On paper, the Humane AI pin didn’t seem like a terrible idea.

It was a stylish little device meant to put AI right on your lapel, designed by former Apple employees and launched in April 2024 — right as consumer AI tools started going mainstream. Hold your finger against it and it would take pictures, search the web, tell you information about the world around you, summarise and respond to emails and texts, make phone calls, and play music. It even had a small built-in laser projector, which could put media controls and small text information onto your hand. If you felt that you used your phone too much, the Humane Pin seemed to provide much of the same functionality but with far less hassle and distraction.

On paper, that all seems promising. But there were many, many problems. For one, it couldn’t call or text contacts from your regular phone number, but from a new number, courtesy of that Pin’s in-built SIM, which cost $24 a month, which you needed for it to work. With a mandatory subscription of $280 a year, you would think the device would be relatively inexpensive, or even free like Whoop. But no. The Pin retailed for $700; the same as many new phones, all of which can run AI chatbots on them, and have all the same functionality as the Humane Pin.

That might be justifiable if the Pin was any good. But it wasn’t. When you asked it a question, the Pin would take an eon to respond, and when it eventually did, the answer was usually catastrophically wrong. This didn’t improve over the product’s short life either, as there were no meaningful updates. On the contrary, at one point, Humane told customers to stop using the charging case as it presented a fire risk.

Also, given that this is the last time I will likely ever write about this product, it’s worth remembering that it launched with a seemingly fraudulent TED talk, where Humane faked the Pin’s capacity for real-time translation and answering; and then followed that with an unnerving reveal video, which included man notable factual errors.

In short, it’s one of the most disastrous tech products released since the exploding Samsung Galaxy Note 7. And less than a year after its release, Humane is dead.

Reports started circulating late last year that Humane was looking for a buyer, and they found it in HP. Before announcing their product, Humane had raised 240M in funding from investors like Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, on a valuation of $850M. A year or so later, HP bought it for parts for $116M; which still seems dramatically overvalued.

The companies founders now have a new job at HP, running an internal AI lab. Their roughly 10,000 former customers, though, are not so lucky. Humane will not refund customers for their devices, and the servers and AI functionality will shut down promptly. They were happy to inform owners that offline functionality will remain.

The off-line functionality they cited was the ability to check the device’s battery level.

Otherwise, it’s now the world’s fanciest, most over-funded, expensive paperweight.