before shipping
• Pitching products via a TED talk
• Having no plan for inevitable electronic waste

Before Humane, Imran Chaudhri was not a person that many people outside of Apple knew of. After he was fired, to aid his credibility going forward, he boasted about his patent collection on his personal website.

At a company like Apple, patent authorship is politicized, and only a few people are usually listed on any given patent. Being one of those few people listed as a patent author can make someone feel really special and inflate their ego.

To give you an example, Ken Kocienda is an early employee of Humane who also boasts about his Apple inventions. I don’t think there are many people left who haven’t heard Ken tell his story of how he “invented” iPhone autocorrect. He rests on this singular laurel. That claim should make you wonder, if Ken was not on that team, wouldn’t someone else have done it? Yes. The answer is definitely yes. Did anyone else work on this other than Ken? I’d bet on it. But he’s the only person making this claim, so it’s the only story you hear. Pro Tip™: Always ask if someone’s trying to sell you their book. (He is.)

A cornerstone of working at Apple is recognizing that most things are collaborations, sometimes with people and teams that you never interact with, and it is rather humbling to know that you are just one small piece of a much larger puzzle. But from the outside, it can seem like a person who has a thousand patents is a certified genius.

Imran has claimed to have “invented” many, many things that were surely done in collaboration with others and definitely would have been done without his involvement.

There’s no reason to believe that a person listed as an Apple patent author makes them capable of inventing anything on their own that was made possible by the enormous teams and vast resources Apple has at its disposal.

When people make claims, please check them.

However, what was a little more troubling to me was how his contributions at Apple—including those patents—became the basis for an encyclopedic entry on Wikipedia.

Around when the company was founded, a Wikipedia article suddenly appeared about Imran Chaudhri that he paid for, proven by a disclaimer left on the article’s Talk page, which I’m sure very few people look at. I don’t think any media outlet ever picked up on this.

In 2018, like Imran himself, Humane was barely something anyone knew about. They were in “stealth mode” for three years. Before manufacturing any product for customers, the company was manufacturing hype for itself. People were simping for Humane, hanging on every word about a product that quite literally had not existed yet.

In October 2022, Imran tweeted:

The thing that strikes me is that before then, it was not clear Humane was making an AI-powered product at all. They probably weren’t. Earlier patents they filed focused on the “laser ink” display which maybe they hoped would play a bigger role. AI was likely a pivot after realizing the vision wasn’t materializing into a meaningful product or because investors were feeling the industry’s AI pressure. I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think this was supposed to be an AI product. It just became one.

It’s hard for me—as someone who has been in this industry for 15 years—to understand the fundamental difference between startup “stealth mode” and the entire period of time before you announce a product, so even though it took three years to emerge from said “stealth mode,” it still took two more years to announce their first product, which Imran did via a TED Talk.

If you watched the video of that talk, you know how cringe it was. Imran is not the first—nor will he be the last—to attempt a Steve Jobs or Jony Ive impersonation to introduce a product. But as he made his attempt, he noticeably lacked Steve’s charming stage presence and the elegant way Jony reads a script. Instead, Imran made a strange pitch that made me curious if he lives in the same reality I do.

It had been fifteen years since Steve introduced the iPhone, where making a call on stage was—for the last time—impressive. Imran opens with this, and only a few people in the audience seemed impressed.

Next, he has has the device translate his words, which after it does, he claims was “fluent French.” He then sprinkles in a statement he thinks sound smart but is so unconvincing.

Live translation is a dream feature for lots of people. Getting it right would be incredible. But does this deliver on that promise? Not quite.

Like many AI demos, Imran has the voice assistant answer a question he already knows the answer to, holding up a candy bar so the the voice assistant can say he should avoid eating it due to his cocoa butter intolerance. There’s a delayed, polite applause. He reminds the audience that he, not the AI voice assistant, is in control. “I’m going to eat it anyway,” he says. To which the voice assistant responds, “Enjoy it.” The audience laughs, while I wonder who thinks this device would in any way stop him from eating it.

Watching how this was pitched to the public, I wonder how was this pitched to TED. I’d love to know who signed off.

A few months later, Humane’s product was dubbed the Ai Pin, and a few months later from that, it was listed as one the Best 200 Inventions of 2023 by Time, before it was ever released and—more importantly—before anyone at Time was able to even try it. Some noted that Time is co-chaired by a couple of Humane’s investors. Whether it was a favor or not, it certainly looked like one.

When the price was revealed to be $699 plus a $24/mo. service fee, anyone who hadn’t already dropped off was certain to have by then.

