It’s been a bad month for AI gadgets, and that’s saying a lot. As if public opinion wasn’t already in the gutter after the collective letdown of Humane and its now-defunct Ai Pin, as well as its less expensive counterpart from Rabbit, the R1, reports have begun circulating that Sam Altman and Jony Ive, via their joint venture, IO, are also struggling to devise AI hardware that, ya know… works. But the fact that things are bad doesn’t mean they can’t get worse, and if new reports about Apple’s AI efforts are any indication, they just might.
According to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is running into a few hiccups with its rumored robotic smart home hub, and I’ll give you one guess what one of those issues is. Per Bloomberg:
“The motor system has had engineering challenges, and the company has sought to find compelling AI uses for the device. That’s pushed out the current timeline to roughly two years from now.”
Mechanical challenges are one thing (that feels like a technical hurdle that Apple can throw money at and eventually resolve), but the AI part isn’t so simple. Devising useful AI features isn’t just a money or engineering problem; it’s a philosophical one. Before Apple figures out where to put its resources, it has to have a reason to devote those resources. And if the broader field of AI gadgets is any indication, those reasons haven’t been exactly forthcoming.
While there are plenty of AI features in existence right now (i.e., everything new and Gemini-related on Google’s Pixel devices), not many of them have resonated with consumers who either don’t know that they exist or haven’t been given a compelling reason to use them. If you can’t convince people to use AI features on a device that they have in their hands almost every second of every day, it’ll be even harder to convince them to use AI features on a device they have almost no frame of reference for, such as, I don’t know, a robotic smart home display.
Not to mention, everything is compounded by the next-gen Siri of it all. If there’s one place you want a next-gen voice assistant, it’s a smart home hub, but Apple has (somewhat infamously) struggled to deliver its promised chatbot-infused Siri, or at least one that works the way it should. Those struggles, by the way, are still firmly ongoing. And the rest of its Apple Intelligence features, while not quite as damaging to public perception, haven’t exactly blossomed yet, especially notification summaries, which Apple had to put on pause briefly, given the fact they, uh… were a bit of a disaster.
Maybe Apple will figure things out. The company doesn’t plan to release its arm-having robot for another two years, according to Bloomberg, and a lot could happen between now and then, but it’s hard to be optimistic with the way things are going. Per the Financial Times, Jony Ive and Sam Altman have struggled with just about every piece of their AI gadget (a palm-sized device that you can bring on the go), including how its voice assistant works and even how to get enough compute to power it via the cloud. Woof.
Clearly, there’s still a lot of work to be done before AI gadgets can be useful in the way that even the biggest tech companies are still trying to get them to be, but if there’s one company that could figure it out, Apple would be it. And if Apple can’t get the job done? Well, I’ve got bad news for Altman, Ive, and company.
If the wave of overwhelmingly negative reviews weren’t enough, it seems that Humane has discovered yet another major issue with its once-hyped AI Pin. The company is warning customers not to use the device’s charging case due to a potential “fire safety risk.”
In an email sent to AI Pin owners, the company said it had received a report of a “charging issue” that led to “a quality issue with the battery cell supplied by a third-party vendor used in your Charge Case Accessory.” Humane didn’t explicitly indicate whether the unspecified “charging issue” caused an actual fire, but it said an investigation found that “certain battery cells supplied by this vendor may pose a fire safety risk.”
While Humane is so far not using the word “recall,” the company is advising people to stop using the charging case immediately. Other charging accessories, including the battery booster and charge pad, are apparently safe as their batteries come from different suppliers. We’ve reached out to Humane for more information and whether they have plans to refund or replace the $149 accessory for people who have already bought one. In the meantime, the company is offering customers two months of its subscription service for free.
The full text of the email is below.
Out of an abundance of caution, we are reaching out today to ask that you immediately stop using and charging your Charge Case Accessory due to an issue with certain battery cells for the Charge Case Accessory.
Upon receiving a single report of a charging issue while using a third-party USB-C cable and third-party power source, we identified a quality issue with the battery cell supplied by a third-party vendor used in your Charge Case Accessory.
Our investigation determined that the battery supplier was no longer meeting our quality standards and that there is a potential that certain battery cells supplied by this vendor may pose a fire safety risk. As a result, we immediately disqualified this battery vendor while we work to identify a new vendor to avoid such issues and maintain our high quality standards.
The issue identified is isolated only to certain battery cells used in the Charge Case Accessory and is not related to the Charge Case Accessory hardware design.
Importantly, Humane’s Ai Pin, its Battery Booster(s) and Charge Pad are not affected as the disqualified vendor does not supply batteries or any other components of those Humane products, and are safe for continued use.
It’s fair to say the Ai Pin launch didn’t go the way Humane planned. This week, the well-funded startup is dealing with another on a long list of mounting issues. The company Wednesday issued an email requesting customers discontinue use of its egg-shaped charging case.
The warning was issued “out of an abundance of caution,” according to Humane. The company says it launched an investigation following a “single complaint” of a charging issue from a customer. Ultimately Humane determined the supplied batteries to be a potential fire hazard.
