by tyler | Apr 11, 2024 | Tech
Apple sent threat notifications to iPhone users in 92 countries on Wednesday, warning them that they may have been targeted by mercenary spyware attacks.
The company said it sent the alerts to individuals in 92 nations at 12 p.m. Pacific Time Wednesday. The notification, which TechCrunch has seen, did not disclose the attackers’ identities or the countries where users received notifications.
“Apple detected that you are being targeted by a mercenary spyware attack that is trying to remotely compromise the iPhone associated with your Apple ID -xxx-,” it wrote in the warning to affected customers.
“This attack is likely targeting you specifically because of who you are or what you do. Although it’s never possible to achieve absolute certainty when detecting such attacks, Apple has high confidence in this warning — please take it seriously,” Apple added in the text.
The iPhone maker sends these kind of notifications multiple times a year and has notified users to such threats in over 150 countries since 2021, per an updated Apple support page .
Apple also sent an identical warning to a number of journalists and politicians in India in October last year. Later, nonprofit advocacy group Amnesty International reported that it had found Israeli spyware maker NSO Group’s invasive spyware Pegasus on the iPhones of prominent journalists in India. (Users in India are among those who have received Apple’s latest threat notifications, according to people familiar with the matter.)
The spyware alerts arrive at a time when many nations are preparing for elections. In recent months, many tech firms have cautioned about rising state-sponsored efforts to sway certain electoral outcomes. Apple’s alerts, however, did not remark on their timing.
“We are unable to provide more information about what caused us to send you this notification, as that may help mercenary spyware attackers adapt their behavior to evade detection in the future,” Apple told affected customers.
Apple previously described the attackers as “state-sponsored” but has replaced all such references with “mercenary spyware attacks.”
The warning to customers adds: “Mercenary spyware attacks, such as those using Pegasus from the NSO Group, are exceptionally rare and vastly more sophisticated than regular cybercriminal activity or consumer malware.”
Apple said it relies solely on “internal threat-intelligence information and investigations to detect such attacks.”
“Although our investigations can never achieve absolute certainty, Apple threat notifications are high-confidence alerts that a user has been individually targeted by a mercenary spyware attack and should be taken very seriously,” it added.
This tool tells you if NSO’s Pegasus spyware targeted your phone
by tyler | Apr 11, 2024 | Tech
A few weeks after defeating Elon Musk’s attempt to silence it in court , anti-hate research nonprofit, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), is back with a new piece of research on X (formerly Twitter). The study builds on earlier work investigating Musk’s impact on online speech by spotlighting how the policy changes he enacted are actively rewarding hate speech posters with increased reach, engagement and even direct payouts through X’s subscriber feature.
CCDH studied the growth rates of 10 influential accounts that pay for X Premium and have posted anti-Jewish and/or anti-Muslim hate speech since October 7, 2023, when Hamas’ attack on Israel sparked the Israel-Gaza conflict. Some of these accounts had previously posted conspiracy theory content related to COVID-19, per the report.
The 10 accounts tracked for the study (titled “Hate Pays: How X accounts are exploiting the Israel-Gaza conflict to grow and profit”) are: Jackson Hinkle, Dr. Anastasia Maria Loupis, Censored Men, Jake Shields, Dr. Eli David, Radio Genoa, Ryan Dawson, Keith Woods, Way of the World, and Sam Parker.
The CCDH found these accounts were able to boost their reach on X after posting hateful content about the war. The report discusses examples of hate speech posted by the accounts, such as tweets depicting antisemitic tropes like the blood libel, or seeking to dehumanize Palestinians by depicting them as rats.
“Each of the accounts showed slow follower growth in the four months before October 7th, for a combined growth of approximately 1 million followers. However, in the four months after the outbreak of the conflict, they collectively gained 4 million new followers,” the CCDH wrote.
Growth rates for individual accounts that gained new followers over the period varied, with the highest growth multiple recorded being 9.6x (for Dawson’s account), followed by 8.3x (for Hinkle), and 7.1x (for Parker). At the lower end, Way of the World grew its followers 1.7x over the period.
X did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment on the report.
The report includes a history of the tracked accounts’ notoriety, noting for example that Hinkle is banned by WhatsApp, YouTube and PayPal. Or that the Censored Men (anonymous) account used to generally post defenses of toxic masculinity influencer, Andrew Tate, but, since October 7, has focused on the Israel-Gaza conflict. Dawson, a Holocaust denier who also believes the 9/11 terrorist attacks were carried out by Israel, was previously banned from X but had his account reinstated in 2023 under Musk.
