Today, the first public reviews about the Humane Ai Pin are now available for you all to read, In my career, I’ve worked on several 1.0 products you’ve probably used—the first iPhone is chief among them—and so I’ve been through this before. Let me run down some of the thoughts and feelings I have today.
I feel proud. Making new things is hard. The team of people at Humane is tops. We accomplished turning a dream into reality. All that feels pretty great. I’m a happy Ai Pin user. I love this little gadget.
I think you have absolutely no obligation to care about this pride, or how it feels for me personally, or relate to what the team of people at Humane have attempted to do. In the end, a tech product needs to deliver benefits to the people who buy it and use it. These benefits must be equal to, and hopefully much greater than, the cost of the product in terms of your time and money. Have no doubt: that’s what we’re aiming for.
I think computers are not done evolving. They are nowhere near their potential to help us humans in our everyday lives. However—to deliver on this potential, things must change. It’s so much more comfortable to keep doing the same things in the same way since we’ve already built up the daily habits and the moment-to-moment muscle memory for a certain set of tasks. But change for the sake of it doesn’t make sense, which brings me to the next point.
I think that LLMs are an advance on par with CPUs. Decades ago, the development of the first CPUs inspired people to make operating systems and programming models and, eventually, personal computers that allowed people to take advantage of the technology without being technologists themselves. We are at a similar moment now with LLMs, and the rate of change in Ai is far beyond what we saw decades ago with PCs. We built the Ai Pin with this historical perspective in mind. We are excited about how Ai will drive the next great advance in now computers can help us. We are ready to change and evolve the product quickly to capitalize on this potential.
I feel that today’s social media landscape encourages hot takes… and the spicier the better! Indeed, it’s so easy to find people online who are willing to jump on the skepticism bandwagon to gape at the same things you’re pointing at and poke holes in every little detail. I get it. And still. Computers will continue to change and get substantially better. The way we use them will change. Ai will be a big part of driving this change. Everyone will be fine with it. The new normal will become normal.
I think that people have and use multiple computing gadgets and can easily and seamlessly move between these different gadgets all day every day. The Ai Pin is now part of this daily flow for me. I use it the most for asking questions, things I use to do web searches for that most often ended up in reading wikipedia articles. But I can now drill down to the exact details I’m interested in. It’s very fun and useful for me, so I use the product like this all the time.
I feel like there’s an apprehension about jumping in and finding how the Ai Pin might fit into your life. This is understandable. Is the Ai Pin frustrating sometimes? Yes. Is my laptop and smartphone frustrating sometimes? Yes! There is no perfect product. The Ai Pin form factor is wonderful, and our new Ai operating system is a wonderful new landscape to explore, but it’s not magic. Expect the same kind of ups and downs as your other tech. You will need to find out how the product fits for you. The fit is there for me and I expect it can be there for you too.
I feel like I can trust my intuition. Years ago, I made the autocorrecting keyboard for the first iPhone. There was considerable doubt about the very concept of the touchscreen keyboard. And yet, when I built the tech, I felt that it was learnable. I saw how there were people among that initial cohort inside Apple when the product was still a deep dark secret: they got it. It became easy for them with just a little time and effort. Obviously, in time, this also became easy for most humans on the planet. Then this effort opened up with whole phone screen to them, since the keyboard could disappear when they weren’t using it. This same kind of disappearing act takes place all the time with the Ai Pin. Find the touchpad, ask a question, listen to the response, put the answer to use, keep going with your life. Using the Ai Pin is so simple and free of friction. My intuition tells me that we are on track. People will get it with a little time and effort. This model will win.
So, is the Ai Pin for you? If you’re on the fence, ask yourself. Are you excited about how Ai might help you change the way you interact with information on a daily basis? Do you want to be a part of the conversation that helps drive the next wave of evolution in personal technology? Are you interested in changing some of your tech habits to find a better way? Do you love cool new gadgets? If yes to any, the Ai Pin is ready for you today.
