It’s an unfortunate trend, but it is also an age-old reaction to hubris. Humane made the fatal PR mistake of trying to convince the world they had a revolutionary product that would change everything… without selling the benefits of the product.

That triggers a bunch of memes, from emperor’s new clothes to pride before a fall. Add in a general societal distrust of tech and AI, plus the age-old derision for geeks/nerds, and Humane could not have set themselves up better for fiasco if they had tried.

I do think it was all well meaning and earnest, not at all a scam. But their over-the-top marketing for v1 of an experimental tech gadget was really clueless.

> Humane made the fatal PR mistake of trying to convince the world they had a revolutionary product that would change everything

Segway walked so Humane could run.

As a college student I remember the lead up to the Segway reveal on Good Morning America. I was so excited for it that I set my alarm for 6AM to watch it. I remember being so confused and annoyed. Fool me once...

You mean "Project Ginger" aka "IT"?

https://www.wired.com/2001/01/ginger-may-be-motorized-scoote...

lol I didn't realize it had been that long. maybe I was just looking for a bright spot in the world after 9/11?

Segway worked exactly as advertised. They are still being made and sold. The problem is that the product didn't _mean_ what the company hoped.

True, the Segway was not a scam at all. It was just amazingly overhyped and that's what killed it as a consumer product.

> Segway worked exactly as advertised

No.

Their PR and marketing was AWFUL to build the level of hype they did around the product they released.

If you're releasing a scooter for mall cops and tourists you don't go on Good Morning America to advertise it as a world-changing technology.

They advertised the release of a world-changing technology and released nothing like that.

I remember the marketing around it. I was so incredibly excited too. They really marketed it as having discovered a room temperature superconductor.

Takes me back to a time when you were still able to shroud things with mystique and excitement. The Matrix, Blair Witch Project, and the PlayStation 2 with the emotion engine were all larger than life. Cloverfield was the last of that kind.

"Entire cities will be redesigned around this new product, which I can't tell you about. But you should try to guess, it'll be fun."

As I recall, the headline on Slashdot that day was, "This is IT?"

It revolutionized how mall cops got around.

I do think it's a really cool thing with good use cases but the marketing of "We'll design cities in new ways because of it" might've been overstating things a bit lol.

Every once in a while a highly funded startup launches a hilariously bad product. Five or so years ago everybody (rightfully) made fun of the juicero. Before that we had Google Glass (glasshole). Today the Humane Pin has to suffer slings and arrows.

Humane AI would never have been able to raise 230+ million had they been truthful about what could be built with the current state of technology. Did the investors understand that you have to recharge the Humane Pin every 2 hours? Did the investors know their laser projection press photos are photoshopped? Did the investors know the laser projector doesn't meet the advertised resolution? The Humane Pin is science fiction.

In many ways the Humane Pin is like Theranos. Holmes probably didn't mean to defraud people. She just raised money for a product that couldn't be built with the current state of technology.

Elizabeth Holmes was repeatedly told by domain experts that many of the types of blood assays she wanted to perform are physically impossible with a single drop of blood extracted from a finger-prick. She didn't simply raise money for a product beyond the current state of technology, she persisted in a narratively convenient fantasy until it caught up with her.

Exactly. Some tests just need a decent sample size to even contain the things you're looking for. Its like thinking you can have a good sample of the entire US population by asking three people a question. It's not just a matter of "the technology just wasn't quite there", it's a matter of just not being a statistically relevant sample size or issues with where you're actually collecting the sample.

I don't know if Google Glass really fits in with the rest of that list. That wasn't some overfunded VC startup that ended up releasing a bad, overhyped product. It was essentially a side-project from Google. I don't think was ever publicly available - it was only sold to a small number of select applicants, and as far as I remember it did what they claimed (which wasn't much).

I think if I were investing a few million into something, I might ask "what's the battery life?" or "Can I try it on my hand?" before coughing up the cash.

But then, I'm not a VC. I guess they go off vibes?

Those questions probably get asked, but long before any real product exists, so the answer is optimistic or just plain imaginary. By the time the real product exists, a lot of money has been spent and there is a lot of pressure to drum up hype for a product that probably doesn’t deliver.