Since taking over Twitter, as X was known back in October 2022 , the billionaire has reversed a number of legacy account bans, which included notorious white supremacists and neo nazis . Coupled with the policy changes Musk has pushed in areas like content moderation, account verification and premium features (such as prioritized ranking for paid accounts’ posts), this has resulted in a polarized platform where it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish genuine information from lies, and where the tone all-too-often skews towards conversational outrage (or worse).
The CCDH contends this is intentional, and is a deliberate strategy by Musk to profit from tragedy. It’s accusing him of embracing hateful accounts and configuring X so that purveyors of hate speech are able and encouraged to turn war and human suffering into an opportunity to raise their profiles on the service, and earn revenue from posts that exploit violence and misery.
Six of the 10 accounts the CCDH studied have enabled X’s subscriptions feature, which lets their followers pay them to access additional content. The report also quoted a post by Hinkle in early October, in which he shared a screenshot that showed him receiving $550 in ad revenue over the course of a month — directly profiting from engagement driven by his posts.
The CCDH said its analysis of the accounts showed that even activity that was critical of these posts — such as quote tweets denouncing hateful content — raised their visibility and reach (potentially boosting revenue-generating opportunities). Such critical reshares contributed as much as 28% to the reach of hateful posts, per the report, which suggested the figure is a conservative estimate as it does not take account of X’s own algorithmic response to these reshares, which applies further amplification aimed at harvesting even more engagement for ad profit.
Ad-funded business models that earn revenue based on user engagement have been known to drive such anti-social outrage mechanisms. In X’s case, Musk’s erratic behavior has alienated some advertisers, but not all: The CCDH found ads being served alongside hateful posts made by all the tracked accounts. “We found ads for Oreos, the NBA, the FBI and even X itself placed near hateful posts,” the report said.
“Under Elon Musk’s ownership, X appears to be pursuing a strategy of hosting as much controversial content as possible,” a CCDH spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We know that this controversial content is addictive, not just for users who approve of it but also for users who criticize it, too. The potential benefit to X is that these controversies could ramp up user time spent on the platform and increase ad revenue — but only if brands are willing to pay for ads that could be displayed near toxic content.”
“The accounts studied by our report have grown sharply despite posting false or hateful content, showing that posting such content is no impediment to growth on X. This is not unique to the Israel-Gaza conflict, but it is the latest example of the problem. Our previous research into accounts that were reinstated following Musk’s takeover of Twitter shows that X stands to make significant ad revenue by welcoming users posting a range of topical hate and disinformation, from brutal misogyny to anti-vaccine conspiracies,” the spokesperson said.
Commenting on the report in a statement, Imran Ahmed, CEO and founder of the CCDH, said: “The public and advertisers need to know more about the symbiotic, profitable relationship between X and hate-peddling ‘influencers’. Lawmakers must act to enforce greater transparency and accountability from platforms and to allow these companies to be held responsible for harming the civil rights and safety of Jews, Muslims and other minority communities.”
Musk has previously claimed hate speech has decreased on his watch, but earlier CCDH research debunked his claim.
X is also currently under investigation in the European Union for a string of suspected breaches of the bloc’s online governance and content moderation regime, including for its response to illegal content, which may include hate speech. Penalties for confirmed breaches of the EU’s Digital Services Act can reach 6% of a company’s global annual turnover.
EU turns up the heat on X over illegal content in wake of Israel-Hamas war
X is leaving up antisemitic and Islamophobic hate, new report shows
by tyler | Apr 11, 2024 | Tech
If the decisions made by corporate boards of directors can indicate where a company wants to be focusing, Amazon’s board just made an interesting move. The company announced on Thursday that Andrew Ng, known for building AI at large tech companies, is joining its board of directors. The company also said that Judy McGrath — best known for her work as a long-time TV executive, running MTV and helping Viacom become a media powerhouse — will be stepping down as a director.
Taken together, the two moves sketch out an interesting picture of the tech giant’s intentions.
After many costly years of going all-out on building out an entertainment empire (Amazon spent almost $19 billion on its video and music business in 2023), it’s interesting to see that McGrath, who would have been an important advocate and advisor on that strategy, is not going to stand for reelection.
