Innovating with AI - 'No one should buy the Ai Pin'

Hey Innovator,

Building an AI smartphone replacement is a tall order.

We saw the Rabbit R1 attempt this feat – and despite lots of preorders, I'm not sure that device is going to make a dent in any market other than "people who buy lots of early-stage AI products."

And at the behest of my Incubator students, I bought the AI-powered Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, which are chunky and uncomfortable but do technically play music and allow me to talk to Meta's large language model with voice commands.

And then, there's the Humane Ai Pin.

Which, according to at least one prominent reviewer, is the worst product ever made.

Now, the review is not all bad. In fact, the feedback on the hardware itself is pretty great – it's a well-made device that has some really cool features, like projecting a screen onto your hand with a laser and allowing you to navigate a virtual menu with hand signals (e.g. make a fist, pinch your fingers). Both take some getting used to, but are generally innovative and potentially will be valuable in future devices.

But where the Pin falls flat is on its usefulness as an everyday device. It's marketed as a smartphone replacement, but it pretty much does everything worse than a smartphone would. Part of this is that it's slow to communicate with its web-based AI language model, but another part of it is that it's just hard to do things quickly without a screen – basically, this is the achilles heel of the anti-smartphone movement.

​I dug into all the details in this Innovating with AI Insights podcast episode with Nyasha Green, a software engineer, LinkedIn Learning instructor and IWAI contributor.

We have a ton of great stuff coming this month – and my #1 goal is to help you learn AI fast. I know you don't have a ton of free time and there is a ton of noise out there.

That's why we Innovating with AI Insights, our new membership (similar to Substack or Patreon), to give you the fastest possible way to cut through the noise and level up from AI Novice to AI Pro in minutes per day.

You can start a 7-day free trial and access everything, then stick around if you enjoy it (prices go up after the next ~50 members join).

I'd love to hear from you about what you'd like me to teach you in the next month – just reply to this email. I read every one.

– Rob Howard
Founder of Innovating with AI