The good old “make a tech startup with a gimmicky product idea, get millions in VC for some reason, create an underwhelming product that was never meant to be any good, then get bought up by a big company that will sit on the IP and never do anything with it” strategy of making money.
get millions in VC for some reason
This is the part I don’t understand. Pretty much everyone agreed these would be terrible products and yet these companies somehow drum up tens of millions of dollars in investments. How?
It’s called exit capitalism. They hope to create enough hype so they can sell off their share to the next idiot for a higher price.
Uh-huh. And how is that supposed to work?
As I described above. The endgame is to either IPO and sell off the shares to the dumb public, or find someone who’s willing to buy out the company because they hold a patent or have some interesting people on board.
That doesn’t explain why the “dumb public” are buying these shares.
It does. Hype.
People and smaller investors are told that this company is the next big thing, so they buy it at high prices.
Even as a dumb investor you can extract a lot of money via pump and dump. Just got to get in/out at the right times.
Spread that out over several portfolios, and you can get rich without ever contributing a single thing to your community!
Yes but in order to do that you have to have another “dumb investor” lined up and convinced that the stock is going to continue to appreciate.
Investors are not smart people
I think you overestimate the amount of knowledge, instinct and just plain research these VC people put on investments (I guess when you have money, if one of 10 hit you made it anyway?)
When the game Pokemon Go came out, Nintendo’s stock skyrocketed to the point Nintendo had to come out and publicly explain they had sold the IP, were not behind the game and made no money from it… “Investors” thought otherwise and started pouring money literally at the wrong company
There are plenty of similar examples…
In this case I think the VC folks probably got a fat return on the selloff. Not sure what the company who bought their asset got out of it though
Because the investors are always using Other People’s Money. They “invest” OPM and if it succeeds they take a huge cut and proclaim themselves to be geniuses. If it fails, they shrug and make up some BS to console the loser.
Well sure, but aren’t those “other people” concerned to see their money being spent that way? Or that they regularly take huge losses? Aren’t the “investors” concerned at all that people are no longer going to trust them with their money?
I’m not going to lie to you and tell you I know how all of this works, but from experience, the people running these scams are rarely the people who suffer.
Here’s one I’ve seen myself:
There’s a new hot startup. Wall Street rolls up to the C-suite of this company and makes an offer: Go public and we’ll give you thousands of “special” shares. (Some companies might even get multiple of these offers from different Wall St. investors.)
Once the company agrees to go public, Wall St. gives that company’s C-suite Special Shares. Wall St. also gives these shares to friends, family and power people they would like to reward and/or influence.
On the big day, the company goes public. (To the Moon, Baby!) Everyone with Special shares can sell anytime they like. Company employees have a 6-month “blackout window”. The general public is encourages to “invest now before the shares go up so they can sell after they go higher!”
After the stock climbs in value, the Special Stock holders dump their shares and rake in the cash. Everyone else is left holding the bag.
So who in this scenario are the losers? The people who bought the stock and watched it lose value? The people who sold their Special Stock after it went up and before it crashed? Who gets punished? Who goes to jail? Where does the money go?
You saw this whole scam condensed to it’s essentials during the Crypto Currency scams a few years back.
So many different variations on this scam. Keeps working too, so long as you don’t get sloppy and steal from rich people like Bernie Madoff did.
They used the phrase AI and humane in the same sentence. Investors who aren’t very technical would get very excited about it of course.
Seems like you can slap AI on anything and it just becomes a money-printing machine. Which is why we’ve seen it slapped on seemingly every tech product in the last decade…
I use chatgpt a lot and think AI is a really useful disruptive technology. I really don’t want it crammed into every piece of tech I use, without a choice to opt out.
I used to work in a company that was VC adjacent.
Most of the people sitting on piles of money don’t have any knowledge or radar to help them negotiate where to put it. They lean heavily on other people to tell them what to invest in.
When AI first started getting big everybody was guessing where the curve was going to be and where the technology was going to head. The people guiding the venture capitalists were putting their oars in the water early.
To be fair there’s a lot of money to be made in AI assistants if they can manage to run the back end affordably. If you’re asking Google, Siri, and Alexa complicated questions they’re miserably fit for the task. But when we get to the point where you can expect a reasonable answer from something like look up all the places to rent cars near Tucson Arizona give me the cheapest price with the best reviews. Or tutor my kid on basic calculus, test him, and give me a report on where he needs more assistance. That kind of stuff is worth money and something that many people with money will pay for.
