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- cross-posted to:
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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.”
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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.
Yeah, the product was a boondoggle. Trying to sell the company after that launch, with nothing else in the pipeline, is a scam.
Anything with “AI” in the title is a cash grab with very little actual technical worth except the models and training data.
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.
remember how over the past few years almost everything brand new had the word “blockchain” shoehorned into it
I don’t think “Blockchain” ever reached anywhere near this level of shoehornery.
oh, for a while there, it was close. things have changed even in the past 2 months since I wrote that comment.
They’re all scams. This one’s just more obvious.
It’s just how the us economy works
Scam how? Selling pre-launch could have been a scam. Money taken from investors could have been a scam, depending on what they pitched. But selling after a complete and known flop of a release? There’s no cards left on the table to be scammy about. “Here’s our brand name. Here’s our patent collection. We’d like to think our patents are worth a ton of money, but we know we’d be lucky getting twenty million.”
My assumption is that, since they were always going to be about collecting, processing, and selling data (usually what AI is used for commercially) that they might have what they think is between 500m and 1b in data to sell.
This might be enough to start a company from or just to assimilate the data into your own company.
The price tag has to be over estimated though by quite a lot. If we read a story about the company selling for a few million, I dont think it would seem outrageous.
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.
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.
20 years ago, the big question VCs were asking their startups was, “How do we convince Microsoft to buy this company?” Simpler times, back then.
10 years ago it was “how do we convince Google to buy this company?”
dramatic music score
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
You obviously don’t know who Leroy Jenkins is, the laws of man do not apply.
Like with everything, only if you do not have enough money.
I’ve got some chores that need to get done, how much can I rent your guys for?
Least I got shit pin!
Do they accept NFTs?
Maybe you could resale the one nabbit ured to sell to you !
Why not? They can only go up in value!
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
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?
Obviously to the Merfolk…duh!
Fucking Aquaman
“Spectacular custom built oceanback, home, impressive land views & only a 5 minutes swim to the beach!”
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.
And it was overpriced. I can see people buying a useless toy for 50 bucks, but not for $700.
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.
There are already copycat products out and I don’t feel sympathy for any of them.
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.
it’s just rich people’s money that could be used to fund housing for the masses. let me know where that beach is so i can go drop off some karma.
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
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!
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
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.
It’s cool tech that is ahead of its time. 5-10 years from now, a big tech company will make something like this and everyone will cry Huzzah!
Magic Leap went the same route.
The difference would be that they have a device that actually works…
If you watch any of the reviews on this device it’s virtually unusable. 5 to 10 years from now, LLM models might actually fit on the device itself and then it could become actually usable. 5-10 years is a FUCKTON of time in the computer space.
It would be prettier useful to have one of those com badges from Star Trek. That seems to be the form factor.
