Things are not going so well for AI hardware startups.
After years of development, startup Humane launched a $700 wearable device in early April that relies heavily on artificial intelligence. The original pitch for the Ai Pin was that it was no longer necessary to juggle different applications; Its operating system can “look for the right AI at the right time,” allowing it to play music, translate languages, and even tell you how much protein is in a handful of almonds. And since it doesn’t have a traditional screen, the Ai pin was supposed to be a little tincture for screen time illness; Smartphones were about to disappear.
The pin has been panoramic. WIRED’s Julian Chokkattu rated the Ai Pin a 4 out of 10. Popular YouTuber Marques Brownlee praised the device’s hardware design, but still called it “The worst product I’ve ever reviewed…so far.” The company since then massaged the message which is intended to replace your phone. Humane co-founder and CEO Bethany Bongiorno has been meticulously responding to unhappy customers (and some fans) on Twitter, with apologies, assurances that improvements are coming, and video demonstrations of the device’s user interface, which replaces to the smartphone in the palm of your hand by projecting lasers into the palm of your hand.
Humane seems to have lost the plot in launching its own product, and it’s not alone. The cheaper Rabbit R1, which sold for $200 as a generative AI “pocket companion” and generated a lot of initial excitement, has now been labeled “disappointing,” “half-baked,” “undercooked,” and “unreliable.” ”. WIRED’s Chokkattu gave it a 3 out of 10, while some people have questioned the way the device handles logins for external apps like Uber.
These first hardware failures are unprecedented. Many startups have promised too much in marketing and then created and shipped mediocre products. Competing in hardware is especially difficult in the era of technology giants, whose ecosystems dominate everything. Developer Ben Sandofsky surmised that Humane’s co-founders’ adherence to the “Apple way,” or toiling in a secret vacuum, is partly to blame. They spent years honing that singular product like a giant tech company would. he wrote in a blog postbut with $230 million in venture capital funding instead of billions in cash deposits.
But both Humane and Rabbit appear to have made another error in judgment: They were both banking on the hype of AI in the ChatGPT era to capture early customers and stay out of the device graveyard. Instead, they jumped on the AI train straight into a non-functioning brick wall. It turns out that generative AI doesn’t make hardware any less difficult.
Expensive failures
“To actually create a new AI device, you need to have the hardware and software figured out, and the question with some of these startups is how much of that software layer is just a veneer,” says MG Siegler, partner at GV. Alphabet’s venture capital firm.
Sielger says technology incumbents now have an even greater advantage, because they can build using their own infrastructure and afford to lose money while iterating new versions of products. While startups try to launch their rudimentary AI products out of thin air, Meta, Google, Microsoft and Apple can leverage existing teams and services to put AI assistants in infinitely wearable sunglasses, produce phones with built-in AI generative search , create designated key AI devices in their laptops and pack their tablets with “outrageously powerful” AI chips.
“Larger tech companies may have five opportunities in a hardware product, while a startup may have only one,” says Jacob Andreou, a Greylock investor who spent several years developing products at Snap. “The odds of one of these smaller companies mounting a future fundraising round after publishing a costly flop are not good.”
