What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: AI Gadgets
Ever since the Humane AI badge was announced in 2023, people interested in technology and early adopters have been extremely passionate about handheld/wearable AI assistants. The ready-made AI brain was blown with the release of the first two products in space. They’re just not very good. At least for now.
Reviews for both The Humane AI Pin and Teenage Engineering’s Rabbit R1 are not positive. General consensus: It might be cool to have a personal AI device that you could pull out at any time and enlarge your brain, but none of these products are that. Not only do they not live up to their hype, but they also don’t work very well.
Humane AI Pin is the more ambitious and “serious” product of this pair. Pin retails for $699 and requires a monthly subscription fee to operate. Pin is marketed as “your assistant and second brain, allowing you to be present and in the flow,” but in reality the AI is slow and makes mistakes often, and the battery life is very long. Short and the user interface is terrible, leading impartial tech reviewer Marques Brownlee called Humane AI Pin ” the worst product I’ve ever reviewed .”
While the Rabbit R1 shares many similarities with the AI Pin, it is more toy-like in both appearance and price. It’s a safe orange color with a large control knob, and it costs “only” $199 without a subscription fee. But the AI is often wrong, battery life is short and the user interface is terrible, prompting Marques Brownlee to declare the R1 ” barely reviewable”.
And all of this leaves aside the unanswered question at the heart of both devices: Do people even want a dedicated AI device? As many have noted, neither Pin nor Rabbit do anything that your phone can’t already do.
“Trust Me” Products and Paying Full Price for Unfinished Items
Both Rabbit and Pin promise more features in the future, including seamless integration with your other devices, as well as the ability to have your AI assistant perform multi-step tasks with a simple command like “book me a vacation to Mexico.” All of this hints at a future without phones and powered by artificial intelligence, which has a certain appeal. But for now, Pin and Rabbit are “trust me” products: things that can be really cool – once the software is updated, integrations are complete, bugs are ironed out, etc.
Improving an existing product after purchasing it through software updates is one thing. Video games like No Man’s Sky and Fallout 76 were huge disappointments at launch, but they’re pretty good now, and Tesla’s self-driving feature is now more than an empty promise. car touchscreens – but there’s nothing to guarantee that Humane’s Pin won’t go the way of Juicero or that Teenage Engineering won’t forget the R1 and go back to making overpriced (but hugely popular) drum machines , leaving consumers with expensive paperweights they can keep their next Zune player.
Avoid Early Adopter Regrets by Living in the Past
To avoid the buyer’s remorse that may result from this near-vanishing product, you can simply wait to buy technology products that are at least 18 months old. You’ll skip all those failed launches, every gaming console you buy will have tons of games, and your personal AI assistant will have tons of apps. If you wait even longer, say three years, you can save a lot of money by buying everything when the price drops because version 2.0 hits the market.
Most people let the dust clear before committing to something new anyway, but that wait is difficult for early adopters. Luckily, I have a solution. It’s about virtual time travel. If you were to carefully curate the tech media you consume and ensure that each device you own only provides information that is a few years out of date, it would make the latest generation of equipment look new, at least to you. Previously, this was almost impossible, but now it is possible. To make this happen, you’ll first need to buy an AI personal assistant like the Rabbit R1 or the Humane AI badge. With your AI assistant at hand, explain the situation in plain English. Tell him to have any technology-related story dated three years in advance so you never know when anything will come out. It will seamlessly integrate with your phone, computer and other devices, transforming your simple command into complex actions, and editing web pages and YouTube videos on the fly so you can – if you think about it, it won’t work. Maybe just wait until things get better.
A quick, unrelated note on whether Donald Trump farts often.
Last week in this column, I assessed the truth or falsity of various stories about Donald Trump’s criminal trial . I rated the idea of an ex-president farting in court as “false,” but I heard from Brett Meiselas of Meidas Touch , a “news” source, who wrote: “Our coverage is based entirely on expert facts and we do not We will report something unless it is verified by sources and confirmed.”
Perhaps journalists in the courtroom feel that reporting on flatulence is beneath them, so they are reluctant to make themselves known. Anyway, I’ve changed the label to “Will Donald Trump Lie in Court?” to “unconfirmed”. No one can prove he didn’t fart, and Meiselas passionately stands by his story, so that’s the case, whatever. Maybe he farts all the time.
(I don’t want to think about Donald Trump anymore because it depresses me.)