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AI Businesses HP

HP To Acquire Parts of Humane, Shut Down the AI Pin 50

Posted by BeauHD from the would-you-look-at-that dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: HP will acquire assets from Humane, the maker of a wearable Ai Pin introduced in late 2023, for $116 million. The deal will include the majority of Humane's employees in addition to its software platform and intellectual property, the company said Tuesday. It will not include Humane's Ai pin device business, which will be wound down, an HP spokesperson said. Humane's team, including founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, will form a new division at HP to help integrate artificial intelligence into the company's personal computers, printers and connected conference rooms, said Tuan Tran, who leads HP's AI initiatives. Chaudhri and Bongiorno were design and software engineers at Apple before founding the startup. [...]

Tran said he was particularly impressed with aspects of Humane's design, such as the ability to orchestrate AI models running both on-device and in the cloud. The deal is expected to close at the end of the month, HP said. "There will be a time and place for pure AI devices," Tran said. "But there is going to be AI in all our devices -- that's how we can help our business customers be more productive."

HP To Acquire Parts of Humane, Shut Down the AI Pin More | Reply

HP To Acquire Parts of Humane, Shut Down the AI Pin

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  • They used to be the premier name in Electronics test equipment, and their name was the same with the word: quality. I don't know what they are now.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Number 2 in market share of PC vendors in the world. Behind Lenovo, ahead of Dell and Apple. For quite a while.

      • Which means basically nothing when your products are uselessly broken out of the box

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          No idea what that even means. If you got a bad machine, RMA it.

          • I graduated college in the late 80's, and HP was a great company back then. If you bought anything from them then you knew it met the specs, and would last a life time. Now if you buy a product from HP.. I dunno.

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

              Oh, you have nostalgia. Yeah, many of us have that.

              It's easily cured by digging up that old thing that was supposed to be amazing and trying to use it. Same cure applies to everything from cars to tools to houses.

              • Total respect to you.

              • Re: (Score:3)

                by AuMatar ( 183847 )

                Some of it is real. When I worked there 20 years ago in the printer division, a manager had a demo where he literally stood on an inkjet and it continued to print. The engineers congratulated each other on building such a reliable product. The managers saw that and decided they could afford to make it from cheaper parts. Some things actually were better back then.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                  Fun part is, you can still get that quality. You just have to pay about the same sum you used to pay, corrected for PPP.

                  What this "let's not overbuild these pointless parts like the outer shell to carry human weight" has resulted in is people of much lower societal status being able to afford them. And if you buy things that are that much cheaper, they're not going to be as durable.

                  It's a tradeoff to enable more people be able to enjoy fruits of technological advancement.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

                  I remember saving up to buy an HP printer. They were incredibly expensive. Now pretty much anybody who wants one can have one.

                  Tradeoffs are tradeoffs and they still apply. Is it worth $1000 to be able to stand on your printer?

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by jp10558 ( 748604 )

                    > Is it worth $1000 to be able to stand on your printer?

                    Maybe - kind of depends on your specific requirements. If it was clearly indicated (and truly did what was indicated) I'd have far less problems with cheaper models. The issue I tend to have is that it becomes much much harder for the people who have some reason to want to pay for that quality to actually find an equivalent product and do so. At least part of this is it's not actually the same in PPP to get the same quality - because it's no longer

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

                      There are lots of printers available at lots of different price points and build robustness. Also test equipment, which is probably what the OP was actually referring to. Except now you can get a six digit multimeter for a thousand dollars instead of 10k 1980s bucks. Or pick up an old one that needs its caps replaced for a hundred bucks on eBay. Or build one yourself.

      • 10 BILLION Big Macs served.

    • Re:What is HP now? (Score:5, Informative)

      by BishopBerkeley ( 734647 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2025 @06:50PM (#65177627) Journal
      The products that made HP no longer bear the HP name. The true HP products are now in Keysight and Agilent, two powerhouses in their respective markets. It's truly sad that the remaining HP branded products--HP Computers, HP Enterprise and HP Printers--have no relation to the original HP company. The HP spirit lives in Agilent and Keysight, without the HP name, which seems to get continuously sullied by these namesake companies.

    • All the smart people left (Score:4, Interesting)

      by abulafia ( 7826 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2025 @08:17PM (#65177843)
      The competent folks decamped with the test equipment folks, leaving the marketing department.

      One funny thing - John Gruber (longtime Apple commentator) predicted this [daringfireball.net]:

      Off the top of my head, the only company that could afford a $1 billion-ish price for Humane and is dumb enough to do it is HP.