That’s not to say that Amazon is not going to continue as a huge force in streaming entertainment, be it video, music, gaming or anything else. The company is now folding in advertising across Prime Video , which is one big reason it may want to keep its audience happy and coming back.
Still, it will be interesting to see how investment plays out in that segment in 2024. The company has laid off hundreds of employees in its studio and video divisions, and it has also been winding down Prime Video in some regions, which may indicate that the business could be smaller going forward. And given the AI whiplash that every big tech company is currently dealing with, it feels timely that McGrath is stepping away from the board now.
To stay at the forefront of the tech industry, Amazon will be looking for better thought leadership on the next steps in its artificial intelligence strategy.
It’s worth remembering that Amazon has been a leading player in AI for a long time. Its Alexa assistant and Echo devices have done a lot to put voice recognition and connected assistants on the map; the company has been working on autonomous services in airborne and ground-level delivery, and in-store purchasing; it uses machine learning to improve how products are targeted; AWS is a big player in AI compute; and it has of late poured billions into investments in big AI startups.
Yet, for at least a year, in the wake of OpenAI’s GPT advancements, Amazon has grappled with the impression (both internally and externally ) that it is “falling behind” on the technology.
Is it true? Is it just optics? Regardless, Ng’s appointment can only be helpful for advancing Amazon’s profile in the realm of AI, since the company stands to gain more thought leadership on real innovation in the space, not just making follow-on moves.
Image Credits: TechCrunch
Image Credits: TechCrunch
Ng is potentially a triple-threat board appointment: He has experience in academia, investing and hands-on building, and has usually handled all three roles simultaneously. He is currently an adjunct professor at Stanford; a general partner at a venture studio called AI Fund; he heads edtech company DeepLearning.AI, and is the founder of computer vision startup Landing AI; and he’s also chair of Coursera, another edtech startup he founded and used to lead.
Ng has also served as the chief scientist and VP at Chinese search giant Baidu, and he founded and led Google Brain, which was that search giant’s first big foray into building and applying AI tech across its products.
Amazon did not provide any statement from Ng in its announcement. We have reached out to him directly, and we’ll update when and if we hear back.
It may feel like a new wave of companies and thinkers are setting the pace in AI, but the Amazons of the world are certainly not standing by idly.
by tyler | Apr 11, 2024 | Tech
If you own a single-family home, driving an electric vehicle can be a transcendent experience. Every morning, when you wake up to a world full of possibilities, your car will be fully charged and ready to take you wherever you need to go.
EV life isn’t nearly so rosy if you don’t have access to a garage or driveway.
Many EV owners in big cities are forced to rely on public fast chargers. Some people have taken to stringing cables from their homes to the curb, which can pose safety hazards. Some cities, like Cambridge, Mass., have formalized the practice, allowing people to receive permits to install wheelchair-friendly cable protectors that span the sidewalk. It’s an experiment that emulates some of the convenience that single-family homeowners enjoy, but it’s a temporary solution, at best.
The lowly lamppost might be a better option: they’re everywhere, and they have all the wiring needed to make curbside charging seamless. One startup from New York City, Voltpost , has been working on a product that retrofits existing street lampposts to enable EV charging. On Thursday, it introduced its lamppost charger after a year of design and development.
The device is essentially a shroud that covers the lower part of the pole, containing all the electronics and cables required to charge two to four EVs at Level 2 speeds. It’s not fast charging, but it’s more than enough for most people to top off overnight.
An illustration of the main components of Voltpost’s lamppost charger. Image Credits: Voltpost
An illustration of the main components of Voltpost’s lamppost charger. Image Credits: Voltpost
Voltpost’s charger docks at hand-level on the lamppost shroud, and the retractable cable has an anchor eight-feet up to keep it off the ground. The design is modular, the company said, to make repairs and upgrades easier. Charge station managers get access to custom software that will allow them to control pricing and remotely monitor the devices.
As is the case with just about every EV charger network, there’s an app to oversee charging sessions, including payments. Drivers can also use it to reserve chargers, an interesting twist on “dibs” or “savesies” that will certainly be a convenience for drivers but could cause some friction among neighbors.
Voltpost said its chargers are quick to install, taking an hour to complete the process in a test with the New York City Department of Transportation. It also said that it has projects in various stages of development and deployment in New York, Chicago, and Detroit. The startup most recently raised a $3.6 million seed round in July.
by tyler | Apr 11, 2024 | Tech
Ambuj Kumar is nothing if not ambitious.
