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.
this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
145 points (98.7% liked)
Technology
34891 readers
305 users here now
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
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
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.
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
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
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.