"It's an MVP! We're just establishing product-market fit; then we'll sort out the engineering details using the money we raised."

You'd think if you were contemplating a $10m investment in a promise-the-world startup, you'd spend the $20k to get an expert analysis of the project.

You'd think, but VCs are lemmings and the moment you convince one to invest a clock starts ticking that makes thorough diligence difficult for everyone else.

Get one person to fall for 'just trust me bro' and the hype train follows.

The part where the investors invest this much money without going through the technical detail of the product always confuses me. How can yo spend that much money responsibly without having enough expertise onboard to evaluate the technical feasibility. Maybe I am just too naive.

It's truly amazing how much money gets doled out in Silicon Valley over "Trust me, bro" said by people wearing black turtlenecks.

I think Magic Leap is probably a better comparison. Unlike with Theranos the tech does work, there just isn't really a market for it.

> Holmes probably didn't mean to defraud people

Then she should've stopped at some point. But she didn't. She kept on making claims that she must have known were not truthful. At that point, at the latest, "didn't mean to" becomes a bit of a hollow word.

> Seems a bit much calling it a scam. That to me implies malicious intent which I don’t think is in place here. Bad/imperfect products happen even to well meaning companies.

There's no malicious intent in producing glossy promos videos of a device you know a priori does not (and cannot) work, becaue it violates a few laws of physics? I feel like some folks around here have become very innured to false advertising

It's hubris and overconfidence that's common among startup founders who think they've found the solutions to all the world's problems.

But it's not a "scam" to release third-rate hardware after overhyping it. Magic Leap and many other startups did the same.

"Scam" should be reserved for actual fraudulent startups like Theranos and Outcome Health.

Strange hill to die on. Lots of people scam by expecting to right their wrongs in the end. Hell even Theranos may have believed with enough scam money they could eventually have made right with the tech. Still a scam. Same here. If it’s not what you’re selling, it’s a lie, and a lie is a scam.

> Strange hill to die on

Not at all strange. The problem is that scam has certain meaning and if we use scam more liberally we dilute the meaning.

If every company is a scam(as almost everyone intentionally overhypes or does something similar to humane), then no company is a scam. Is google a scam as they scripted the gemini video?

> Is google a scam as they scripted the gemini video?

That video was more of a fraud than a scam, but I think we're just splitting hairs at that point.

I think the issue here is that arguably startup culture has _redefined_ scam to _not include_ "fake it till you make it gotta get funding" bullshit. In a previous era that stuff might arguably have been non-controversially been though of as a kind of scam. My own experience with startups is that they often hew as close to the line of scam as they can get away with and this behavior has been normalized.

This has nothing to do with startup or current times. That's why I gave example of Google. Google is not a scam in my definition but still has clearly faked gemini demo. Even Wright brothers admitted to faking a lot of news and claims before they could make real working planes.[1][2]

[1]: https://www.nps.gov/teachers/classrooms/the-wright-brothers-...

[2]: http://wright-brothers.wikidot.com/

It still counts as a scam even if someone eventually succeeds. Whether the given thing is a scam depends on whether, at the moment of utterance, the statement is a lie meant to accomplish some goal or not. It doesn't exclude the possibility that success might happen someday. This is what I mean about the bizarre morals of startup hustler types. Lying to extend your runway is still lying and normal people still think its a scam.

Do you use any word to distinguish what google did in my example vs what theranos/FTX did? Or would you put both in the same category as one small lie is same as basing existence of a company on lie.

Is this the same google that raised money under the motto “don’t do evil”?

Google raised money under the motto of:

>Digital Library, “birds of a feather” identified inside sea of information so communities and groups could be tracked in an organized way

"Highlands Forum", DLI (NSF, NASA and DARPA), MDDS program, In-Q-Tel etc

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...

> The problem is that scam has certain meaning and if we use scam more liberally we dilute the meaning

Language is not something you can manipulate so easily and you absolutely cannot fight language changing, but also I promise that no one is diluting the meaning "scam".

Saying google is scam similar to theranos/FTX dilutes the word scam.

