Pure AI hardware is dead： from futuristic to e-waste
Today, Humane, a manufacturer of artificial intelligence equipment, announced that it would sell "key artificial intelligence capabilities" to Hewlett-Packard Company, with a transaction amount as high as 116 million US dollars (about 845 million RMB).
After the transaction is completed, Humane will stop selling its product AI Pin, and will stop all services at 3 pm (EST) on February 28th, and delete all photos, videos and notes on the device.
The once hot pure AI hardware equipment turned into a bubble.
The Rise and Bubble of Pure AI Hardware
In addition to Humane’s AI Pin, you may have heard of Rabbit R1, a pocket AI device from the American startup Rabbit, which had the same scenery when it was launched. After it was released, it was found to be an Android app. Although the experience is better than AI Pin, it still has many problems, and it can be regarded as an "AI intermediary" at most.
Screen-less interaction, voice assistant, entrance to future life … These attractive selling points of independent AI devices, which claim to be able to "end users’ hands through AI technology", are caught in the dilemma that technology is idealized and users’ needs are out of touch.
Take Humane AI Pin as an example, it expects to complete all interactions with gestures and voice in a screen-free, wearable form, combined with laser projection technology and GPT large model. But in fact, it can’t even achieve the stability of the foundation. The design logic of "AI for AI’s sake" is completely the industry’s blind optimism about technology maturity.
From the future to garbage, just "confirm receipt"
On the platform of TED, Imran used 15 minutes to describe a screenless, seamless and perceivable AI world for users. Since its inception, it has attracted the support of top investors including OpenAI, Microsoft, SK Networks and LG Technology.
The hardware aesthetics full of "Apple Style" makes the AI Pin stir up a thousand waves once it is demonstrated. However, as we said before, the bad experience made users vomit constantly from the moment they got the AI Pin, and MKBHD, a top blogger in the technology circle, rated it as "the worst product I’ve ever reviewed for now".
Humane didn’t help themselves. They released an AI operating system called CosmOS, hoping to build an open developer ecosystem. In October last year, the price of AI Pin was lowered, but it still failed to recover.
Although HP’s price of $116 million is by no means cheap, compared with Humane’s early valuation of $1 billion, the market’s confidence in such hardware equipment collapsed.
AI hardware relies on the cloud. Once the server is turned off, AI Pin will instantly become a "brick". The service is the hardware model, and now it has become the last straw to destroy the rights and interests of users.
AI hardware, from independent equipment to ecological integration
Perhaps, AI hardware should never be a brand new product.
According to foreign media reports, the Humane team, including founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, will set up a new department at HP to help HP integrate AI into personal computers, printers and Internet conference rooms.
And we can also see in HP’s official documents that this department will be called HP IQ.
Does it look familiar? Yes, this is exactly the same as the possibility that mobile phones, cars, Baidu, Tencent, and even township work and medical information all embrace DeepSeek to upgrade industries and explore AI.
Attached to the mature hardware ecosystem, AI products will have the possibility of breakthrough.
It suddenly occurred to me that Meizu, which announced All in AI at the beginning of last year and launched the products of AI Pin and Rabbit R1 at the end of last year, seemed to have no movement at the end of last year. Perhaps they also saw this.
AI nobelieveromanticism
On the side of the boat, Qian fan contest; At the head of the diseased tree, ten thousand mufengchun.
On February 17, Lei Jun, the chairman of Xiaomi Technology, said in an interview that he would make up his mind to put AI technology on various terminal products and let consumers experience the beautiful life brought by technology.
The failure of pure AI hardware, to some extent, is a direct collision between technical idealism and market reality. When the industry is addicted to the narrative of "subversion", "uniqueness" and "breakthrough", it is easy to ignore the user experience, cost control and the construction of sustainable business model.
Now it seems that the future of AI will not be hardware innovation, but the optimization of existing tools. Compared with the grandeur of the waves behind the Yangtze River, AI will be a quiet change.