I'm honestly surprised they made 10,000 sales.
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
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Every web outlet and influencer with more than 1000 followers bought one. But that's all they're ever going to sell.
Isn't it ironic that most likely, all their sales were used to make videos roasting their shitty product?
I am also seeking a $1 billion buy out, to compensate for years of being underpaid! What a coincidence!
I'd buy you out but all I have is my 20 bucks from streaming music revenue and I'm going to spend that on beer.
If you even made one dollar off your own music, that's fuckin cool. You earned that beer!
What's your band called?
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No one wants badly executed overheating slow Google assistant in a pointless little box. You already have a superior assistant in your pocket, reacting to your voice.
And bluetooth pins that allow you to talk to the AI in your pocket already exist. That's without that projector screen thing but still.
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ask for 1B valuation with only ~7M in sales + ~240k/mo subscription revenue… hmmmm gonna be a no for me Dogg
The entire company was a pump and dump scheme. They're gonna continue the pump until dump or bankruptcy.
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So, if we do some sloppy rounding and say that the subscriptions make them 3 million a year . . . it'll only take a bit more than 330 years for anyone buying Humane at the asking price to break even. My cat could figure out that wasn't a good buy. (Of course, he'd prefer to invest in a tuna cannery . . .)
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I'm sure there's some MBA douche stupid enough to buy it.
I could see Apple buying it. The form factor makes sense, it's the fact that it relies on AI and has its own cell connection are the main issues. If I could tap it and have Siri take dictation or take a picture of something to get more information it would be pretty neat.
Apple already have the perfect form factor, it’s called a phone.
Or, if you want something smaller, they have a watch.
Or if you want something bigger they have glasses.
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Why on earth would apple buy this shitty android device? And feature wise, they can just make the airpods into an AI device paired with your phone or watch.
I don’t need any hardware that does something my phone already does.
I don’t understand this reverse consolidation these companies think people want.
Does it though? Having it pull down your shirt, having to rely on projecting a GUI on your hand, and being unable to hear it in loud environments all seem like pretty strong limitations of the form factor
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I don’t see how the AI assistant won’t eventually just end up on the smartphone. And, given that it’s not always appropriate to talk out loud to your phone, being able to use it with a screen makes it the perfect device for it.
That’s why they made it a pin.
Sure you can sell an app on the App Store, but most people won’t pay more than 5 bucks for an app, and even that’s stretching it. And the subscription market is already over saturated. So how do you make a boatload of cash? Sell overpriced hardware that needs to be “upgraded” every year or 2 to use new features, and include a subscription to use the thing in the first place.
They wanted to pull an Apple and lock people into their hardware ecosystem. I guarantee there was a plan for them to release an AI phone in the next 5 years if this thing did well.
What they missed is Apple products are generally pleasant to use on a daily basis. From what everyone said, this thing was hot garbage and slow to respond to queries.
It will just come as standard with phones. Apple made a deal with OpenAI so it’s only a matter of time until Samsung does the same. Then it becomes a selling point for the device.
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There's totally a use case for a peripheral like a watch... But it's only so you don't have to pull your phone out of your pocket.
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"MKBHD takes out another company" /s
Huh - so it turns out people liked how smartphones consolidated all their various devices into one?
I guess the era of the hardware app is over…
You can't conclude that from this. The fact that there was hype and excitement about this supports an interest in the concept. This was simply utterly horrible execution and that is all.
I’m also be seeking for a 1 billion payout
At least my product is working as intended
Inevitably. That's the goal of most tech startups; hype themselves up and sell out for as many millions as possible. Meanwhile honest labor, education, and trades workers can't afford houses.
Thinking about the cost of maintenance, liabilities, and ethical/moral decisions
- you couldn't pay me enough to take on that company
good luck to anyone else thinking otherwise
What an insane valuation, lol. I wonder how gullible their seeders/initial investors were when they pitched the company initially. Needing to get that much money to settle bills and debts just blows my mind. Shit like this is why I sold my AMD shares at its peak a few months ago and why it's probably worth considering selling Nvidia now as it's peaking. The AI boom may peak a bit higher, but I think the frenzy is going to begin waning within the next ~6 months as more and more investors realize the tech is still very limited outside of backend enterprise use (e.g. using LLMs to ingest all your SOPs, regulations, technical documents, etc. and then make it available for employees to query for random work questions).
But who knows, I've been wrong before.
I could draw a kitten for that kind of money if anyone is interested. At least there are no monthly costs to it.
HP is reportedly one of the companies that Humane was in talks with over a potential sale
They didn’t learn the lesson with webos? They lost billions even if that was a good os with good phones.
Can’t imagine anyone wanting to buy this company for more than 1million and that’s just because of patents and devs (acquihire - where the buyer is only interested in ip and devs and doesn’t care at all about the actual product)
Ed Zitron is going to have a field day with this one.
I listen to Better Offline and I’m as jaded and cynical as the rest of us, but even I find some of his episodes too much to take.
Like he has no impartiality at all, particularly his takes on LLMs. Our small company of software developers and engineers have saved so much time with Visual Studio CoPilot. The fact is there are uses where they’re extremely useful; just maybe not as the MSM portrays it.
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Humane as a company is worth the cost of exactly 10,000 units.
Tell me it's being bought by a data mining company?