If my boss uses my social security number to get a credit card it's not "diluting" the word fraud just because SBF also did fraud at a much larger scale.

But like sure, tilt at that windmill.

No kidding. I get the sentiment but the argument doesn’t hold water. A scam is a scam. There are big scams and small. There are lies big and small too. We can even call the small ones white lies. But they are still lies.

Is selling something knowing that it can never deliver on the promise a scam? I think so. P.T. Barnum hawked shows outside the tent that couldn't deliver inside. Theranos could never deliver. Nor Magic Leap. Nor Elon on his crazy promises!

They're all scammers.

They did deliver, the device does mostly all the things that were shown in the demo and Marques shows most of it.

is it incredibly bad at doing such things? yes.

is a smartphone a much better device at doing all the things the AI pin does? yes as well.

So i wouldn't call it a scam, its just a bad product.

lol SpaceX has literally doubled the number of successful rocket launches since 2020

Despite this (and SpaceX seems to be the company of his that he is least involved in on a day to day basis) he has made many documented false promises. Playing with rockets shouldn’t excuse that https://elonmusk.today/

SpaceX was the company he was most involved, and still is pretty involved. Just watch any factory tour he made, be it the 2005 ones or the new Texas ones. Or hear what people who worked with him talk.

And I can't trust that site. An example:

    3,129 days since Elon Musk said Teslas would have 1,000 kilometer (621 mile) range within a year or two. (9/23/2015)

    "My guess is probably we could break 1,000 kilometers within a year or two. I'd say 2017 for sure."

An altered quote taken out of context. Here what he actually said from the interview[1]:

    Q: When will we break the 1000km range mark for an electric car?

    M: A thousand kilometers, hmm. Well, it depends under what circumstances for a thousand kilometers. As it is, the record right now for Model S is 800 km. That is the furthest that anyone has driven a Model S...

    Q: So we could be close?

    M: Yeah, we're pretty close. Now, in order to do that they did drive at a relatively slow speed. So, you know, we're taking, I think they drove maybe at 40 or 50 km/h or something like that. But I think, my guess is probably we could break a 1000km within... a year or two?

    Q: Okay, so within 2016 maybe even?

    M: I say if you say 2017 I'd say 2017 for sure.

His prediction turned out completely accurate[2].

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl5vLC3Xlgc&feature=youtu.be...

2: https://electrek.co/2017/08/04/a-tesla-model-s-100d-just-dro...

And FSD is still not out, let alone robo taxis. Elon bullshits and sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't.

Well it is "out" and now everyone has it

As one of those people, it's pretty bad, especially at navigation which Navigate on Autopilot was very good at

Can't wait for his BS about record number of activations this quarter after he force activated it on the fleet

That said, if it weren't for all the lies and hype, we'd probably all be blown away by what it can do

Teslas can self-drive from NY to LA all on their own? That's out, and everyone has it? That's what was promised.

If you sell someone a cherry pie to be delivered tomorrow, take nearly a decade, and end up handing them a bag of cherries and a dusting of flour with a label of "cherry pie" on it, you didn't meet your promises.

You're vigorously agreeing.

I watched a paraplegic man play chess with his mind a few weeks ago. To put Elon on the same list as Theranos seems inaccurate.

Crediting Elon with everything he company's do doesn't strike me as fair or accurate

It's one of the number one reasons I'd never work for him. Every failure is your fault and every success is his. Yet all he contributes is tweets

When has Elon said that the failures are the faults of his employees? Hell, he seldom claims that it's his success. Every Starship test flight he's congratulated the team for a job well done.

It's the random people constantly looking for excuses to not believe his successes ("he doesn'thave much to do with SpaceX" or "he stole Tesla"), as well as idiotic article headlines ("Elon Musk's SpaceX does X" etc) that have made up those ideas.

Elon is quite unique in the sense that:

- he can identify incredibly good companies and products, and (usually) is able to lift them up, fund them, and leave them mostly be. It's not him running Tesla day-to-day (nor was tesla started by him), nor is it him running SpaceX, nor...

- at the same time, everything that he's involved in directly is just abysmally stupid

Your post may or may not be correct, but does not answer the question in the comment you were responding to and has zero supporting arguments for both assertions you make.

