right now is a prime time to get into AI scams. Start taking the bag from gullible dumbass techbros.

not ambidextrous

I’ve barely started the video and they already fucked up

I love how AI products manage to be as useless as crypto ones. It’s genuinely just the same shell game by and for the same people but they built shitty google instead of shitty debit cards and shitty casino chips. My phone has been so much better than this thing since 2018.

The funniest part is the fact that everything that this device promises to do is easily done by your phone. $200 device that I have to keep charging to play music through Spotify and get a fucked up doordash order? Fucking lmao. Phones can do it better and faster. Which is MKBHD’s point too. Phones are fucking op. These companies are just trying to milk the AI bros.

Top comment:

These AI boxes feel like a product people would use in an alternate universe where smart phones are still being developed

I think the way products like this get created is from a fixation with futurist media from creators’ formative years that is incompatible with living in the actual future that came to pass.

When I was a kid reading the Hunger Games, I thought those communicuff things they got in the third book were so cool. I wanted one so bad, it just screamed “future” to me. But in reality, it’s just a big impractical smartwatch with less functionality, like the Rabbit is a tiny impractical smartphone with less functionality. They want to create the future based on their conception of the what the future is, but that’s not how it works. The real future isn’t THE FUTURE, it’s things that look a little nicer and do a little more stuff until you look back and realize how far things have come. Skipping the queue and trying to predict the future in this way just doesn’t work unless you’re supremely lucky. How do I know? Another anecdote: As a kid I used to buy old popular science magazines for ten, twenty-five cents apiece from the library where my brother got tutoring. Usually just a year or two old, but some were older. None of the stuff they were predicting panned out, at least not really as they predicted it, and they do it for a living.

Teenage engineering

The jokes write themselves.

I really dont understand what was the driving motivation to make these devices. Who was sitting at their desk thinking “I want like, a phone, but from 1997. No wait, not a phone, a Personal Digital Assistant but with voice and AI, which definitely wasn’t something that was made up and served no use except for the most insufferable of business perverts.”

Check out the humane pin. It’s like this, but even worse.

I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:

• yewtu.be
• inv.nadeko.net
• yt.artemislena.eu
• piped.video

People made fun of the Humane Pin and its pricing. But here’s the reality.

• A product costs $$ to design and test, $$ to manufacture, package, and ship, and $$ to operate once it’s shipped. Built into that last bin is the cost of connectivity, ongoing operations, and backend hosting (including AI inference). Tack onto that marketing and overhead, plus maybe profits.

• They might sell it at a discount to help goose up demand. That money has to come from somewhere. There are R&D grants, preorders, VC money, government or enterprise contracts, etc. There will be some extra revenue from selling the collected data, but traditionally, that alone hasn’t been enough to keep company lights on.

• A product priced like Humane looked like it was priced realistically. Upfront cost to cover manufacturing, fixed, and sunk costs. Monthly to cover ongoing expenses. Obviously, both those were set high, but that could be so they could have enough early-adopter money to raise more or (gasp) make a profit to keep going.

• The R1 looks to be priced at an unrealistic discount to grab attention and market share. But they don’t have a monthly fee, which means all future expenses come out of that fixed upfront fee or revenues from selling the collected data.

• Since all AI operations are on the cloud, let’s say $XX per person per month cost. Fortunately for them, they’re passing the networking cost to the user in the form of BYO SIM card. At $200, that means $200/XX months of fees. You do the math. But there’s also the cost of manufacturing, packaging, etc. It sure seems like this isn’t sustainable, long-term.

The one conclusion is that a consumer hardware device will be expensive to buy and operate until a lot of things become commoditized. People should be prepared to either pay a lot or to have their products drop like flies after a year or two.