Inside a former stable in the San Francisco neighbourhood of SoMa, a wave of gentle chirps emerged from small, blinking devices pinned to the chests of employees at a startup called Humane.

It was just
weeks before the Ai Pin would be revealed to the world — a culmination of five years, US$240 million ($402m) in funding, 25 patents, a steady drumbeat of hype and partnerships with top tech companies, including OpenAI, Microsoft and Salesforce.

Their mission? No less than liberating the world from its smartphone addiction. The solution? More technology.

Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, Humane’s husband-and-wife founders, envision a future with less dependency on the screens that their former employer, Apple, made ubiquitous.

Artificial intelligence “can create an experience that allows the computer to essentially take a back seat,” Chaudhri said.

They’re billing the pin as the first artificially intelligent device. It can be controlled by speaking aloud, tapping a touchpad or projecting a laser display onto the palm of a hand. In an instant, the device’s virtual assistant can send a text message, play a song, snap a photo, make a call or translate a real-time conversation into another language. The system relies on AI to help answer questions (“What’s the best way to load the dishwasher?”) and can summarise incoming messages with the simple command “Catch me up”.

The technology is a step forward from Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant. It can follow a conversation from one question to the next, without needing explicit context. It’s also capable of editing a single word in a dictated message, rather than requiring the user to correct an error by repeating the text from beginning to end, as other systems do. And it does it from a gadget that’s reminiscent of the badges worn in Star Trek.

To tech insiders, it’s a moonshot. To outsiders, it’s a sci-fi fantasy.

At Humane, there’s deep anxiety about the weeks ahead. The tech industry has a large graveyard of wearable products that have failed to catch on. Humane will begin shipping the pins next year. It expects to sell around 100,000 pins, which will cost US$699 and require a US$24 monthly subscription, in the first year. (Apple sold 381,000 iPods in the year after its 2001 launch.)

For the startup to succeed, people will need to learn a new operating system, called Cosmos, and be open to getting new phone numbers for the device. (The pin comes with its own wireless plan.)

They’ll need to dictate rather than type texts and trade a camera that zooms for wide-angle photos. They’ll need to be patient because certain features, like object recognition and videos, won’t be available initially. And the pin can sometimes be buggy, as it was during some of the company’s demos for The New York Times.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, said in an interview that he expected AI to be “a huge part” of how we interact with computers. He has invested in Humane as well as Rewind AI, which plans to make a necklace that will record what people say and hear. He’s also discussed teaming up with Jony Ive, Apple’s former chief designer, to create an AI gadget with a similar ambition to Humane.

Bongiorno, 40, and Chaudhri, 50, have a marriage of contrasts. He shaves his head bald and speaks with the soft, calm voice of a yogi. She sweeps her long blonde hair over one shoulder and has the enthusiasm of a team captain. They both dress in Jobsian black.

They met at Apple in 2008. Chaudhri was working on its human interface, defining the swipes and drags that control iPhones. Bongiorno was a programme manager for the iPhone and iPad. They worked together until they left Apple in late 2016.

A Buddhist monk named Brother Spirit led them to Humane. Chaudhri and Bongiorno had developed concepts for two AI products: a women’s health device and the pin. Brother Spirit, whom they met through their acupuncturist, recommended that they share the ideas with his friend, Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.

Sitting beneath a palm tree on a cliff above the ocean at Benioff’s Hawaiian home in 2018, they explained both devices. “This one,” Benioff said, pointing at the Ai Pin, as dolphins breached the surf below, “is huge.”

“It’s going to be a massive company,” he added.

Humane’s goal was to replicate the usefulness of the iPhone without any of the components that make us all addicted: the dopamine hit of dragging to refresh a Facebook feed or swiping to see a new TikTok video.

They experimented in secret with hardware components and built a virtual assistant, like Siri or Alexa, working with customised language models based in part on OpenAI’s offerings.

The device’s most sci-fi element — the laser that projects a text menu onto a hand — started inside a box the size of a matchbook. It took three years to miniaturise it to be smaller than a golf tee.

José Benitez Cong, a longtime Apple executive who considered himself retired, joined Humane in part for redemption. Benitez Cong said he was “disgusted” by what the iPhone had done to society, noting that his son could mimic a swiping motion at the age of 1.

“This could be something that could help me get over my guilt of working on the iPhone,” Benitez Cong said.

The device is arriving at a time when excitement and scepticism about AI hit new highs each week. Industry researchers are warning of the technology’s existential risk, and regulators are eager to crack down on it.

Yet investors are eagerly pouring cash into AI startups. Before Humane even released a product, its backers had valued it at US$850m.

The company has tried to promote a message of trust and transparency, despite spending most of its existence working in secret. Humane’s Ai Pins have what the company calls a “trust light” that blinks when the device is recording. (A user must tap the pin to “wake” it.) Humane said it did not sell user data to third parties or use it in training its AI models.

In the months leading up to its introduction, Humane has fanned the anticipation. In April, Chaudhri showed off the pin’s laser projector during a TED Talk. (People later accused him of faking the demo, he said, but he assured them that it was real.) In September, in an echo of Apple’s fashion-friendly launch of its Watch, supermodel Naomi Campbell wore Humane’s pin — barely noticeable without knowing to look for it — on a grey Coperni blazer on the runway at Paris Fashion Week.

Humane’s supporters have a pat way of dismissing scepticism about its prospects: They invoke the first iPod. That clunky, awkward device had just one use, playing songs, but it laid the groundwork for the real revolution, smartphones. Similarly, Humane envisions an entire ecosystem of companies building features for its operating system — an AI version of Apple’s App Store.

Humane’s ambition to disrupt the smartphone is audacious, creative and even irrational — the kind of thing Silicon Valley is known for, but, critics bemoan, in recent years has turned into incremental frivolities, like selfie apps and robot pizza trucks.

But even after months of wearing their Ai Pins all day, Humane’s founders can’t fully detach from their screens.

“Are we using our smartphones less?” Chaudhri asked. “We’re using them differently.”

Written by: Erin Griffith and Tripp Mickle

Photographs by: Kelsey McLellan

© 2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES