AI that can be your second brain with Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri of Humane

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4:09Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So wherever you are right now, chances are there is a screen within arm's reach. Maybe it's a phone or a tablet or a smartwatch. And over the past decade, we've come to depend on these screens to conduct most of the business in our lives. Transportation, communication, scheduling, entertainment. We now do all of this pretty much on our screens. But what if you could do all these things without the distraction of a screen? Well, that's the idea behind the Humane AI pin. It's a little square device that can do many of the same things as our screen devices.

4:50Think of it a little like an AI assistant. The difference is the Humane pin is controlled by the sound of your voice. The pin has a touchpad, a camera, a built-in projector, and it's made to pin right to your clothes with a little magnet. The AI pin was created by humane co-founders Imran Chaudhry and his wife, Bethany Bongiorno. Before they got into the world of artificial intelligence, the two of them worked at Apple, leading the design of some of the very screens I was just talking about. Imran started there first in the late 1990s when working for Apple meant kind of being the underdog. Our team started by redefining what a Mac was, by building Mac OS X.

5:32I just really had an eye towards how do you actually build a new type of computer that was easier to use, that wouldn't crash. And Macs used to crash all the time back then. But that was our boot camp. And then we got to work on things like multi-touch, which went on to propel things like iPhone and iPad and watch. All stuff that my team and I worked on. I mean, of course, there's the famous presentation that Steve Jobs gives and says, stylus? Who needs a stylus, right? When you've got five digits on each hand and that's something that you worked on. You worked on that touchscreen, the technology that enabled that.

6:17Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think that was the fundamental unlock for making the transition from remote interactions from a keyboard and mouse to really allowing people to do what we call direct manipulation. And that's literally just being able to touch the screen and have a far more intimate relationship with the things that you're really using on a day-to-day basis. Yeah. I mean, both of you were at Apple at just such an incredibly historic time. Bethany, you joined about 10 years after Imran started. But still, I mean, right after the iPhone kind of shipped is when you joined. And soon, I guess, you were kind of put in charge as a project manager involved with the iPad.

7:08Yeah, I joined Apple in 2008. And I, you know, I was a BlackBerry user, I was a PC user, I didn't have an iPhone. But I had a lot of admiration for what they were doing. And a couple months after I joined the iPhone team, which was which was pretty small at the time still, and still treated like a startup within the company and had, you know, a lot of secrecy around what that team was up to. A lot of, you know, locked doors where the teams were meeting and doing our work. But a couple months after I joined, they asked me if I would take on a new project. And at the time, they told me that they couldn't tell me what the project was, but that it would require that for the next, you know, year and a half to two years of my life, I would have to work many, many hours and it would be really challenging and really difficult.

8:04And it was this new project that Steve wanted to do. They couldn't tell me what it was, but they would need to know in 24 hours if I would take it on. And so I said yes and walked into a room, signed an NDA. And then they told me that I was going to be leading a project to build a tablet and bring together a group of engineers and work really closely with the design team and just figure out how we could make it possible. and that started that project for me. It's so interesting to me because, of course, Apple is famously as secretive as the Pentagon, right? And many companies talk about breaking down silos and breaking down walls and creating cross-collaboration.

8:44And Apple really took a complete and has taken and continues to take a completely different approach, which is it's very siloed. But I wonder, having been inside, it seems like it works. Like there is method to that madness And that kind of secrecy is probably necessary? Or do you think that with some perspective looking back on it, it's sometimes a little bit too much? You know, there's some advantages. You get an amazing amount of focus, which is good. And I think the projects that I worked on were all essentially 1.0s that turned into something else and that really siloed, protected space allows for those kinds of things to happen.

9:28I think where it becomes difficult is when you come out of stealth, so to speak, you start to have to really need different functions of the organization to come in. And that's where it gets a little messy. Because you don't have the relationships. Yeah, you don't. And I think some of us over time at Apple built those relationships. But in some cases, you'd end up with duplicative work that would build some animosity and things like that. So those are the things that you have to struggle with. And essentially, Bethany, I'm curious about your perspective because obviously the two of you met at Apple.

10:11and then fell in love and got married and now here you are today. But when the two of you were both at Apple and a couple, presumably you had to keep what you were working on from Imran and vice versa. You probably couldn't really talk about what you did. It would be like two people who worked for the CIA. Well, actually, we had the good fortune that we were building basically everything together. There were very few things that Imran was working on mainly that I didn't know about. For the most part, he knew everything I was directly involved in. And actually, we met on my first day at Apple. And we didn't really like each other that much, mainly because we're polar opposites.