An electrical engineer by training, Kumar led hardware design for eight years at Nvidia, helping to develop tech including a widely used high-speed memory controller for GPUs. After leaving Nvidia in 2010, Kumar pivoted to cybersecurity, eventually co-founding Fortanix, a cloud data security platform.
It was while heading up Fortanix that the idea for Kumar’s next venture came to him: an AI-powered tool to automate a company’s cybersecurity workflows, inspired by challenges he observed in the cybersecurity industry.
“Security leaders are stressed,” Kumar told TechCrunch. “CISOs don’t last more than couple of years on average, and security analysts have some of highest churn. And things are getting worse.”
Kumar’s solution, which he co-founded with former Twitter software engineer Alankrit Chona, is Simbian , a cybersecurity platform that effectively controls other cybersecurity platforms as well as security apps and tooling. Leveraging AI, Simbian can automatically orchestrate and operate existing security tools, finding the right configurations for each product by taking into account a company’s priorities and thresholds for security, informed by their business requirements.
With Simbian’s chatbot-like interface, users can type in a cybersecurity goal in natural language, then have Simbian provide personalized recommendations and generate what Kumar describes as “automated actions” to execute the actions (as best it can).
“Security companies have focused on making their own products better, which leads to a very fragmented industry,” Kumar said. “This results in a higher operational burden for organizations.”
To Kumar’s point, polls show that cybersecurity budgets are often wasted on an overabundance of tools. Over half of businesses feel that they’ve misspent around 50% of their budgets and still can’t remediate threats, according to one survey cited by Forbes. A separate study found that organizations now juggle on average 76 different security tools , leading IT teams and leaders to feel overwhelmed.
“Security has been a cat-and-mouse game between attackers and defenders for a long time; the attack surface keeps growing due to IT growth,” Kumar said, adding that there’s “not enough talent to go around.” (One recent survey from Cybersecurity Ventures, a security-focused VC firm, estimates that the shortfall of cyber experts will reach 3.5 million people by 2025 .)
In addition to automatically configuring a company’s security tools, the Simbian platform attempts to respond to “security events” by letting customers steer security while taking care of lower-level details. This, Kumar says, can significantly cut down on the number of alerts security analyst must respond to.
But that assumes Simbian’s AI doesn’t make mistakes, a tall order, given that it’s well established that AI is error-prone .
To minimize the potential for off-the-rails behavior, Simbian’s AI was trained using a crowdsourcing approach — a game on its website called “Are you smarter than an LLM?” — that tasked volunteers with trying to “trick” the AI into doing the wrong thing. Kumar explained that Simbian used this learning, along with in-house researchers, to “ensure the AI does the right thing in its use cases.”
This means that Simbian effectively outsourced part of its AI training to unpaid gamers. But, to be fair, it’s unclear how many people actually played the company’s game; Kumar wouldn’t say.
There are privacy implications of a system that controls other systems, especially concerning those that are security-related. Would companies — and vendors, for that matter — be comfortable with sensitive data funneling through a single, AI-controlled centralized portal?
Kumar claims that every attempt has been made to protect against data compromise. Simbian uses encryption — customers control the encryption keys — and customers can delete their data at any time.
“As a customer, you have full control,” he said.
While Simbian isn’t the only platform to attempt to apply a layer of AI over existing security tools — Nexusflow offers a product along a similar vein — it appears to have won investors over. The company recently raised $10 million from investors including Coinbase board member Gokul Rajaram, Cota Capital partner Aditya Singh, Icon Ventures, Firebolt and Rain Capital.
“Cybersecurity is one of the most important problems of our time, and has famously fragmented ecosystem with thousands of vendors,” Rajaram told TechCrunch via email. “Companies have tried to build expertise around specific products and problems. I applaud Simbian’s method of building an integrated platform that would understand and operate all of security. While this is extremely challenging approach from technology perspective, I’ll put my money — and I did put my money — on Simbian. It’s the team with unique experience all the way from hardware to cloud.”
Mountain View-based Simbian, which has 15 employees, plans to put the bulk of the capital it’s raised toward product development. Kumar’s aiming to double the size of the startup’s workforce by the end of the year.
by tyler | Apr 11, 2024 | Tech
Nothing lasts forever. Nowhere is the truism more apt than in consumer tech. This is a land inhabited by the eternally restless — always on the make for the next big thing. The smartphone has, by all accounts, had a good run. Seventeen years after the iPhone made its public debut, the devices continue to reign. Over the last several years, however, the cracks have begun to show.
