Not surprised at all. This and the Humane Pin both seemed like a quick cash grab before phones integrated all the new AI goodness. I'm expecting we'll see that window close by the time I/O and WWDC wrap up this year, so they had to move fast.
I don't think this is a fair characterization of Humane. I don't and haven't worked at Humane, but I did interview there and have some friends who work there now. They are notoriously secretive about their product (founders are ex-Apple, and they try to keep an Apple like secrecy culture) but I do know a bit about the evolution of the product.
Humane was founded in 2018, well before ChatGPT was released in November 2022. If you look online you can find some articles about patent applications they made well before ChatGPT was released that give you an idea about their idea for the product at the time, e.g. https://9to5google.com/2022/01/07/humane-android-ar-wearable...
Developing the hand tracking, laser projection system, voice recognition, etc. is very hard, especially considering the power constraints on the device. They spent years working on this and when LLMs hit the scene they realized that the original product idea was going to be severely lacking if they didn't integrate this technology. This caused a big internal pivot to more closely integrate with these LLMs. I'm not sure which they're using, presumably they're paying for GPT-4 access or something like that. It's understandable why they felt like they had to do this, and why it feels like a rushed integration. The bottom line is that they were way too optimistic with the hardware capabilities when they started working on the product, and the last minute rush to integrate with LLMs to at least improve the software capabilities to kind of close the gap is what we're left with. It's not a great situation, but I also think it's unfair to characterize it as a "cash grab".
Cash grab from their VCs is probably more accurate... I have zero doubt some incredible engineering has gone into the product.
However, from what I can tell they were searching for a problem to solve instead of coming with a distinct, compelling, articulable vision of what they wanted to build
I feel like all these companies are really hamstrung by the fact that they don't have enough access to our phone's features. There's no way to build a Siri competitor if you're not Apple or Google, the APIs to send and read texts, make calls, control music apps etc just don't exist.
Chat GPT integrated with your phone's operating system is a lot more useful than pure Chat GPT. I wouldn't be surprised if Open AI gets dethroned by Apple and Google because of that fact alone. It doesn't matter how good your model is if you're not allowed to use it due to anticompetitive practices.
If anything deserves antitrust scrutiny, it's the locking down of private APIs, not some petty disputes about App Store fees.
100% agree with this. there are ways to jump into apples walled garden though. in a way that they wouldn't be able to stop or patch without fundamentally changing their Eco-system approach.
But 100% everyone should be able to build and swap the agent on their device. but it's not your device. its apples. they let you use it. Same with YouTube and our data. it's not really ours. try get your YouTube watch data. it will take 2 weeks by then its 2 weeks old. you can do nothing with that data.
much bigger conversations needed that are not happening.
Their "keynote" just screams shenanigans. It's the most blatantly fake product demo I have ever seen.
To take one example, at 14m30s, the CEO is shown using the device to book a trip to London. This is presented as a live demo, but it's clearly simulated.
To be fair, he doesn't "book" a trip to London in the presentation, he gets flight, hotel, and car rental information, which isn't that out there.
But, he does imply that you can book from the device, which is completely insane. How do you deal with flight selection with multiple layovers? Seat choices? DOBs? KTNs? Phone numbers? Frequent flyer number? Payment? Travel insurance? Disability accommodations?
What could possibly be the overlap of people who travel enough that this is all worth setting up, who don’t already have their own personal assistant?
Playing devil's advocate, tech demos are often faked. From the famous "Hello" Mac introduction in 1984[1], to Google with their Gemini demo a few months ago.
A certain degree of smoke and mirrors to generate hype around ground-breaking tech is the norm, not the exception. This doesn't necessarily mean that the product itself is a scam.
> From the famous "Hello" Mac introduction in 1984
I feel like that's a little different. The Macintosh demo was obviously a "sizzle reel", not an example of how the machine would normally behave in use. No one would have watched the demo and expected the computer to talk to the user when turned on.
A more interesting reference point might be the iPhone intro, which wasn't "fake", but did rely on a carefully orchestrated sequence of events to avoid known bugs.
The 1984 Macintosh demo also wasn't running on a stock Macintosh, but rather an expanded version of the hardware. So, as well as being a slideshow of sorts it was slightly disingenuous as to what the hardware was capable of.
Fun tidbit: There's a point in the tech demo where he asks the rabbit device to "filter job candidates to ones that are LA-based"
When the r1 address replies to him, it attaches a new spreadsheet, and he opens it on-stage. But the spreadsheet it sent, that they then show on screen, has not filtered any candidates to LA-only. (The column next to their names shows labels on screen like "NYC", "Austin", "Miami", "Seattle", etc)
Just wow. How did no one spot that one! how did Rabbit have the confidence to just post it. This is a masterclass in human psychology, hindsight is 20/20...
I remember the CEO of Nokia showing off their latest phone on stage at Mobile World one year, live in front of the world's assembled press.
Little did he know two developers were sweating their nuts off as everything on his screen was coming from an old PC stuffed in a closet in a bedroom thousands of miles away, fed down a ratty cable modem.
they seem to have pivoted overnight into the LLM hype? All I can recall from Humane's past marketing was all about the weird laser projector as a replacement to your phone, never about it being a chatgpt-in-a-box (which is all they talk about now)
