Inside an old horse stable in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, a wave of soft squeaks emerged from small flashing devices strapped to the chests of employees of a startup called Humane.
It was just weeks before the startup’s device, the ai Pin, was revealed to the world: a culmination of five years, $240 million in funding, 25 patents, a steady pace of publicity and partnerships with a list of major technology companies. , including OpenAI, Microsoft and Salesforce.
Your mission? Nothing less than freeing the world from its smartphone addiction. The solution? More technology.
Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, husband and wife founders of Humane, envision a future with less reliance on the screens that their former employer, Apple, made ubiquitous.
artificial intelligence “can create an experience that allows the computer to essentially take a backseat,” Chaudhri said.
They are promoting the pin as the first device with artificial intelligence. It can be controlled by speaking out loud, touching a touch panel, or projecting a laser screen onto the palm of your hand. In an instant, the device’s virtual assistant can send a text message, play a song, take a photo, make a call or translate a real-time conversation into another language. The system relies on ai to help answer questions (“What’s the best way to load the dishwasher?”) and can summarize incoming messages with the simple command: “Catch up.”
The technology is a step up from Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant. You can follow a conversation from one question to the next, without needing explicit context. It is also capable of editing a single word in a dictated message, rather than requiring the user to correct an error by repeating the text from beginning to end, as other systems do. And it does so with a gadget that is reminiscent of the insignia worn in Star Trek.
For the tech-savvy, it’s a moonshot. To outsiders, it’s a science fiction fantasy.
At Humane, there is deep anxiety about the coming weeks. The technology industry has a large graveyard of portable products that have not achieved catch on. Humane will begin shipping the pins next year. It hopes to sell about 100,000 pins, which will cost $699 and require a $24 monthly subscription, in the first year. (Apple sold 381,000 iPods in the year after its launch in 2001.)
For the startup to be successful, people will need to learn a new operating system, called Cosmos, and be willing to obtain new phone numbers for the device. (The pin comes with its own wireless plan.) They will have to dictate texts instead of writing them and exchange a zoom camera for wide-angle photographs. You will have to be patient because certain features, such as object recognition and videos, will not be available initially. And the pin can sometimes be buggy, as happened during some of the company’s demos for The New York Times.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said in an interview that he expected ai to be “a big part” of how we interact with computers. He has invested in Humane and another artificial intelligence company, Rewind ai, which plans to make a necklace that will record what people say and hear. He has also talked about teaming up with Jony Ive, Apple’s former chief designer, to create an artificial intelligence device with similar ambition to Humane.
Humane has the advantage of being the first of those ai-focused devices to become available, but Altman said in an interview that was no guarantee of success. “That will be up to the customers,” he said. “Maybe it’s a bridge too far,” he said, “or maybe people will say, ‘This is so much better than my phone.’” A lot of technology that seemed like a safe bet ends up selling for 90 percent off at Best Buy. he added.
Blame the iPhone
Bongiorno, 40, and Chaudhri, 50, have a union of contrasts. He shaves his head and speaks with the soft, calm voice of a yogi. He wears his long blonde hair over one shoulder and has the enthusiasm of a team captain. They both wear Jobsian black.
They met at Apple in 2008. Chaudhri was working on its human interface, defining the swiping and dragging movements that control iPhones. Ms. Bongiorno was director of iPhone and iPad programs. They worked together until leaving Apple at the end of 2016.
A Buddhist monk named Brother Spirit took them to Humane. Chaudhri and Bongiorno had developed concepts for two ai products: a women’s health device and the pin. Brother Spirit, whom they met through his acupuncturist, recommended that they share the ideas with his friend, Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce.
Sitting under a palm tree on a cliff above the ocean at Benioff’s Hawaiian home in 2018, they explained both devices. “This one,” Benioff said, pointing to the ai Pin, as dolphins broke the waves below, “is huge.”
“It’s going to be a huge undertaking,” he added.
Humane’s goal was to replicate the usefulness of the iPhone without any of the components that get us all addicted: the dopamine hit of dragging to refresh a Facebook feed or swiping to watch a new TikTok video. They secretly experimented with hardware components and created a virtual assistant, like Siri or Alexa, that worked with custom language models based, in part, on OpenAI offerings.