Why don’t you think it’s fair or accurate to credit founders with the work their companies do?

Do we credit calculus to Isaac Newton, the guy who invented it, or to Charles II, the random schmuck who happened to be king at the time? Why on earth should we give founders credit for work done by other people?

Musk is a lazy ketamine addict. He doesn't do anything other than tweet at himself from his alt accounts and fail upward, disproving meritocracy in the process.

I didn’t ask about kings, repeating the question to help you:

> Why don’t you think it’s fair or accurate to credit founders with the work their companies do?

Also do you have any evidence for the either of the two attacks on Musk?

It is not fair when it deprives the people working in the company of the recognition. Those people are critical to the successes.

Why do you think crediting founders with the work their companies do means that people working in the company cannot also be credited?

They can, and they should. Sometimes it is done. But to me it feels that many times a disproportionate amount of credit goes to founders/CEOs. People even fighting over whether for example Elon is successful or not, and completely disregarding everyone else in the organization. Or course the organizations are complex, but also mostly opaque - we do not know who does what.

Musk regularly lies and cannot be trusted.

He places a lot of bets, though, and that some of those bets may pay off in no way takes away from the fact that he engages in pretty scammy behavior.

In my view, his SOP is pretty much exactly what Theranos tried to do: fake it (scam) until you make it.

Theranos faked blood test results. This is not the same thing as ‘being slow at delivering self driving’ to quote one of the other people in this thread.

Musk faked demos of FSD. What's the difference?

Not getting treated for a disease you have, or taking medication for a disease you don’t have, versus buying something that wasn’t yet as good as the product video.

There's certainly a difference in terms of the possible severity of the impact of the two things, but that doesn't speak to whether or not they're both scam behavior.

If you're claiming things about your product or service that aren't true (even if they may become true eventually), and especially if you're faking evidence to support your lies, you're scamming.

People have died due to someone believing that a Tesla could handle normal driving conditions when it could not. That doesn’t seem like an incredibly huge gap in terms of impact.

This site[1] actually collects and lists the statements and highlights how long it's been since he said them.

1: https://elonmusk.today

And I can't trust that site. An example:

    3,129 days since Elon Musk said Teslas would have 1,000 kilometer (621 mile) range within a year or two. (9/23/2015)

    "My guess is probably we could break 1,000 kilometers within a year or two. I'd say 2017 for sure."

An altered quote taken out of context. Here what he actually said from this interview[1]:

    Q: When will we break the 1000km range mark for an electric car?

    M: A thousand kilometers, hmm. Well, it depends under what circumstances for a thousand kilometers. As it is, the record right now for Model S is 800 km. That is the furthest that anyone has driven a Model S...

    Q: So we could be close?

    M: Yeah, we're pretty close. Now, in order to do that they did drive at a relatively slow speed. So, you know, we're taking, I think they drove maybe at 40 or 50 km/h or something like that. But I think, my guess is probably we could break a 1000km within... a year or two?

    Q: Okay, so within 2016 maybe even?

    M: I say if you say 2017 I'd say 2017 for sure.

His prediction turned out completely accurate[2].

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl5vLC3Xlgc&feature=youtu.be...

2: https://electrek.co/2017/08/04/a-tesla-model-s-100d-just-dro...

So you think it’s “bullshit” because it accurately states his 2017 timeframe and here in 2024 the longest range model is still half that?

https://www.tesla.com/model3

One hypermiler reporting a long range under perfect conditions is not how any normal buyer is going to interpret that claim.

Model S is 402mi (EPA range). Thats not 1000km, but its much more than half.

But one hypermiler reporting a long range under perfect conditions is exactly what he described at length while making that claim. It was pretty clear to me. And that was exactly what we got in 2017.

If one wants to lie by twisting what he said, what happened or putting purposefully out of context to gain clicks or drive up hate against the guy, that is another thing. You should not do that. Nowhere he said what the site or you are implying.

I'm tired how people are getting radicalized because they hear absurd things ("pizzagate") and instead of doubting it they believe it and become outraged. If you actually hear people talking, they are usually much more reasonable than what they seem if you just take a few of the most negative phrases out of context.

