https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-04-16/humane-s-ai-pin-got-juicero-ed-by-marques-brownlee-joanna-stern-and-more?srnd=opinion

AI’s Very Own Juicero

Seven years ago almost to the day, Bloomberg News broke the internet by pitting Juicero’s $400 juice machine against a reporter’s grip. When squeezing a packet of chopped-up fruits and veggies, the journalist managed to extract nearly the same amount of juice just as quickly as the device, effectively dismantling one of the hottest, most lavishly-funded gadget startups in Silicon Valley:

Fast-forward to 2024, and Dave Lee says there’s a new gadget in town: Humane’s Ai Pin, dubbed the first "major" consumer device of the artificial intelligence era. Perhaps you remember the husband-and-wife duo behind the product — both former Apple employees-turned-tech visionaries — from this New York Times feature last fall. Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno promised to do something much bigger than pour you a glass of green juice: replace your smartphone with a compact wearable device that’s able to ask you questions, "look" at things and describe them through voice technology and a sci-fi laser display that projects onto your palm. It sounds cool! If only it, uh, worked:

The famously even-handed Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal concluded it was simply "not cool" because of its lack of functionality and the extreme heat thrown off by the device attached to your shirt. David Pierce at tech news site The Verge said it was "so totally broken in so many unacceptable ways." Marques Brownlee, a.k.a. MKBHD, the reviewer every PR team is desperate to impress, said it was — gulp — the "worst product I’ve ever reviewed."

… Reviews showed the device taking as long as 10 seconds to answer questions — a lifetime, these days. In many instances, reviewers said, the software just got things flat-out wrong. Is that entirely Humane’s fault? No. It’s relying on large language models created by other companies. But these distinctions don’t matter when trying to sell a device for $699 with a $24 monthly subscription.

You’d think we’d have learned our lesson about making faulty, overpriced gadgets by now. But no, San Francisco start-up founders with more VC money than braincells are still oh so susceptible to overpromising and underdelivering.


Humane’s massive flop shows just how early we are in the AI race. Consider the fact that "most people were barely aware that OpenAI existed 18 months ago," writes Paul J. Davies. Now, ChatGPT is as good as gospel for company chiefs drooling over the prospect of productivity gains. But nobody knows how long it’s gonna stay that way, with Alphabet, Meta and Anthropic racing to catch up.

Paul says "the problem of getting locked in to a key vendor is very familiar," since the GenAI hoo-ha arrives on the heels of the boom in cloud-computing services. It’s only a matter of time before OpenAI and others will start to jack up their fees à la Amazon Web Services, potentially forcing businesses to pledge loyalty to a single provider. What happens if that provider were to, say, overpromise and underdeliver? As Mark Twain once wisely said: "History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme."

Light On

This is so embarrassing to even write down, but on Saturday, I (and 3,000+ other humans, some of them single, not all of them sober) spent seven (!!!) hours outside Irving Plaza to secure tickets to see Maggie Rogers perform at Madison Square Garden in October. While I ended up getting good seats, it is the first AND last time I will partake in such a perilous activity. Waiting in a maze-like line, anticipating the wind, withstanding assault after assault on your eardrums — jackhammer construction work, ice cream truck jingles, gaggles of loud fans — just to save a hundred bucks on Ticketmaster fees is not worth it! I, did, however, gain three new Instagram followers (huge dub for the grid) and accidentally snapped this incredible picture of a pigeon mid-flight, so it wasn’t for nothing:

On the bright side, at least I wasn’t waiting in line for solar power:

The queue for new energy generation and storage projects surged 29% last year to almost 2.6 terawatts (Tw) of capacity, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory reported last week. That’s almost 12,000 energy projects, hypothetically producing roughly twice the amount of power currently providing juice to the nation’s schools, hospitals, gaming rigs and Taco Bells. The wait list has more than doubled since 2020, largely due to proposed solar, wind and battery projects.

Mark Gongloff says the US transition to renewable energy is dying in the face of a "bloated backlog of renewable projects awaiting approval from grid operators." At the helm of some of those projects is Big Tech, which has already breathed life into hydrogen storage, electric vehicle charging infrastructure and small nuclear reactors. But the aforementioned AI revolution is an added complication. On a typical day, ChatGPT "handles an estimated 195 million queries, consuming enough electricity to supply some 23,000 US households," Bloomberg’s editorial board writes. The more tech companies invest in renewable solutions, "the more they’ll help such innovations reach economies of scale, lowering the cost of clean energy for everyone."

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South Africa could use some help in that department. As it stands, only the wealthy can afford solar power to avoid electricity blackouts. "South Africa is already the most unequal country in the world," Lara Williams explains, and "there’s been little policy support to make clean energy sources more affordable" — further evidence that the country lacks strong governance. But that may soon change. On May 29, John Micklethwait says South Africa will hold its most important election since 1994, when Nelson Mandela dismantled apartheid. In the decades since, John says its politics have grown more competitive. "To win votes in the future, ANC politicians will have to start focusing on fixing schools, roads and railways — rather than on dispensing patronage," he writes (free read).

The line for renewable energy may be incomprehensibly long, but it’s worth the wait. And unlike a concert queue, we can speed up the process, either by voting in new officials or hiring more people to study the grid.

Telltale Chart

Elsewhere in the psychology of crowds, John Authers says the TINA movement (There Is No Alternative) — which says even mediocre stock returns are better than those of other asset classes — is now devolving into what Ian Harnett of Absolute Strategy Research calls TINY: There Is No Yield on stocks. "Higher rates are more of a problem for share valuations than at any time this millennium," he writes. "For a generation that had grown accustomed to a stock market that yielded more than bonds, making asset allocation decisions much easier, this development makes life much harder."

So, is Iran cooking up a bomb or what? Even though Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei denies it, the country is up to its neck in enriched uranium and number-crunchers in Washington estimate that it would only take one month for it to produce seven nuclear weapons. John Bolton thinks now is the moment for Israel and the US to attack the country’s nuclear facilities, in response to Saturday’s failed missile barrage. But that would be a major mistake: "Iran’s program doesn’t exist because of US feebleness. It exists because Iran’s leaders want it," Marc Champion warns (free read).

Further Reading

Free read: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is making India’s polls all about himself. — Andy Mukherjee

When Trump Media went public, it set off a race between its business and its shareholders’ ability to sell. — Matt Levine

Singapore is entering uncharted territory with its new leadership change. — Karishma Vaswani

Hot retail sales data and the risk of higher energy prices have bond traders on edge. — Jonathan Levin

Speaker Mike Johnson is officially in cahoots with Conspiracist-in-Chief Donald Trump. — Patricia Lopez

Why is Latin America’s favorite libertarian economist also trending in the UFC? — Tyler Cowen

Crypto cannot maintain its amateur status, it has to turn pro. — Aaron Brown

ICYMI

How airstrikes and refugees reshaped Rafah.

The IMF is not happy with Uncle Sam’s credit card bill.

Young men are being targeted in more ways than one.

An update on the Philharmonic’s sexual misconduct saga.

Red Lobster is mulling a bankruptcy.

Kickers

Anti-wrinkle straws are all over TikTok.

Nicola Peltz Beckham’s vanity project is "awful."

Do not trust somatic healers with your money.

In search of the meaning of matzo.

Big Blueberry is out for your algorithm.

Notes: Please send Cheddar Bay Biscuits and feedback to Jessica Karl at jkarl9@bloomberg.net.