One Last Round of Dunks on the AI Pin
Ahhh, and there it is. Humane, maker of the useless and evil AI Pin, has folded the con, and sold itself for scrap to HP. Calling out the Ai Pin has been a regular feature on Icecano, and now we get to do it one last time!
The aftermath has the best line of the day with “The Humane AI pin died on the way back to its home planet” at How's That AI Future Looking?, which, heh, make sure to look at the URL slug.
Elsewhere:
Humane is shutting down the AI Pin and selling its remnants to HP | The Verge
The Humane AI Pin: A $700 Brick of E-Waste
Daring Fireball: We Found the Sucker Willing to Buy Humane, and as Promised, I'm Going to Be Insufferable, Because of Course It Was HP And full points to Gruber there, for correctly calling that the final buyer was going to be HP.
There are obviously other, more important things going on than a failed startup getting parted out by the scrapyard that is the modern HP, so let’s just make a couple of fast points and never speak of it again.
First, I’ve been part of a startup that got acquired by a larger company in a fire sale. In my experience, those happen because the big company saw something the startup had internally adjacent to the actual product and thought “ohh, I’ll take that, tho.” Plus, a bunch of patents. Press Release goo aside, I wonder what it was?
The key lesson here is: this is where Humane was always going to end up. I kind of hope it was a con, rather than genuinely being this stupid. But cast your mind back to all the press they got over the last few years. Anyone who treated it as a real product with a future was either fundamentally unserious, too credulous, or in on the con. They can be safely ignored from here on.
You know the thing where someone will make a movie that fails, and then their Hollywood career will stall out? We need that for software. If Kyle McLachlan didn’t get to make another movie after Showgirls, everyone who worked on this thing should have to go do whatever the software equivalent of regional theatre is for a while. Of course, maybe that’s what working at HP to put AI in printers or whatever is?