“Our investigation determined that the battery supplier was no longer meeting our quality standards and that there is a potential that certain battery cells supplied by this vendor may pose a fire safety risk,” Humane wrote in an email viewed by TechCrunch. “As a result, we immediately disqualified this battery vendor while we work to identify a new vendor to avoid such issues and maintain our high quality standards.”
We reached out to company for more detail and asked whether Humane has any intention of issuing a full recall or refunds. Currently, the company is offering consolation in the form of two free months of its $24 subscription service.
Humane is far from the first consumer electronics company to ship products with potentially hazardous batteries. The timing of the news is less than ideal, however, as its founders have reportedly been shopping the company around to potential buyers a mere months after launching its first product.
According to the note, the Charge Case is the only Humane product affected by this news. Neither its Battery Boost or Charging Pad have been singled out by the company.
If there’s one overarching takeaway from last night’s Rabbit R1 launch event, it’s this: Hardware can be fun again. After a decade of unquestioned smartphone dominance, there is, once again, excitement to be found in consumer electronics. The wisdom and longevity of any individual product or form factor — while important — can be set aside for a moment. Just sit back and enjoy the show.
Despite flying out of an airport on a monthly basis, last night was my first night at the TWA Hotel nestled among the labyrinthian turnoffs of JFK’s Terminal 5. One rarely stays at hotels where they live, after all. The space is a nod to another era, when people dressed up to board flights and smiling chefs carved up entire legs of ham.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
A rented DeLorean decked in Rabbit branding was parked out front, serving as a postmodern homage to the event’s decade-agnostic embrace of the past. Less glaring was the Ritchie Valens song sandwiched between Motown hits on the elevator speakers as we rode three floors down to the subterranean event space.
Hundreds of attendees were already lined up by the time I arrived at the space. Familiar faces from the world of tech journalism mulled about, but a considerable number were excited early adopters. The two groups were distinguished with “Press” and “VIP” lanyards, respectively. A man standing in front of me in the queue volunteered that he had flown out from Los Angeles specifically for the event.
Like Humane, the team at Rabbit is clearly invested in spectacle. The approaches are similar, but different, with the former investing a good deal of funding into viral videos, including an eclipse teaser that clearly fancied itself a kind of spiritual successor to Apple’s famous “1984” spot. One gets the sense, however, that Rabbit genuinely didn’t anticipate just how much of a buzz the company’s CES 2024 debut would generate.
“When we started building r1, we said internally that we’d be happy if we sold 500 devices on launch day,” the company posted on X. “In 24 hours, we already beat that by 20x!”
It would have been difficult to time the release better. Generative AI hype had reached a fever pitch. Humane had unveiled but had yet to release its Ai Pin. Intel was declaring 2024 the year of the AI PC and soon enough, Samsung would be doing the same for the smartphone. Apple, meanwhile, was promising its own big news on that front in the coming months.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
When putting on a big show, a tech company also needs to dress the part. The focus on product design is another key parallel between Rabbit and Humane. While the form factors are vastly different, both the Ai Pin and R1 are testaments to value of industrial design. For its part, Rabbit took a page out of the Nothing playbook, contracting the stalwarts at Teenage Engineering to create a wildly original-looking product. Indeed, the R1 looks as much like an art piece as anything. It’s a squat, orange object — something you might want to mount to the handlebars of your bicycle for inclement weather.
While the Ai Pin’s defining physical characteristic is its absence of a display, Rabbit embraces the screen — if only modestly so. The display is a mere 2.88 inches and at times feels almost incidental to the cause. That goes double for its touch functionality. While, much like the Ai Pin, a bulk of your interactions are performed with voice, a combination analog scroll and button mostly fill in the gaps.
Beyond entering a Wi-Fi password, there aren’t a ton of reasons to touch the screen. That’s for the best. The most monumental and ongoing task facing the nascent AI device space is justifying its existence outside of the smartphone. After all, anyone with a half-decent mobile device (and plenty of non-decent ones) has access to generative AI models. These are largely accessed via browsers or stand-alone apps at the moment, but models like ChatGPT and Google Gemini will be increasingly baked into mobile operating systems in the months and years to come.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
When I posed the question to Humane, co-founder and CEO Bethany Bongiorno offered the following anecdote: “[Humane’s co-founders] had gone to this dinner, and there was a family sitting next to us. There were three kids and a mom and dad, and they were on their phones the entire time. It really started a conversation about the incredible tool we built, but also some of the side effects.”
The Ai Pin’s absence of a screen is, in essence, a feature. Again, there’s plenty of cause to question the wisdom and efficacy of that design decision, but regardless, it’s crucial to the product. It’s worth noting that at $199, the barrier of price justification is significantly lower than the Ai Pin’s asking price.
Brian Heater
The truth is that, at this early first-gen stage, novelty is a massive selling point. You either see the appeal of a devoted LLM accessing device or you don’t. Rabbit’s relatively affordable price point opens this world quite a bit. You should also consider that the R1 doesn’t require a monthly service fee, whereas Humane is charging you $24/month for functionality. That, coupled with the (albeit limited) touchscreen and really stellar design, and you can understand why the product has taken a good bit of wind out of the Ai Pin’s sails.