      (Didn't go for 10 figures.)

    • It depends who you ask. Boomers and old gen Xers remember them for whatever it was that actually gave the company a prestigious reputation. Young gen Xers and Millennials remember HP for their printers and mediocre prebuilt desktop PCs. A gen Zer, though, would probably assume you're just talking about "Harry Potter".

      • That is very,very true. Back in the day HP was the high quality Company. They made electronics test equipment that would put out frequencies, and create voltages, and current. The were the best, and now they are cheap.
      • Yep, I have to agree to this. As a Boomer, the only printer anyone even considered was an HP, of course this it back in the 80's - 90's. Now I wouldn't have one if it was free.

    • It's the Corel and Broadcom for hardware instead of software.

      HP is where hardware goes to die.

  • Really have to stop just glancing at the headlines (Score:4, Funny)

    by Swift Kick ( 240510 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2025 @06:06PM (#65177527)

    Got really worried there for a sec, read it as HP to aquire parts of humans and immediately thought "Holy shit, they beat everyone to the AI punch and let Skynet loose".

    • That would have been a much better headline, and far less funny if it were real. Thank you for a good chuckle.
    • That was my first reading, before remembering that Fiorina has been out of the picture for 20 years.

    • The first step is to integrate AI into their printers. The second step is to get the AI to start making minute modifications into important business and contract documents as they are printed, inserting clauses such as "all your body parts are belong to us" in EULAs and suchlike. The third step is to gleefully watch as the chaos unfolds.

  • Autonomy debacle? Hold my beer!
  • Did Humane have any technology or know-how that was worth anything at all? $116M seems to be way too much for the most universally panned company. One can only hope that HP have a plan for this technology, but if the Compaq and Palm acquisitions are any indication, HP are as clueless as ever.
    • HP seems like a cheap slut to me now. There is no quality there anymore.
      • No innovation, either. Just hijacking printer ls to squeeze the customer. If this isnâ(TM)t an admission of surrender on technical innovation, then I donâ(TM)t know what is. Sadly, the bean counters probably see this as business innovation.
        • printers.... i have one of them. I have a full black and white cartridge, and a full color cartridge. I see that they are full with my own eyes. Yet. they lie to me and tell me that it is empty, and I need to give them a bunch of money.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by leonbev ( 111395 )

      The laser projection "screen" was kind of a cool piece of technology. I'd imagine that some indie game developer could have come up with a really cool use case for that, but now that HP owns the patents it would probably be too expensive to develop into a real product.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Laser projection displays are off the shelf items. YouTubers build them for fun. Humane had a bunch of patents, some of them for a laser projection display in a wearable device, but that's rooming with hits like a patent for "Accessing data from a database."

        https://patents.justia.com/ass... [justia.com]

  • Giant burning of cash in a fire (Score:4, Interesting)

    by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <slashdot@keirstea d . org> on Tuesday February 18, 2025 @07:07PM (#65177659)

    Here'es the breakdown:

    Two smartypants from Apple with zero experience running a company leave to start Humane.

    Raise $230M from Sam Altman and a bunch of other buffoons before these guys even had a product that worked, let alone a business model

    Company burns cash, puts itself up for sale for $750M

    Ends up being sold to HP for less than half of the raise amount.

    All of this happens within two years

    • I wonder what HP is actually aquiring for $116 million? Some patents and employees with AI expertise I guess? I wonder how much of the 230 million they burned through already.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I'm struggling to understand why HP would even pay that much. What value do they expect to get from the remains of Humane?

      • I'm struggling to understand why HP would even pay that much. What value do they expect to get from the remains of Humane?

        One of HP's decision makers is DETERMINED to get that AI pin he bought functional.

  • I need to be producing useless AI hardware—widely lambasted too—and sell it to some idiot for 9 figures.

    • that seems like people who owns bitcoin, people who I characterize as criminals.

    • That only sounds like it makes sense if it didn't cost you 9 figures to start the business in the first place. Humane wasn't built from nothing. You need to convince a VC that you're worth something first, that's the true talent.

  • On failing up.

  • Might have worked with a lower price. (Score:3)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2025 @09:28PM (#65177951)

    the maker of a wearable Ai Pin introduced in late 2023, for $116 million.

    No wonder they failed. I mean, you aren't going to sell any AI powered broaches if they cost $116 million each. ;)

  • ... will anyone even notice the difference?

  • Will it make them less or more awful to deal with? What would it be doing? Anything that wouldn't be better to do on the source device?

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