The market plateaued, as sales slowed and ultimately contracted. Last year was punctuated by stories citing the worst demand in a decade , leaving an entire industry asking the same simple question: what’s next? If there was an easy answer, a lot more people would currently be a whole lot richer.
Smartwatches have had a moment, though these devices are largely regarded as accessories, augmenting the smartphone experience. As for AR/VR, the best you can really currently say is that — after a glacial start — the jury is still very much out on products like the Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro.
When it began to tease its existence through short, mysterious videos in the summer of 2022, Humane promised a glimpse of the future. The company promised an approach every bit as human-centered as its name implied. It was, at the very least, well-funded, to the tune of $100 million+ (now $230 million), and featured an AI element.
The company’s first product, the Humane Ai Pin, arrives this week. It suggests a world where being plugged in doesn’t require having one’s eyes glued to a screen in every waking moment. It’s largely — but not wholly — hands-free. A tap to the front touch panel wakes up the system. Then it listens — and learns.
Image Credits: Darrell Etherington/TechCrunch
Image Credits: Darrell Etherington/TechCrunch
Humane couldn’t ask for better timing. While the startup has been operating largely in stealth for the past seven years, its market debut comes as the trough of smartphone excitement intersects with the crest of generative AI hype. The company’s bona fides contributed greatly to pre-launch excitement. Founders Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri were previously well-placed at Apple. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, meanwhile, was an early and enthusiastic backer.
Excitement around smart assistants like Siri, Alexa and Google Home began to ebb in the last few years, but generative AI platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini have flooded that vacuum. The world is enraptured with plugging a few prompts into a text field and watching as the black box spits out a shiny new image, song or video. It’s novel enough to feel like magic, and consumers are eager to see what role it will play in our daily lives.
That’s the Ai Pin’s promise. It’s a portal to ChatGPT and its ilk from the comfort of our lapels, and it does this with a meticulous attention to hardware design befitting its founders’ origins.
Press coverage around the startup has centered on the story of two Apple executives having grown weary of the company’s direction — or lack thereof. Sure, post-Steve Jobs Apple has had successes in the form of the Apple Watch and AirPods, but while Tim Cook is well equipped to create wealth, he’s never been painted as a generational creative genius like his predecessor.
If the world needs the next smartphone, perhaps it also needs the next Apple to deliver it. It’s a concept Humane’s founders are happy to play into. The story of the company’s founding, after all, originates inside the $2.6 trillion behemoth.
Image Credits: Alexander Spatari (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
In late March, TechCrunch paid a visit to Humane’s New York office. The feeling was tangibly different than our trip to the company’s San Francisco headquarters in the waning months of 2023. The earlier event buzzed with the manic energy of an Apple Store. It was controlled and curated, beginning with a small presentation from Bongiorno and Chaudhri, and culminating in various stations staffed by Humane employees designed to give a crash course on the product’s feature set and origins.
Things in Manhattan were markedly subdued by comparison. The celebratory buzz that accompanies product launches has dissipated into something more formal, with employees focused on dotting I’s and crossing T’s in the final push before product launch. The intervening months provided plenty of confirmation that the Ai Pin wasn’t the only game in town.
January saw the Rabbit R1’s CES launch. The startup opted for a handheld take on generative AI devices. The following month, Samsung welcomed customers to “the era of Mobile AI.” The “era of generative AI” would have been more appropriate, as the hardware giant leveraged a Google Gemini partnership aimed at relegating its bygone smart assistant Bixby to a distant memory. Intel similarly laid claim to the “AI PC,” while in March Apple confidently labeled the MacBook Air the “world’s best consumer laptop for AI.”
At the same time, Humane’s news standing stumbled through reports of a small layoff round and small delay in preorder fulfillment . Both can be written off as products of immense difficulties around launching a first-generation hardware product — especially under the intense scrutiny few startups see.
For the second meeting with Bongiorno and Chaudhri, we gathered around a conference table. The first goal was an orientation with the device, ahead of review. I’ve increasingly turned down these sorts of meeting requests post-pandemic, but the Ai Pin represents a novel enough paradigm to justify a sit-down orientation with the device. Humane also sent me home with a 30-minute intro video designed to familiarize users — not the sort of thing most folks require when, say, upgrading a phone.