The device’s most sci-fi element, the laser that projects a text menu onto a hand, started inside a box the size of a matchbox. It took three years to miniaturize it until it was smaller than the size of a golf tee.
Humane established a company culture that it borrowed from Apple, including its secrecy. During its experimentation phase, the startup generated intrigue by announcing high-profile investors like Altman and making grandiose, if vague, public statements about building “the next shift between humans and computing.” Humane also maintained Apple’s obsession with design details, from its device’s curved corners and compostable white packaging to the Japanese-style bathrooms in the company’s austere offices.
But Humane moved away from Apple’s rigid, demanding culture in certain ways. The company encouraged staff to work together, question plans and talk.
José Benítez Cong, a veteran Apple executive who considered himself retired, joined Humane, in part, to redeem himself. Benítez Cong said he was “disgusted” by what the iPhone had done to society, noting that his son could imitate a swiping motion when he was a year old. “This could be something that could help me overcome my guilt about working on the iPhone,” Benítez Cong said.
holding the light
An eerie whistling sound filled the room, and two dozen Humane employees, sitting around a long white table, focused carefully on the sound. It was just before the launch of the ai Pin and they were evaluating its ringers and beeps. The pin’s “personal” speaker (a portmanteau of the company’s “personal” and “sonic”) is critical, as many of its features rely on verbal and audio cues.
Mr. Chaudhri praised the “safety” of a chirp and Ms. Bongiorno praised the “more physical” sounds of the pin laser. “It feels like you’re really holding the light,” she marveled.
Less secure: that hissing sound you hear when sending a text message. “He feels sinister,” Bongiorno said. Others around the table said it sounded like a ghost, or almost like you’d made a mistake. Someone thought it was a Halloween prank.
Bongiorno wanted the sound when sending a text message to be as satisfying as the sound of the trash can on one of Apple’s older operating systems. “Like ‘thunk,’” he said.
The device comes at a time when enthusiasm and skepticism about ai is reaching new highs every week. Industry researchers warn of the existential risk of the technology and regulators are eager to crack down on it.
However, investors are eagerly pouring money into ai startups. Before Humane even launched a product, its backers had valued it at $850 million.
The company has tried to promote a message of trust and transparency, despite spending most of its existence working in secret. Humane’s ai Pins have what the company calls a “confidence light” which flashes when the device is recording. (User must tap the pin to “wake it up”). Humane said it did not sell user data to third parties or use it to train its ai models.
In the months leading up to its introduction, Humane has stoked anticipation. In April, Chaudhri showed off the pin’s laser projector during a TED talk. (People later accused him of faking the demonstration, he said, but he claimed it was real.) In September, in an echo of the launch of her fashion-friendly Apple Watch, supermodel Naomi Campbell unknowingly wore the barely noticeable Humane pin. look for it: with a gray Coperni blazer on the catwalk at Paris Fashion Week.
ai App Store
Humane’s supporters have an easy way to dismiss skepticism about his prospects: They invoke the first iPod. That clunky, awkward device had only one use: playing songs, but it laid the foundation for the real revolution: smartphones. Similarly, Humane envisions an entire ecosystem of companies creating features for its operating system—an ai version of Apple’s App Store.
But first, you pass. In a demonstration in the Humane office of a feature that will be implemented in a future version of the product, a software designer took a chocolate chip cookie and tapped the pin on his left breast. As he beeped to life, he asked, “How much sugar is in this?”
“I’m sorry; I couldn’t look up the amount of sugar in the oatmeal raisin cookie,” the virtual assistant said.
Chaudhri downplayed the mistake. “To be fair, I have trouble with the difference between a chocolate chip cookie and an oatmeal raisin cookie.”
Humane’s ambition to revolutionize the smartphone is bold, creative and even irrational; the kind of thing Silicon Valley is supposed to be known for, but, which critics lament, has in recent years devolved into incremental frivolities like selfie apps and robotic pizza trucks.
But even after months of using their ai Pins all day, Humane’s founders can’t completely disconnect from their screens. “Are we using our smartphones less?” Mr. Chaudhri asked. “We’re using them differently.”
