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
95 points (99.0% liked)
Technology
34701 readers
548 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
get millions in VC for some reason
This is the part I don't understand. Pretty much everyone agreed these would be terrible products and yet these companies somehow drum up tens of millions of dollars in investments. How?
It's called exit capitalism. They hope to create enough hype so they can sell off their share to the next idiot for a higher price.
Investors are not smart people
Because the investors are always using Other People’s Money. They “invest” OPM and if it succeeds they take a huge cut and proclaim themselves to be geniuses. If it fails, they shrug and make up some BS to console the loser.
I used to work in a company that was VC adjacent.
Most of the people sitting on piles of money don't have any knowledge or radar to help them negotiate where to put it. They lean heavily on other people to tell them what to invest in.
When AI first started getting big everybody was guessing where the curve was going to be and where the technology was going to head. The people guiding the venture capitalists were putting their oars in the water early.
To be fair there's a lot of money to be made in AI assistants if they can manage to run the back end affordably. If you're asking Google, Siri, and Alexa complicated questions they're miserably fit for the task. But when we get to the point where you can expect a reasonable answer from something like look up all the places to rent cars near Tucson Arizona give me the cheapest price with the best reviews. Or tutor my kid on basic calculus, test him, and give me a report on where he needs more assistance. That kind of stuff is worth money and something that many people with money will pay for.
This form factor is off-putting and honestly AI at this point is still only mostly right.
The VCs are all over AI and there's opportunity there. Just not on every product and probably not yet.
They used the phrase AI and humane in the same sentence. Investors who aren't very technical would get very excited about it of course.
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.
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
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.
They could pivot from their fancy-futurism hand-gesture nonsense, and actually work on a device for disabled folks. Let the mobile device take all that load, and the pin do the streaming and haptic stuff. People who come under the spectrum of blindness will appreciate this, but well, fuck these founders for being so obtuse.
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?
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
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.