HP is acquiring Humane’s assets, but shutting down the Ai Pin business (and bricking existing units)

The Humane Ai Pin generated a lot of buzz ahead of launch as Humane positioned it as a brand new category for mobile devices that would leverage artificial intelligence to let you perform all sorts of tasks without a phone or PC.

It was a spectacular flop at launch with reviewers complaining that the product was overpriced and the core service could have just been a smartphone app. Within a few months the company was said to be talking to HP about the possibility of acquiring Humane for $1 billion. Today the companies announced a deal where HP will buy some of Humane's assets. But it'll be for just over one tenth of the price Humane had originally sought.

The deal, which is expected to close by the end of the month will have HP pay $116 million for software, intellectual property (which includes more than 300 patents and patent applications"), and personnel (which Bloomberg reports amounts to the and "the majority of Humane's employees").

One thing HP doesn't want? The Ai Pin itself. According to Bloomberg, the hardware business will shut down, and a message on the Humane website thanks early adopters who are using Ai Pin hardware… and informs them that their devices will be bricked in 10 days.

Device Timeline: Your Ai Pin will continue to function normally until 12pm PST on February 28, 2025. After this date, it will no longer connect to Humane's servers, and .Center access will be fully retired.

That means Ai pins will "no longer include calling, messaging, Ai queries/responses, or cloud access" and user data will be deleted from Humane's servers. The company recommends making backups immediately.

There's no mention of refunds or any other form of compensation for customers who may have spent as much as $699 + subscription fees to become early adopters. The only refunds that will be offered are for customers that have purchased a device within the past 90 days, since they're still within the 90-day return window… but given the lousy reviews, I can't imagine there are many recent customers who fall into that category.

So what does HP get out of this? The PC maker is said to be planning to creating a new division that will be headed up by Humane co-founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, who had previously worked at Apple. The goal is to find ways to bring AI features to HP hardware including "personal computers, printers, and connected conference rooms."

That's hardly surprising – pretty much every major tech company is investing heavily in AI these days. What remains to be seen is whether there's enough demand to justify that investment…  and/or whether this is something that's actually going to distinguish one PC or printer brand from another at a time when not only are most competitors doing something similar, but Microsoft is building AI features directly into the Windows operating system that powers most non-Apple PCs (with the exception of a handful of models that ship with GNU/Linux distributions).

via Humane (press release, service note, FAQ), HP, and Bloomberg)

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