The wearable computer company, Humane, which received negative reviews for its AI Pin model, is currently looking to sell its firm. As to a Bloomberg article, the company, headed by Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, two former Apple workers, is reportedly "looking for a price of between $750 million and $1 billion."
After the $699 AI Pin's launch, which has been mostly criticized for its sluggish response and a user experience that falls far short of the always-on, wearable AI assistant notion that its founders had promised, that could be a difficult sell. The product was promoted, at least in part, as a means of helping consumers become less reliant on their smartphones and become more present.
CosmOS, Humane's proprietary operating system, is designed to run on the AI Pin. It connects to an AI model network in order to retrieve voice search results and determine what the built-in camera is pointing at. In certain interactions, the wearer's inner palm is projected with a laser "display" beam from the gadget. Maintaining the device's functionality requires a monthly subscription.
The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, is reported to be working with renowned Apple designer Jony Ive on an unconnected project that could better highlight AI's potential. According to the Bloomberg article, Humane has raised $230 million from investors. Investors placed Humane's 2023 market worth at $850 million, but that was before the company's debut product received harsh criticism from critics.
While there are some creative and innovative ideas therein, the hardware of the AI Pin has shown poor battery life and overheating problems, and the software is underbaked and overly unstable. As promised, Humane will release firmware upgrades to fix some of the bugs. To improve the intelligence of the gadget even more, OpenAI's GPT-4o model was released just last week.
Considering the amount that the firm is trying to raise, the range of possible purchasers for Humane appears to be somewhat small. While big language models and generative AI are becoming more and more common, Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are all making great strides into the AI space. However, it's unclear how much value Humane's intellectual property would actually add to any of their continuing initiatives.
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