This form factor is off-putting and honestly AI at this point is still only mostly right.
The VCs are all over AI and there’s opportunity there. Just not on every product and probably not yet.
You’re literally describing venture exit. Once the asset reaches the desired value, you sell your part and hop. Rinse repeat.
Obviously not the case for most of us wagoids
Obviously not the case for most of us wagoids
Then stop sitting on yo ass and unionize
Look at the bright side, some engineers had fun working an a new thing.
I’d’ve had tons of fun working on it, but they probably paid their engineers chiefly in equity, so I never would have taken the position anyway.
Those were not the engineers you want to see do cool things
I wish I could make useless trash and be given unfathomable amounts of money by infinitely gullible investors.
Yeah but then you’d be a POS that nobody likes.
Money doesn’t buy real friends. Doesn’t buy real love. Doesn’t buy real happiness.
Just a bunch of hyper inflated plastic.
Money doesn’t buy real friends. Doesn’t buy real love. Doesn’t buy real happiness.
No, but what it does buy is the time to do those things, at least until the global system actually changes. I mean you’re not entirely wrong, its all fake, but also real at the same time.
I get what you mean, to live under a system which has requirements, means you must meet those requirements.
However to be stuck in that mindset perpetually is a sickness. There reaches a point where you must say, this is enough. I am comfortable and those that I’m responsible for/care for are provided for when they need it most. We have to stop ourselves and reassess our condition to determine if we’re straying too far. Human psychology has plenty of vulns and desensitization/growing too comfortable is most definitely one of them.
Greed is a pretty globally held sin in most religions and appears to be a fairly objective vice imo. I think too many people assign value to salary and materialistic things - but the reality is that you may be infinitely more valuable to a smaller company that pays you say 60k max than to a company that’d pay you 100k and could afford more but will just as soon lay you off because they think they can just buy more people. Value != only how much you make
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Even in the hypothetical maximal fully built out ultimate version, what was this device supposed to be able to do that a smartwatch with a voice assistant couldn’t do?
Most smart watches don’t have cameras so Machine vision-y things.
Obviously the pin is way off from where it would need to be for that to be useful though
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I’ll admit I don’t know much about apple products, but I can’t find any reference to a camera on any apple watch. It’s not mentioned on the spec page or in any reviews I can find. It would also make features like remote camera kind of redundant.
Could you show an example of one of these smart watches? I use a garmin vivoactive and it most definitely does not have a camera, and is their premium line. It’s 5 years old now, but the new models don’t have it either.
Sorry, i deleted my comment like 10 seconds after posting because i googled it and saw i was incorrect. A few years ago Apple added a camera APP to the watch that remote controls your phone camera, but didn’t actually add a camera to the watch. I misremembered, my bad
Fair enough I thought I was taking crazy pills for a bit there!
Hah nah, you were totally right
One of my old colleagues worked there, which was a waste because they were actually competent. I hope they’ve bailed already.
I saw the Marques Brownlee review of this and I have no idea why they actually released it to market? It looked so wildly undercooked.
Bullshit marketing bingo, if it wasn’t destroyed publicly on a big stage, it might have succeeded
Lol
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Humane, the startup behind the poorly-reviewed AI Pin wearable computer, is already hunting for a potential buyer for its business.
That’s according to a report from Bloomberg, which says the company — led by former longtime Apple employees Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno — is “seeking a price of between $750 million and $1 billion.”
It hooks into a network of AI models to fetch answers for voice queries and to analyze what the built-in camera is pointed at.
The Bloomberg report notes that Humane has raised $230 million from investors including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who is rumored to be developing an unrelated product (in collaboration with legendary Apple designer Jony Ive) that could better showcase AI’s promise.
There are some novel and clever ideas in there, but the AI Pin’s software is underbaked and too inconsistent, and the hardware has exhibited poor battery life and overheating issues.
Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are all making significant pushes into the AI realm — with large language models and generative AI becoming more prevalent by the day — but it’s unclear how much value Humane’s intellectual property would really bring to any of their ongoing efforts.
The original article contains 379 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 48%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good luck with finding an idiot company dumb enough to buy them with only one extremely failed product.
Maybe Mozilla will do it? They currently sink large amounts of money in AI bullshit like that.
But no way, big tech buys them.
