Humane’s AI Pin: all the news about the new AI-powered wearable

On Thursday, after months of demos and hints about what the AI-powered future of gadgets might look like, Humane finally took the wraps off of its first device: the AI Pin.

The device, as we revealed yesterday, is a $699 wearable in two parts: a square device and a battery pack that magnetically attaches to your clothes or other surfaces. In addition to that price, there’s also the $24 monthly fee for a Humane subscription, which gets you a phone number and data coverage through T-Mobile’s network. The company told Wired the device will start shipping in early 2024 and that preorders begin November 16th.

The Ai Pin, the new gadget / wearable device / projector / thing from the secretive startup Humane, might cost as much as $1,000 and may require a monthly subscription for data, according to The Information.

The mysterious device has been in development for years, but we got our first good look at it during co-founder Imran Chaudhri’s presentation at TED this year. In the presentation, he used then unnamed device to accept a phone call, get information about where to buy a gift, translate a sentence that is then spoken in an AI-made version of his voice in French, and even get an opinion on whether he can eat a chocolate bar. It was an impressive demo, though we had a lot of questions about how it all worked.

Humane’s first gadget, the AI Pin, is currently slated to launch on November 9th, but we just got our best look at it yet thanks to a somewhat unexpected source. Before it has even been announced, the AI Pin is one of Time Magazine’s “Best Inventions of 2023,” along with everything from the Framework Laptop 16 to the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 to the Bedtime Buddy alarm clock.

The write-up is brief and relatively light on details, but there are a couple of new details, along with the best photo we’ve seen yet of the device. It appears the AI Pin will attach magnetically to your clothing, and uses “a mix of proprietary software and OpenAI’s GPT-4” to power its many features. (If you remember, that includes everything from making calls to translating speech to understanding the nutritional information in a candy bar.)

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This week, I’ve been reading Zeke Faux’s excellent crypto book and the story of the viral cookies that suddenly disappeared, trying desperately to figure out what the heck the Humane AI Pin actually does, pouring all my notes and tasks into NotePlan, watching the new-to-Netflix season of The Great British Baking Show and anything at all I can find about The Sphere in Vegas, and am on like my fourth week of being totally obsessed with the history of the AltaVista search engine. 

It’s Paris Fashion Week, and Humane was designer Coperni’s latest buzzy tech name to be included. Humane’s Ai Pin — a device we’ve so far only seen in silhouette on the company’s website or peeking out of Humane co-founder Imran Chaudhri’s breast pocket in a TED demo earlier this year — was pinned on the clothes of multiple Coperni models during its presentation. And it’s a rounded-corner square thing that makes me think just a little of a Star Trek: TNG-style communicator.

The Coperni showcase doesn’t answer our many questions about the device since nobody seems to have used it on the runway as far as we can tell, but at least we know basically what it will look like now. We still have no real idea how self-contained it is, whether it supports third-party apps, or how you interact with it generally. Those questions will be important, especially with potential competition on the way from Chaudhri’s former Apple colleague Jony Ive and OpenAI.

Humane, a startup founded by ex-Apple employees, plans to share more about its mysterious AI-powered wearable on the same day as a solar eclipse in October, co-founder Imran Chaudhri said in a video on the company’s Discord (via Inverse). The solar eclipse is set to happen on October 14th.

The device, officially called the “Humane Ai Pin” (in the Discord video, Chaudhri pronounces that middle word like you would say the word AI), is being promoted as something that can replace your smartphone. In a wild demo at this year’s TED conference, Chaudhri uses the device, which is somehow attached to his jacket at chest height, to do things like:

Humane, the buzzy company started by former Apple employees that has been making big promises about an AI-first and post-smartphone future, announced today that its first gadget will be called the Humane Ai Pin. It’ll be powered by “an advanced Snapdragon platform” in partnership with Qualcomm, and it’s coming later this year.

That’s really all we know so far. Humane continues to be mysterious about how the Ai Pin works, what exactly it will do, and even what it looks like. (Most mysterious of all: why in the world is “AI” not capitalized? What is “Ai?” Am I supposed to pronounce it like “eye?” I am confident this will infuriate The Verge’s copy desk and me in equal measure for years to come.)

Buzz has been building around the secretive tech startup Humane for over a year, and now the company is finally offering a look at what it’s been building. At TED last month, Humane co-founder Imran Chaudhri gave a demonstration of the AI-powered wearable the company is building as a replacement for smartphones. Bits of the video leaked online after the event, but the full video is now available to watch.

The device appears to be a small black puck that slips into your breast pocket, with a camera, projector, and speaker sticking out the top. Throughout the 13-minute presentation, Chaudhri walks through a handful of use cases for Humane’s gadget:

Humane, the startup founded by ex-Apple employees Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, has given a first live demo of its new device: a wearable gadget with a projected display and AI-powered features intended to act as a personal assistant.

Chaudhri, who serves as Humane’s chairman and president, demoed the device onstage during a TED Talk, a recording of which has been acquired by Inverse and others ahead of its expected public release on April 22nd.