10:59And my job was to make sure that things were on schedule and on time and that everybody was at the table and were having the right conversations. You know, Imran's the vision. My job was about pushing the boundaries of what's possible and what the world really needed in that moment. Yeah. And so we used to get into quite a few arguments, actually. And I would go up to him and say, Imran, what are you doing? Like, we can't do all of this, or this idea is too big, or the team can't do it. And he would push back on me and say, well, we have to do it. You know, we have to make this happen. And have you tried this?

11:39His favorite line was, have they tried this? Have they tried this? And he was always right, which was always the really frustrating part of it in most moments. And so, yeah, we had the opportunity to build a lot of things together, whether it was new hardware and totally new product categories or software, things like FaceTime and iMessage, you know, that were really complicated things for billions of people that involved a lot of challenges along the way. In 2016, you both left Apple and, you know, presumably with the idea of maybe trying to create something yourselves. But was that the reason?

12:18Was it, did it feel like, did you feel like it was time to move on to, that you'd kind of done everything you wanted to do there? Yeah, you know, that equation of like, why somebody decides to move on is always such a complicated one. I had an amazing opportunity there and was really blessed with the things that we were able to achieve. Around that time, we were working on iPhone 10, which in and of itself is kind of like, a bit of like a Groundhog Day thing. It's just a newer version of the same thing. Yeah, you know, we definitely were some new things we were thinking about. But what I was really into was being able to push the limit of compute.

13:01And what I found for myself was that the environment had changed a bit. And I really needed to think about where else I'd want to go. I wasn't at all done in terms of thinking where I wanted to take compute, but I felt as if I had reached my personal limit at Apple because everything had really started to mature. When the two of you decided to leave, tell me a little bit about some of the ideas that you had thought about, things that you could do. Because it wasn't what we are going to talk about, Humane AI, wasn't the original idea. Maybe there was going to be like a fitness app or a wellness app or a maternal care app.

13:48You guys have talked about a couple of different ideas, right? Yeah, we actually started ideating on a couple of ideas. And Imran took his passion and started really digging into AI. And this was in 2017. He was very passionate about it. And I really started to look into women's health. And it was something, the other area that Imran and I were very interested in, mainly because women actually suffer because we were never really taught how our bodies work and we don't have the right tools to be able to care for ourselves ultimately. And so we essentially started building two prototypes and we had one in the space of women's health and the other was this idea that Imran was pushing around a new kind of computer.

14:40Imran, tell me about that idea that you had in mind. What were you thinking? Yeah, so always was fascinated with AI. And when I was in high school, I had a job at a computer shop where I used to be able to get books and magazines and read them. And I used to read AI journals when I was in high school and just be fascinated by that stuff. and a lot of it theoretically was something that was moving into a place of practice around that time frame 2017 or so and sparked a lot of inspiration to say hey I actually really want to build a new kind of computer something that is really going to help humanize the the ability to be able to interact with AI.

15:32And around 2017, I was able to convince Bethany that if we started now, that we would be where we needed to be by the time we'd be able to actually practice this stuff, which is kind of like right now. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, the dinner date that convinced one of the inventors of the touchscreen to go screenless. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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19:39Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2017, which is a really pivotal year for AI research. And Imran and Bethany are thinking about how their experience working for Apple might help launch their next venture. So, all right, so you knew that you wanted to do something around computing. Now you had, I mean, you were intimately involved in developing and helping to develop your names and patents around so many of the products we use. my Apple Watch, my iPhone, like you're in this thing. You had spent so much of your career working on screens, right? Things that we can look at.

20:24And so were you, I mean, already back in 2017, were you sort of saying a version of this to yourself, which is, can I make something that doesn't require a screen? Were you literally thinking that granular? Yeah, that's exactly right. How do you actually elevate compute? Because I think smartphones are great. They're really, really great at what they can do now, but they're very limited in terms of how much more they can do. And if you think about if they're able to leverage some of these multimodal inputs that use text and voice and sound and image and eventually video, you need a new kind of computer that really allows for you to take advantage of that kind of processing.

21:16And at that point, you don't need to use screens the same way. You need screens because screens confirm everything that you're doing, whether you're typing in something properly or whether you've tapped the right button. But if you can actually take that away, take the burden of that away, you don't need a screen other than something for a lightweight confirmation, which is kind of the underpinnings of what we've built. So Bethany, I gather after sort of a year and a half of consulting and considering maybe doing something in the women's health space, I think around 2018, you both agreed to pursue this.