Humane’s CEO, Bethany Bongiorno—who is married to Imran—replied to casual criticism on Twitter in November 2023:

Surely Bethany remembers when her husband—and chairman of their company—posted “the smartphone is dead” just one year earlier.

Humane sold just 10,000 of the 100,000 they expected to. I’d love to know how many were actually produced. I’d also like to know how many were returned in total, because it was reported that the new sales were lower than the units returned. I can’t blame anyone who returned theirs. If I had bought one and it was was overheating, I would sooner seek a refund than a replacement battery. For a device clipped to your clothing, overheating is something I’d like to avoid.

The device’s problems were well-documented. The response time was awful. The battery life was abysmal. Even when it worked, it offered little value.

Didn’t Humane test this device? If they didn’t know about these problems until after it shipped, that’s a huge blind spot. If they did, that’s even worse. With these problems, low sales numbers and a high return rate was inevitable. It is—of course—not the fault of any reporter who rightly criticized the device, but rather Humane, its founders, and its investors who are responsible for shipping it like this.

This all paints a grim picture for electronic waste. In the future, this should be addressed at the very beginning of any hardware company. People should know what the end-of-life plans are for devices before they’re sold. It’s unlikely, because without regulation, why would any company care? But as consumers, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect companies to have their own plans to properly dispose of their own devices after customers are finished using them.

After it was clear to most people that Humane was not going to come back from those poor sales numbers, they pivoted once again. But rather than pivoting the product, they pivoted the company’s marketing. They pretended to have forgotten the supposedly valuable part of their proposition, the “operating system” they call CosmOS. So they reintroduced it with flowcharts and videos that I’m sure did not instill any confidence among customers that Humane would continue to support their product. Instead, it signaled pretty clearly Humane was seeking a buyer for the whole company.

As a side note, I am not an expert on what constitutes an operating system, but to me, CosmOS doesn’t seem like an operating system. It seems like a series of API calls the device or service makes via a voice assistant and a web portal interface for the customers’ data. On top of an operating system.

And at this point, it might be a good time to point out that the web portal interface called .Center was the primary—if not the only—method for users to interact with their data outside of the Ai Pin itself. That means photos and videos captured or notes recorded could only be viewed, edited, or exported from that website. By storing all of this stuff on a server for only this product to access and having no synced local copy anywhere—even on the device itself for direct syncing or export to other services—customers were forced into this model which undoubtedly duplicates functionality their other devices already have. I don’t blame Humane for lacking integration with Apple’s services, but I blame them for not building proper desktop or phone software that kept user data in a format their users could easily migrate elsewhere.

With reports of the company hoping for an acquisition in the 750 million–1 billion dollar range, I suspect everyone was finally laughing. I’ve brought this up before, but Instagram was once sold for a billion dollars. Star Wars was sold for four billion dollars. It takes a planet-sized ego to think this company could be worth a billion dollars.

But maybe customers were not laughing. For them, the future of this device was decidedly unclear, until just the other day when Humane announced that HP was acquiring some of Humane. HP is not acquiring the product or the customer base, but instead CosmOS and the team that built it. It would not be an Imran Chaudhri statement if it didn’t mention their patents, so Humane made it abundantly clear that part of what HP is acquiring includes “more than 300 patents and patent applications.”

In a separate statement for their customers, Humane said the device will cease to function in any meaningful way after February 28, 2025. That’s less than 10 days from the acquisition announcement. Adding insult to injury, customers will only be able to access and export their data from the only place it was ever made available, the .Center website. For data on the Ai Pin that hasn’t been retrieved, it must first upload to the service before customers can access it. All within less than 10 days. After that, the data will be inaccessible, even if it’s still on the device.

The way this product is being shut down reveals so much about the company.

To all the journalists out there, please don’t repeat that Humane is “winding down.” That phrase should be used only when the availability of services are being phased out over a decent period of time. Decent is not 10 days. This is being immediately shut down. This device, its services, and support will no longer be available by the end of this month.

The remaining hardware will likely be disposed of, by the company and its customers. Humane suggests to customers that they handle that on their own, which I find insulting, as I think the company is responsible for the waste.

Humane existed for six years, which is quite a long time, but it collapsed quicker than any other company I have seen before. I hope that in the future, people can see red flags more clearly and that journalists identify them much earlier, without giving companies the benefit of the doubt. It’s better to be skeptical until proof is presented.

There’s really no reason to believe that people who were good individual contributors would be good entrepreneurs. It’s a completely different skillset with entirely different challenges. Yet, the industry reports on “former Apple employees” like they’re going to be the next Steve Jobs.

Stop idolizing these people.

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