Humane's Ai Pin: Revolutionizing AI Hardware Accessibility

0:00What can 160 years of experience teach you about the future? When it comes to protecting what matters, Pacific Life provides life insurance, retirement income, and employee benefits for people and businesses building a more confident tomorrow. Strategies rooted in strength and backed by experience. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you today. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. Today on the podcast, I want to talk about a very interesting company that I've actually covered in the past, and it's called Humane.

0:35And the reason why Humane, I think, is making so many waves is that it's a hardware startup. And a lot of times when we talk about AI and the implications of AI, we're talking about a lot of different software startups, right? Different AI models that do different interesting things. and humane is taking a slightly different approach where they're actually creating a hardware product which is kind of like a little puck that you put into your pocket of your shirt it's got a little camera it's got a little projector it uses ai to do a lot of different things you know in the past we saw a demo of it at during a ted talk but we've gotten a bunch of new information about this It's called the AI Pin.

1:16They did a press release. We've got some new information about it. And I think really interestingly, we learned about, you know, who's behind it from a development side and also from an investment side. And I think this is important because of some of the features that this is this AI is planning on doing. So today on the podcast, I'm going to cover all of that and tell you a little bit more. So without further ado, let's jump into it. The first thing to know is that this startup was launched by ex-Apple Design and Engineering duo, Iram Chaudhry, and also Bethany Bongorno. And they released a bunch of new kind of a bunch of new features and tools or information about it today.

1:56And what's I think really important to know is that this is not a new product. You know, this isn't just something that's jumped onto the scenes because of the big AI hype wave that we're seeing recently in, you know, Silicon Valley and other places. This is something that has been worked on since around 2018 when it was originally founded. And they essentially kind of unveiled this and they were bringing a whole bunch of ex-Apple employees on to this team that originally were responsible for iPhones, you know, touchscreen keyboard and a lot of different tools, including, you know, iCloud and Apple Pay and Home and some other things.

2:32So, you know, it has a pretty solid team coming from Apple. When you look at their marketing stuff and how they're talking about what they're doing. You definitely get Apple vibes from the whole thing. And so this kind of wearable gadget with a projector display is going to be really interesting. But I did want to talk about really quickly who is behind this, because I think that is really important. So right now, this is a San Francisco based company. They have around 200 people in their workforce, a little bit more than that. And they've raised 230 million dollars which you know respect is a sizable sum of money but compared to a lot of other ai you know models like you look at inflection ai that's raised over 1.5 billion dollars um of course that's the second highest so it's hard to compete with that but i think this 200 million range is where we see actually a lot of other ai startups so this is a pretty solid place and they're getting their money from um salesforce ceo mark benioff kindred ventures SK Networks, LG Technology Ventures, Microsoft, Volvo Cars Fund, or Volvo Cars Tech Fund, Tiger Global, Qualcomm Ventures, and OpenAI's CEO and co-founder Sam Altman.

3:44So this is important because of what they're planning on integrating with this technology. But this is what they actually said about it. They said, the AI pin is a connected and intelligent cloth-based wearable device uses a range of sensors to enable contextual and ambient compute interactions. That's what they said in their kind of press release. They also said the AI pin is a type of standalone device with a software platform that harnesses the power of AI to enable innovative personal computing experiences. Now, this might be one of their biggest value propositions to their device, but in my opinion, it's like one of the things I'm the least excited about and that I have the most criticism is the fact that you know this does a lot of things that smartphones can do but they're just saying yeah but we can do them with like less touches and you can do it faster and we'll have a button to do the thing instead of you having to pull up an app on your phone but like a lot of the things that this does a lot of the technology is just what you would find as apps on your smartphone so I think that might be an area they'll find hard to compete with people um but they're but I guess their whole approach to this is that you know this thing doesn't have a screen And so it's, you know, not supposed to get in the way of your life.

4:53You're not supposed to be like interacting with this on your phone all the time. It's just meant to be like a tool to help you do a number of different tasks. So it would kind of pull away all their marketing jargon that they say. Essentially, assuming that all of their claims are actually going to work the way they say they are. This is going to be able to do a lot of tasks, including voice commands that they'll be able to activate voice commands with a tap. The AI pin is designed to clip onto your breast pocket of your shirt, and it can offer a summary of emails and, you know, a summary of your calendar invites.