More interesting to me, however, was the prospect of sitting down with the founders for the sort of wide-ranging interview we weren’t able to do during last year’s San Francisco event. Now that most of the mystery is gone, Chaudhri and Bongiorno were more open about discussing the product — and company — in-depth.
Humane co-founders Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri.
Humane co-founders Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri.
One Infinite Loop is the only place one can reasonably open the Humane origin story. The startup’s founders met on Bongiorno’s first day at Apple in 2008, not long after the launch of the iPhone App Store. Chaudhri had been at the company for 13 years at that point, having joined at the depths of the company’s mid-90s struggles. Jobs would return to the company two years later, following its acquisition of NeXT.
Chaudhri’s 22 years with the company saw him working as director of Design on both the hardware and software sides of projects like the Mac and iPhone. Bongiorno worked as project manager for iOS, macOS and what would eventually become iPadOS. The pair married in 2016 and left Apple the same year.
“We began our new life,” says Bongiorno, “which involves thinking a lot about where the industry was going and what we were passionate about.” The pair started consulting work. However, Bongiorno describes a seemingly mundane encounter that would change their trajectory soon after.
Image Credits: Humane
Image Credits: Humane
“We had gone to this dinner, and there was a family sitting next to us,” she says. “There were three kids and a mom and dad, and they were on their phones the entire time. It really started a conversation about the incredible tool we built, but also some of the side effects.”
Bongiorno adds that she arrived home one day in 2017 to see Chaudhri pulling apart electronics. He had also typed out a one-page descriptive vision for the company that would formally be founded as Humane later the same year.
According to Bongiorno, Humane’s first hardware device never strayed too far from Chaudhri’s early mockups. “The vision is the same as what we were pitching in the early days,” she says. That’s down to Ai Pin’s most head-turning feature, a built-in projector that allows one to use the surface of their hand as a kind of makeshift display. It’s a tacit acknowledgement that, for all of the talk about the future of computing, screens are still the best method for accomplishing certain tasks.
Much of the next two years were spent exploring potential technologies and building early prototypes. In 2018, the company began discussing the concept with advisors and friends, before beginning work in earnest the following year.
It’s time for change, not more of the same. pic.twitter.com/I6K5FVYzx2
— Humane (@Humane) July 19, 2022
In July 2022, Humane tweeted, “It’s time for change, not more of the same.” The message, which reads as much like a tagline as a mission statement, was accompanied by a minute-long video. It opens in dramatic fashion on a rendering of an eclipse. A choir sings in a bombastic — almost operatic — fashion, as the camera pans down to a crowd. As the moon obscures the sunlight, their faces are illuminated by their phone screens. The message is not subtle.
The crowd opens to reveal a young woman in a tank top. Her head lifts up. She is now staring directly into the eclipse (not advised). There are lyrics now, “If I had everything, I could change anything,” as she pushes forward to the source of the light. She holds her hand to the sky. A green light illuminates her palm in the shape of the eclipse. This last bit is, we’ll soon discover, a reference to the Ai Pin’s projector. The marketing team behind the video is keenly aware that, while it’s something of a secondary feature, it’s the most likely to grab public attention.
As a symbol, the eclipse has become deeply ingrained in the company’s identity. The green eclipse on the woman’s hand is also Humane’s logo. It’s built into the Ai Pin’s design language, as well. A metal version serves as the connection point between the pin and its battery packs.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
Image Credits: Brian Heater
The company is so invested in the motif that it held an event on October 14, 2023, to coincide with a solar eclipse. The device comes in three colors: Eclipse, Equinox and Lunar, and it’s almost certainly no coincidence that this current big news push is happening a mere days after another North American solar eclipse.
However, it was on the runway of a Paris fashion show in September that the Ai Pin truly broke cover . The world got its first good look at the product as it was magnetically secured to the lapels of models’ suit jackets. It was a statement, to be sure. Though its founders had left Apple a half-dozen years prior, they were still very much invested in industrial design, creating a product designed to be a fashion accessory (your mileage will vary).
The design had evolved somewhat since conception. For one thing, the top of the device, which houses the sensors and projector, is now angled downward, so the Pin’s vantage point is roughly the same as its wearer. An earlier version with a flatter service would unintentionally angle the pin upward when worn on certain chest types. Nailing down a more universal design required a lot of trial and error with a lot of different people in different shapes and sizes.