It takes a lot of effort to undo fake news. A few more examples from that website:

"Rocket Fuel Solves Climate Change", an absurd extrapolation on what was probably a tweet about ISRU for Mars.

And this juxtaposition that makes you think he just sold what was paid to them, when instead it is 10% of what they had bought previously if you actually follow the link:

Hodl [Link]

    1,120 days since Elon Musk promised to hold bitcoin instead converting it. (3/24/2021)

    "Bitcoin paid to Tesla will be retained as Bitcoin, not converted to fiat currency."
    Elon Musk in a Tweet

    1,087 days since Elon Musk converted $272 million to fiat currency. (4/26/2021)
    As reported by Nate DiCamillo in yahoo! finance

You might argue that the second move goes against the spirit of what he said in the tweet and all that, but you have to agree with me that this site is being purposefully deceitful on how it is presenting this to promote hate and radicalize more the people.

I watched a "locked in" man use a computer mouse with a brain implant in 2002. It remains to be seen if this is actually better than what's been done before other than torturing a bunch of monkeys running needless experiments.

Also I doubt Musk had much to do with the brain implant other than being someone to push people forward and being a bag of money for it. Did he design the implant? Did he insert it? Did he code it?

Goalposts: moved.

Agreed, Musk seems to have bought and paid for mostly legitimate companies, and most "broken promises" seem to come from how desperate he is for attention on Twitter, often at the reputational detriment of said companies. If anything, he's just lucky his first big break company was PayPal, not Theranos.

Probably most people are sad he went from cool sci-fi CEO to weird divorced dad energy on bird website CEO.

enough of "hubris and overconfidence" and you do cross into full-on scam territory

Are you referring to how 5 gigahertz waves struggle to penetrate many forms of glass used in buildings and homes?

5GHz is a 6cm wavelength. Building glass will have a non-zero amount of attenuation but shouldn't be a particularly problematic building material.

It's the coatings.

Puffery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery

An awful lot of "puffery" is simply legalized false advertising.

Lying

Yes, that is bit much but the main point being this projection technology is nowhere novel, I have been playing with pico projectors and modern ones comes with Android OS so it's just a mini projector. However the only thing innovative here is natural voice interaction powered by modern AI but that also seems to be very slow for any practical purpose.

Is the hand movement to control what is being projected on your hand as a menu “nowhere novel”?

Honest question, is it much different than how VR headsets track hand movements and gesture in VR?

From the reviews, it seems different and worse.

But it is something novel that requires serious research. Even if the result is disappointing, it is novel enough to not make the it a “scam using old te vc projection”. That was the point of my rhetorical question before.

Does it require serious research? I am not trying to be difficult but I have seen write ups on basic hand gesture tracking from 5+ years ago.

Depends how you define “serious”.

I am defining “serious for a consumer product company”. Putting that in a small device seems quite a feat.

If you define “serious” as “particles colliding” or “drugs that cure some type of cancer”, then no.

Keep in mind that I am using “serious” as opposed to “scammy”. I thin this pin is far from a scam.

Thats fair. I guess I am biased with one of the initial story that described the genesis of the product during a cliff top retreat on Benioff's property. All the hype, the demonstrations, but the actual product falls flat of any real functionality. There is a disconnect between the hype they sold and what they released. That is scam territory.

I remember my buddy casually controlling the volume in his car by rotating the index finger cw/ccw with his hand on a gearbox handle. It was round 6-7 years ago. Nothing projected on his hand though, as it was all projected on a windshield, only visible to him. BMW 7, iirc.

hand is just a surface bro, I don't think it has anything to do with hand, light will bounce back on any opaque surface, just think of it as a mini projector and it's not even full RGB spectrum colour.

The hand movement controls what is being showed in the projector, which are inputs of the computation it does.

You speak with such confidence. Always a reliable red flag that you don’t know what you are talking about.

They are not calling this product a scam, but rather noting its similarity to laser projection projects of the past that (obviously) turned out to be scams. A subtle but important distinction.

Wrong.