5:28It can be able to translate between different languages and answer and place phone calls. One feature that they kind of tease, which again, I've seen other AI companies sort of working on this, is the ability for you to, you know, talk in one in your native language, and then it will translate that for you to someone you're speaking to. but it doesn't just translate it, you know, and use a random voice. It actually uses, it takes AI and it essentially clones your voice and allows you to talk in another language. This is actually something that we've recently seen out of 11 Labs, and 11 Labs does have an API.

6:00So this, while this was incredible technology when they announced this at their TED Talk earlier this year, this is now technology that almost anyone is going to be able to do, essentially that feature using the API from 11 Labs. So I think I would love for them to be successful. It's kind of a cool idea and product. But the thing is, when you work with hardware, it's a lot. There's a lot of challenges to working with hardware. And I think the hardware side of this might actually be slowing them down from the software side. And they're trying to do so many different things that there's so many other companies that do all of these software aspects.

6:35So I could easily see someone, you know, they might spend a lot of time. They're this Apple company working on this since 2018. They might release this perfect Apple-like device. that some people think is super cool, premium, obviously, it's going to be expensive, a lot of people use, but I could also see a lot of people just cobble together a clone run on Android using APIs to a bunch of different AI engines that does a lot of the same stuff. So it'll be interesting to see how they compete against that. In any case, thanks to the camera and computer vision powered software, the AI pin can also recognize objects around it, like food nutrition labels, and it uses a built-in projector and depth sensors, And so it's actually able to project an interactive interface onto nearby surfaces.

7:17So, for example, you could hold out your phone. It'll project or your palm. It'll project onto your hand or onto the surface of the table around you, you know, different things I would like to tell you. So in their press release, they said our AI pin represents an opportunity for people to take AI with them everywhere and unlock a new era of personal mobile computing, which is seamless, screenless and sensing. um humane also revealed that just recently that they're collaborating with qualcomm so this is you know at the beginning we talked about all the people that invested in them this is why those people invested in them and this is the collaborations they're doing so they are this is very interesting they're actually collaborating with qualcomm to develop uh the ai pins internal hardware um which is there's an unnamed chip from call qualcomm's snapdragon series that's going to power this device and humane's promising more info to come later in the year ahead of the devices launch but this is really interesting so they got qualcomm to invest in them and then you know qualcomm is also helping to actually develop uh the chip that is going inside of this which i think is you know obviously a great uh a great partnership so it will also have um well okay so according to the product manager Ziad Askar from Qualcomm.

8:37He's Qualcomm's SVP of product management. He said, Humane's AI pin will deliver a superior AI experience with the advent of generative AI. Humane's AI pin and user experience takes excellent advantage of some of the key strengths of on-device AI and uses real-time contextual information to provide the users with exciting personalized AI use cases. Now, you know, if Qualcomm really does develop a specialized chip for this device, perhaps it will be able to beat phones in a way, you know, like iPhones won't actually have a powerful enough chip to do some of this on-device AI computing, right? So, I mean, even if you're looking at something like 11 Labs, a lot of times this is being computed by 11 Labs, you know, cloud infrastructure, and you're getting an API to that.

9:18And so if you wanted this thing to be really conversational and repeat what you said immediately, 11 Labs might have a leg there. maybe this will be faster so maybe that's another benefit they have they've also announced partnerships with sk network and microsoft to bring its platforms and services to market microsoft's going to be supplying their cloud processing power and sk networks is going to be handling their distribution um they've also have a collaboration with open ai to integrate some of open ai's tech into their device whatever form that ends up taking i'm not 100 sure and lg is also working with humane on the research and development of this entire project and for the next phase of its product lifecycle as well as helping them adapt their tech to smart home devices which is really interesting then of course they did get an investment from volvo and volvo is teaming up with them to kind of collaborate on some potential automotive industry offerings right so perhaps they'll integrate this into different volvo vehicles or other things which I think will be very interesting.

10:16So Humane is definitely a company to watch. They have a very solid team. They have some very solid and serious backers. So I think they have a really high chance of being able to succeed given all of the resources and what they're building. But I do think they're definitely gonna have to answer the question of how do they compete against APIs to standard software and just to all of the power and apps that we have on our phones today.