HP just blew $116 million of your ink cartridge money to buy one of Silicon Valley’s biggest flops

This week, the startup Humane—which raised $240 million to build an iPhone-killing AI Pin—announced its sale to HP for $116 million. While far short of the company’s original $1 billion asking price, it’s astonishing that the brand scrapped for anything at all. A product that had promised to change the world instead became a worldwide laughingstock, indicative of the worst tendencies of Silicon Valley-founder hubris. Universally panned, Humane sold fewer than 10,000 units. Sometimes, its returns outpaced its sales. Units could catch fire. 

Humane cofounders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno thanked their few loyal customers by announcing their Pins would no longer work in 10 days. Well, for anything but checking the battery level.

“This investment will rapidly accelerate our ability to develop a new generation of devices that seamlessly orchestrate AI requests both locally and in the cloud,” said Tuan Tran, president of technology and innovation at HP, in a press statement. “Humane’s AI platform Cosmos, backed by an incredible group of engineers, will help us create an intelligent ecosystem across all HP devices from AI PCs to smart printers and connected conference rooms. This will unlock new levels of functionality for our customers and deliver on the promises of AI.”

Heh. I can understand why the world was fooled by the AI Pin when it launched in 2024. I have a little less sympathy now for HP execs, who have just completed one of the most tone-deaf acquisitions in corporate history.

The Ai Pin was flawed from the beginning

Mystique around Humane had been swirling for years by the time Chaudhri took the stage at TED in May 2023 to present the idea of “the disappearing computer.” After spending his career at Apple working on some of its most important launches like the iPhone, he pitched a screenless AI interface that “allows us to get back to what really matters: a new ability to be present.” By simply asking it to “catch me up,” his computer cut through endless notifications to tell him what was important. By holding up a candy bar, his computer could tell him if he could eat it with lactose intolerance. And when his wife called, well, her name magically appeared right on his hand.

Little did the audience realize: the computer had merely disappeared into Chaudhri’s jacket with a needle and thread. 

Even a bad magic trick can fool people who want to be fooled. And Humane’s vision struck a chord with a society that felt guilty for using its phones all the same. Freeing our eyes and hands sounded like liberation, and the promise of an AI that could do everything from translate languages in realtime to examining the foods you’d eaten through the day to determine if you’re aligned with your diet, seemed like the sort of just-out-of-reach magic that could finally be real. And, wait, was that a LASER BEAM THAT JUST SHOT ONTO HIS HAND?

The next time the AI Pin arrived on stage, it would be worn on the lapel of Naomi Campbell—true supermodel royalty—at Paris Fashion week. The closest parallel I could remember was Beyoncé donning an Apple Watch around its announcement. The product was starting to feel too big to fail. Its investors—including Tiger Global Management, Microsoft, Qualcomm Ventures, and Softbank, alongside individuals like Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and OpenAI’s Sam Altman—fed an $840 million valuation. It felt like something that deserved to be taken seriously.

Still, the TED Talk had struck me funny for reasons I couldn’t articulate. Later, Chaudhri canceled an on-stage interview with myself where he’d promised to speak about the product for the first time. He also declined an interview after my in-person demo (I’ve experienced a hundred or more product walkthroughs in my career, and I’ve never been unable to ask a question after any but with Humane). What I generously interpreted as shyness—Chaudhri’s soft spoken magnetism cannot be denied—increasingly seemed to be protecting a thin veneer. 

Five months before Marques Brownlee nuked the AI Pin into oblivion by calling it the worst product he’d ever reviewed, I’d been saying the same to friends in the industry who eagerly asked about my experience with the device. It was difficult to explain to people that this wasn’t hyperbole, that when I arrived in San Francisco in November 2023, the demo was really that bad. That every query took painfully long even inside a perfectly closed environment. That all the magical dietary food stuff didn’t seem to work at all. That I was expected to ooh and ahh when the Pin told me the weather. That I wasn’t even allowed to use the device myself. 

Still, Chaudhri and Bongiorno (who, note, always wore the Pin on a thick jacket to support its weight), had already planned for countless special edition releases, with the Pin in all sorts of limited edition candy colors. It didn’t work, mind you. The AI Pin was nothing more than a smartphone without a screen, stuck to your chest. Its limited capabilities somehow put technology more in the way. But the entire brand and packaging promised to usher us into a new era of computing, because Humane was focused more on optics than function.

The project didn’t seem salvageable, but I was actually surprised when the world of tech reviewers mirrored my initial take. These are people who review Android phones for a living! And they hated the thing.

Where this leaves HP

Humane was always going to sell as scrap to something or someone. There was just too much invested into the company for there to be nothing to show. Its carefully engineered chipset (the AI Pin used little off-the-shelf hardware) is unlikely to be worth much of anything outside the device itself, but perhaps HP has a purpose. Its 300 patents around various AI/UX interactions likely have an appeal to any tech company, if only because AI isn’t going anywhere. And the purchase price isn’t beyond what companies will spend to acquihire tough-to-recruit technologists.

I’m more surprised that HP has made such a public bet on the ashes of Humane, which has been immortalized in memes as a pile of bogusness. If this was some attempt at capturing whatever lingering spirit was left in the Humane brand, the two companies snuffed it out when bricking their devices. 

HP says that Humane “will form HP IQ, HP’s new AI innovation lab focused on building an intelligent ecosystem across HP’s products and services for the future of work.” For a company that’s still making billions in profits annually from predatory printer ink subscriptions, perhaps it’s a fitting end. The worst AI company of the last decade will linger as some sort of “smart” notification that your magenta is low.