21:55How did Imran describe what this product could be to you initially? Yeah, I had been out for the day and I came home and he said, this is what we're going to build. And he pulled out, he had made a one pager on the computer that basically described the vision for this operating system. And he said, this is what we need to do. And so I said, okay, well, let's start it. Let's see, is it possible? And I'm the person who definitely questions sometimes, like, is this technically feasible? Like, are we going to be able to do this? What are the things that would prevent us from being successful? And so, and Imran is always, you know, 10 to 100 steps ahead of me.

22:34So in his head, he already knows where we're going and what's possible and what's not. We definitely think about things in a different way. But that really started it once we said, okay, let's build some prototypes now. How specific was that one pager? Did it say a wearable device in the shape of a square with a camera? I mean, we'll get there. But how specific was it? He had a diagram of the device. He had a drawing that he had done that looks very much like it does today with a couple minor exceptions. It even had the magnetic attachment and also had a description of what it would do. Like, here are the things that you would do with it.

23:17Here's what it has, what it doesn't. And I remember at the time having worked on the iPhone and having had some experience there, my first thought was this is impossible to build a phone this small and to be a standalone device. You know, you're talking about four radios. It has to have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and GPS and a pretty powerful chip to run what he wanted. So my first instinct was to say this is impossible, but I also know my husband pretty well. So I said, okay, let's give it a go and see if we can prove it to ourselves that we can rebuild this. Imran, at the time in 2018, this is before ChatGBT, like ChatGBT, I mean, people are using it in so many different ways.

23:58Like, I'm going to Italy this summer. And I was like, give me the seven essential restaurants I need to eat at in Rome. And I gave it some parameters and it's great. Okay. But in 2018, ChatGBT wasn't out yet. How confident did you feel that within the next three years, that the things that you wanted this thing to do could be done? Pretty confident. I used to say this thing at Apple, you know, if you can dream it and if you can describe it, you can make it. And I don't think a lot of people like really believe that. But if you have those parameters in place and you understand how you get there and how long it's going to take, it's at a much larger scale than, say, like a chef that imagines a recipe because they can taste the notes in their mouth and they're just imagining things.

24:54I sort of feel that way with this. This is the medium I understand the most. So when you guys embarked on this project, you really went underground. You kind of went underground. You had to operate like Apple, right? You had to be super secretive. What was that like basically going underground until 2023 when you kind of came out of the underground and revealed this product? What, I mean, how did you operate? I mean, was it, you couldn't talk about this with anybody outside of the company? Yeah, it was a challenge because we also needed to hire. So we knew that there was a risk involved in sharing with people who were joining or thinking about joining what we were building.

25:44And so we actually, you know, up until the fall of last year, every single person that joined Humane didn't know what they were joining to build. We didn't even tell candidates what it was, which was kind of a radical decision. but we felt it was pretty important. One, to make sure they were joining for the right reasons. Also to protect the idea because it's still pretty fragile in the early stages. But it was a challenge. And I think we also started building really in earnest in late 2018, early 2019. And we were self-funding for a good amount of that time up until the summer of 2019. and then at that point started to bring a team together and only had a couple of months really of building together before COVID forced everybody into lockdown.

26:36So there were a number of challenges along the way that were hard for a startup. Tell me what the vision was as you continue to kind of develop what this product would be. Imran, did you think, okay, I want this to be, and again, And forgive me because I'm oversimplifying it. I know it's much more complex, but just for the illustrative purposes, right? Were you sort of thinking, okay, this will be like the best personal assistant? Like, how were you thinking about what this could do? Yeah, this was really more like a companion or an expert that you could take with you. And this piece that would allow you to be liberated from having to really use a computer in a conventional way.

27:20You know, I think it's this always with you piece that the moment you could think of something, it would allow you to act on it. And it was just always there. And the results that you would get would happen, I used to say, at the speed of thought, right? And even mundane things like text messages would start to feel a lot more lightweight because of that. I want to just describe what it is for people who haven't seen the demos. But it's essentially, it's a square, a little sort of square, maybe a little bit bigger than an Apple Watch face, right? Yeah. And it sticks onto your clothing through a magnet.

28:04And it has a camera so it can capture images. And it's got a cell phone so you can wear earbuds or not. And then it has a projector that it can project like text messages or other things on your hand. So it's got all of the more or less the things that your phone has, right? But it's designed to answer questions. Walk me through what was the hardest hurdle that you had to kind of overcome to pack all that in such a small little package? Yeah, you know, I'd say the hardest part was really ensuring that everything was going to be something we could fit in. So we call that miniaturization, making all the components small enough so that they sit there.