> Humane’s website and other promotional material have a series of fake still images (“Photoshopped” images overlayed on hands). While even these pictures are pretty low-resolution (much less than a true 720p image), they turn out to be much better than what is seen in the videos of the Humane projector.

Nowhere in this quote (or the article) are they calling Humane a scam?

Humane AI should have paid off some social media influencers. Or paid for some social media management. Or hired a PR firm. Or whatever you call it.

Now they are getting the Fisker treatment.

PR can only do so much.

It ain’t pig butchering.

I don't understand what you are saying.

Not 100% sure either but a pig butchering scam is a kind of unrelated social media scam: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_butchering_scam

When the content of the writing can't generate revenue, the hate and anger can.

Aah yes. Classic cult tactics. If anyone calls you out on your nonsense, they are all haters. Recently saw this guy Alex Hormozi, complete scammer, use this strategy on YouTube.

I agree with you semantically, but these days I'm less and less concerned with "intent" when it comes to scams. It ultimately just revolves down to empty moralism about "people today," and fails to grasp the issue at hand.

Like how phone scammers are often themselves trapt in a system beyond their control [1].

Or even case in point with this thing. Maybe the owners aren't malicious, but if not, they are clearly somewhat being scammed themselves by AI hype, to the point they are willing to invest so much in the chatbot box, tie their entire business presumably to one current API or another, however bad an idea we know that is.

There are just many long chains of debt, confusion, hyperstition that are knotting around us, with no clear source. One person's scam turns into another's "innovation" before turning again back into a scam for the end user.

If we are really getting ready for the AI future, we need to get used to being wronged and taken advantage of by technically blameless entities, whose intent is logical, capitalist, and at least nominatively "benevolent."

The era of morality itself might soon turn to something else! In a world so predetermined and calculated, where there is such advanced science around influencing thought, cybernetics, etc, how does it even make sense anymore? Or at least, how is focusing on something like intent here even satisfying anymore beyond saying "bad people do bad things"?

1. https://www.propublica.org/article/human-traffickers-force-v...

I agree that intent is not relevant, but humans must be held accountable for outcomes. Ever since we've had algorithms that appear to make decisions, we've been fighting this idea that _humans_ are "technically blameless entities", just following orders from the black box. We must not get used to it.

> Must admit I’m surprised by the aggressiveness of it all. It’s almost like an echo chamber where people have decided it’s ok to pile on

This seems to be a really common occurrence recently - I know the internet can be mean, I've been on it since the peak of IRC, but it seems way more intense these days. The moment something is marked as the bad thing, hordes of people absolutely pile onto it out of nowhere.

Is this something I've just not noticed, a more people online thing, long term effects of covid (the virus itself and/or the lockdowns), a result of whatever algorithm tweaks Elon has been making, are people just pissed off in general, etc?

It feels bizarre how aggro the internet has become!

I think psychology might call this Splitting, which honestly seems to describe the business model of social media platforms these days too, so maybe there's a connection there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)

Off topic but using as an example of this: This tweeted photo, showing a pub in the UK that allows dogs, but bans children. Bit edgy, sure, but look at the bloodbath in the replies/quotes! It's absolute chaos!

https://twitter.com/hifromkyle/status/1779548610528415809

> The moment something is marked as the bad thing, hordes of people absolutely pile onto it out of nowhere.

This isn’t “out of nowhere”. Humane and their AI pin have been marketed an d talked an kur all over Internet tech spaces for a very long time. I’ve been seeing talk about the Humane AI pin in these same channels (YouTube, Twitter, tech websites) frequently since they were funded.

People have been forming opinions and skepticism for a long time. The key thing that changed is that the product finally transitioned from hypothetical to reality, and suddenly everyone’s thoughts were confirmed all at once.

This is nothing like your photo of a pub getting talked about on Twitter for a brief moment. AI and AI hardware have been a hot topic for years and Humane has been pushing marketing materials and demos on social media for a long time.

They made themselves the center of the conversation. Now the rubber hits the road and they have to deal with being the center of the conversation without having the substance to back up their big social media push.

The real mob mentality is all of the people who are arriving late to this multi-year buildup and trying to scorn the reviewers and critics.

