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Humane AI Pin is a disaster: Founders already want to sell the company (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Despite seemingly having nothing else in the pipeline and the AI Pin being dead on arrival, Bloomberg reports the company is "seeking a price of between $750 million and $1 billion in a sale."

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[–] 147 points 2 years ago (6 children)

So this is scam right? Overpromise on a product that doesn't work then sell the company for some huge price because it's cutting edge technology? Because it feels like a scam.

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  • [–] 57 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    remember how over the past few years almost everything brand new had the word "blockchain" shoehorned into it for no good reason?

    This is the same kind of thing. It's an atrocious boondoggle. There must still be a serious amount of cocaine floating around Venture Capitalist parties, because one of those boys is gonna drop 500M on this company and think they bought the dip, when in fact they, themselves, are the dip.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I can't even remember the last time when some hot new technology changed our lives significantly. I'm inclined to say Android because it was a new mobile OS and now it's everywhere and various devices but even that is more than a decade old.

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  • [–] 45 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Anything with "AI" in the title is a cash grab with very little actual technical worth except the models and training data.

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  • [–] -4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Scam how? Selling pre-launch could have been a scam. Money taken from investors could have been a scam, depending on what they pitched. But selling after a complete and known flop of a release? There's no cards left on the table to be scammy about. "Here's our brand name. Here's our patent collection. We'd like to think our patents are worth a ton of money, but we know we'd be lucky getting twenty million."

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    My assumption is that, since they were always going to be about collecting, processing, and selling data (usually what AI is used for commercially) that they might have what they think is between 500m and 1b in data to sell.

    This might be enough to start a company from or just to assimilate the data into your own company.

    The price tag has to be over estimated though by quite a lot. If we read a story about the company selling for a few million, I dont think it would seem outrageous.

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