“There’s an aspect of this particular hardware design that has to be compassionate to who’s using it,” says Chaudhri. “It’s very different when you have a handheld aspect. It feels more like an instrument or a tool […] But when you start to have a more embodied experience, the design of the device has to be really understanding of who’s wearing it. That’s where the compassion comes from.”
Image Credits: rabbit
Image Credits: rabbit
Then came competition. When it was unveiled at CES on January 9, the Rabbit R1 stole the show.
“The phone is an entertainment device, but if you’re trying to get something done it’s not the highest efficiency machine,” CEO and founder Jesse Lyu noted at the time. “To arrange dinner with a colleague we needed four-five different apps to work together. Large language models are a universal solution for natural language, we want a universal solution for these services — they should just be able to understand you.”
While the R1’s product design is novel in its own right, it’s arguably a more traditional piece of consumer electronics than Ai Pin. It’s handheld and has buttons and a screen. At its heart, however, the functionality is similar. Both are designed to supplement smartphone usage and are built around a core of LLM-trained AI.
The device’s price point also contributed to its initial buzz. At $200, it’s a fraction of the Ai Pin’s $699 starting price. The more familiar form factor also likely comes with a smaller learning curve than Humane’s product.
Asked about the device, Bongiorno makes the case that another competitor only validates the space. “I think it’s exciting that we kind of sparked this new interest in hardware,” she says. “I think it’s awesome. Fellow builders. More of that, please.”
She adds, however, that the excitement wasn’t necessarily there at Humane from the outset. “We talked about it internally at the company. Of course people were nervous. They were like, ‘what does this mean?’ Imran and I got in front of the company and said, ‘guys, if there weren’t people who followed us, that means we’re not doing the right thing. Then something’s wrong.”
Bongiorno further suggests that Rabbit is focused on a different use case, as its product requires focus similar to that of a smartphone — though both Bongiorno and Chaudhri have yet to use the R1.
A day after Rabbit unveiled the product, Humane confirmed that it had laid off 10 employees — amounting to 4% of its workforce. It’s a small fraction of a company with a small headcount, but the timing wasn’t great, a few months ahead of the product’s official launch. The news also found its long-time CTO, Patrick Gates, exciting the C-suite role for an advisory job.
“The honest truth is we’re a company that is constantly going through evolution,” Bongiorno says of the layoffs. “If you think about where we were five years ago, we were in R&D. Now we are a company that’s about to ship to customers, that’s about to have to operate in a different way. Like every growing and evolving company, changes are going to happen. It’s actually really healthy and important to go through that process.”
The following month, the company announced that pins would now be shipping in mid-April. It was a slight delay from the original March ship date, though Chaudhri offers something of a Bill Clinton-style “it depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is” answer. The company, he suggests, defines “shipping” as leaving the factory, rather than the more industry-standard definition of shipping to customers.
“We said we were shipping in March and we are shipping in March,” he says. The devices leave the factory. The rest is on the U.S. government and how long they take when they hold things in place — tariffs and regulations and other stuff.”
Image Credits: Brian Heater
Image Credits: Brian Heater
No one invests $230 million in a startup out of the goodness of their heart. Sooner or later, backers will be looking for a return. Integral to Humane’s path to positive cashflow is a subscription service that’s required to use the thing. The $699 price tag comes with 90 days free, then after that, you’re on the hook for $24 a month.
That fee brings talk, text and data from T-Mobile, cloud storage and — most critically — access to the Ai Bus, which is foundational to the device’s operation. Humane describes it thusly, “An entirely new AI software framework, the Ai Bus, brings Ai Pin to life and removes the need to download, manage, or launch apps. Instead, it quickly understands what you need, connecting you to the right AI experience or service instantly.”
Investors, of course, love to hear about subscriptions. Hell, even Apple relies on service revenue for growth as hardware sales have slowed.
Bongiorno alludes to internal projections for revenue, but won’t go into specifics for the timeline. She adds that the company has also discussed an eventual path to IPO even at this early stage in the process.
“If we weren’t, that would not be responsible for any company,” she says. “These are things that we care deeply about. Our vision for Humane from the beginning was that we wanted to build a company where we could build a lot of things. This is our first product, and we have a large roadmap that Imran is really passionate about of where we want to go.”
Chaudhri adds that the company “graduated beyond sketches” for those early products. “We’ve got some early photos of things that we’re thinking about, some concept pieces and some stuff that’s a lot more refined than those sketches when it was a one-man team. We are pretty passionate about the AI space and what it actually means to productize AI.”