It’s plain old mob mentality. It’s been that way since we were hunter-gatherers in the forests.

Aye fair point, I guess I've just been noticing it happening more because I noticed it happen and am now tuned to see it - that Baader-Meinhof frequency illusion thing.

I don’t see this sort of review as aggressive or hostile; rather, it displays the sort of inductive reasoning that we should all be doing more of in the face of wondrous claims that follow a recognizable pattern.

Hype artists and bad faith actors thrive on amnesiac audiences, and it’s about time we were all a bit less credulous.

Ironic that this has been downvoted a bunch

haha it is what it is, I'll figure out how to better explain what I mean next time.

Putting this one down to "words are lossy compression for thoughts"

Yeah, it's a very aggressive statement. The product as-is is obviously pretty crappy, but I do believe there's a reasonable path forwards imaginable.

The hardware itself seems to be decent-ish, albeit suffering from the usual first-gen issues. The AI-focused software stack is currently quite bad, but software is easy to update. Pair it with a smartphone, allow 3rd party apps, and it's essentially an alternative to a smartwatch. You lose the screen, but you gain a camera. I'd probably be quite tempted to buy a gen2 myself, even if all the AI stuff doesn't work out.

It’s a scam targeting VC investors, not the public.

Instead of pitching a practical and attainable product, one has to aim for the moon in order to get the VC $$$$. The wilder, the better.

Call me crazy, but as a society we’ve decided that “possible” is too boring.

While many VC funded companies only want to get bought out (instead of actually being a freestanding successful company), I strongly feel there are a sizable subsection of “founders” that don’t even want to get bought out…

They only just want to play the game and collect high salaries along the way…

Sadly, they aren’t even to blame. Too many Fortune-50 executives just try not to embarrass themselves long enough to collect insane levels of compensation.

Is a wonder that VC founders do the same?

Too many startups are really just “playing house” — really flashy website, monochrome headshots of executive team, multiple officies, plethora of partner logos… Only missing substance and a real product.

My only career regret is that I went for "technical chops" rather than charisma and "storytelling chops". Over and over we see founders hauling in millions from [evidently] gullible VCs who hear a story and Want To Believe.

See also https://youtu.be/PDjleq0PJX0?t=2645

Agreed that scam implies intent, but it is a hell of an ego trip. They so much wanted to create a new product category on par with the smartphone they could not admit the right thing to do was pivot to making it a peripheral. Android has all the underlying software, from a secondary screen API for the projector to Google Lens to an AI assistant that they could have done a peripheral that cost 1/3 as much, weighed half, didn't need a midday battery swap, and didn't get burning hot. Samsung would have done that. Maybe they still will.

By definition, it isn't "piling on" for this blog to have been written, last December, before the CES AI gadget hype. Anticipating, long before launch, issues that are being discussed now, when reviewers have the device in their hands. Nor, in any way, shape or form is it unusual for a bad/imperfect product to receive poor reviews. That is not piling on--it is normal and expected.

No one is literally saying that an individual contributor at Humane is a "scammer" just because they happened to have worked on a project that arguably takes perfectly good sand and subtracts value from it. That happens. A lot. Sometimes you intend to make a product, and you end up working on an empty product-shaped object. Heck, sometimes, say in healthcare, the drug or device you hoped would help people not only does nothing, but actually causes harm. That doesn't mean you were foolish to have started work, but simply because you started with "good intentions" doesn't mean a product belongs on the market.

Humane is charging $700 for a device with $24 monthly subscriptions. If someone thinks that such an offering is worthless, or nearly so, it is hardly surprising if they use "aggressive" language to warn people away.

If there is anything unusual or unsettling it is that some people in tech seem to feel that it is "unethical" to treat tech companies as anything less than bold innovators, irrespective of what that they ship. If someone is despairing over past week's discourse, one only can imagine how they'd deal with something like Apple's "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" commercials.

That was my initial reaction, the word scam is overused these days. But then I reached the comparison section between the photoshopped/ generated images and the real photos.

I'd say the last second pivot to "AI" to try and cash in on the hype is definitely malicious intent.

People are getting less patient for hype cycles.