Neither of the devices trade in apps the way modern smartphones do. You interact exclusively with the onboard operating system. This can, however, be connected to other accounts, including Spotify, Uber, Midjourney and DoorDash. The system can take voice recordings and do bidirectional translations. The system can also gain environmental context via the onboard camera.
The Rabbit R1’s AI vision feature is a mixed bag. It also varies quite a bit from capture to capture, including the details it recognizes and the context it offers. (Apologies for the construction noise) pic.twitter.com/lf7WcOt8Rz
Among the first tests I threw at it was offering a description of my bookshelf. I pointed the camera at a row of four hardcovers: “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville; “The Barbary Coast” by Herbert Asbury; “Understanding Media” by Marshall McLuhan; and “Dodsworth” by Sinclair Lewis. It universally had difficulty with the last book — understandably, as it was the least clear of the group.
It largely spotted and understood what it was seeing with “Moby Dick,” calling it a “classic” and sometimes offering a brief synopsis. It recognized the middle two books 50% to 75% of the time. It also attempted to offer some context as to the curatorial choices and sometimes went out on a limb to compliment said curation.
There were times, however, when the context was a bit much. I asked the R1 when the Oakland A’s are playing (I added the city after an initial inquiry for just “A’s” showed up as “Ace”), and it gave me tonight’s game time, before running down a list of the next 10 or so teams they’re playing. But hey, I’m a lifelong A’s fan. I relish such defeats.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
Something worth noting for all of these early-stage write-ups is that these sorts of devices are designed to improve and customize results the more you use them. I’m writing this after having only picked up the device last night. I’m going to send it off to Devin for a more in-depth write-up.
Having only played around with the R1 for a few hours, I can definitively tell you that it’s a more accessible device than the Humane Pin, courtesy of the touchscreen and price. It doesn’t solve the cultural screen obsession Humane is interested in — nor does it seem to be shooting for such grandiose ambitions in the first place. Rather, it’s a beautifully designed product that offers a compelling insight into where things may be headed.
DETROIT, Mich. (WNEM) – Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel and Michigan Humane are teaming up to investigate and prosecute cases of animal abuse.
Nessel’s office said large-scale, multi-jurisdictional, well-organized fighting rings and similar operations require exceptional resources for investigation and prosecution. Her department will provide support and resources to Michigan Humane and its agents in pursuit of perpetrators.
“I know most Michiganders think of their pets as family members and subjecting those family members to abuse is incomprehensible,” Nessel said. “Animal abuse is cruel and sadistic. It is also a crime that is often associated with other serious criminal activity, including domestic violence, illegal possession of firearms, illegal gambling, drug possession and large-scale animal abuse and fighting rings. I am proud to partner with Michigan Humane to prosecute these offenders.”
“Animal cruelty isn’t an animal issue. It is a human issue. The partnership between Michigan Humane and the Michigan Attorney General’s Office will strengthen our ability to address animal cruelty towards creating healthier and safer communities for everyone,” Michigan Humane President and CEO Matt Pepper said.
Nessel and Michigan Humane previously partnered to raise awareness for puppy scams.
HOUSTON, November 14, 2018 (Newswire.com)
– Dog Lodge Sanctuary is a Texas-based 501(c)(3) organization located on 60 acres in Hempstead, Tx. dedicated to providing a permanent home for senior and/or special needs dogs that otherwise might face a very bleak future but in the right environment can still lead a quality life. We are focused on providing a safe, loving, healthy and stable environment for our dogs so that they may know peace and dignity for the rest of their lives. The primary function of Dog Lodge is to come to the rescue of dogs that are, for all intents and purposes, considered “unadoptable” because of advanced age or because they have chronic illness or physical disabilities. The Sanctuary is an alternative to life on the streets, abuse, neglect, fighting, and euthanasia. Here is an opportunity for those dogs to be in a place where they can belong; where they can be happy, where all their special needs can be met – where they can love and be loved.
Dog Lodge Sanctuary is now open and operational. Founders Rick Laminack and Elaine Rosen have turned their passion into reality and have made a significant financial investment to open Phase 1 which consists of two buildings. The first building holds the grooming room, laundry room, sanctuary office, food prep and storage area, and a 26’ x 80’combined training/therapy/exercise room. The dog accommodations are in the second building along with a large living room for the dogs, a volunteer break room, and a private vet clinic for the convenience of our visiting veterinarians.
Recently quoted in Houston’s Pet Talk Magazine Rick and Elaine stated, “Our investigation ultimately helped us to identify our mission. On the surface, the “system” for handling homeless dogs that is in place not only in Houston but all over the country seems like it could work; meaning ideally, that homeless dogs are brought into a shelter or rescue and then rehomed. But, as everyone knows, it’s not that simple. The number of dogs that need rehoming is staggering so even if the system were able to run without a hitch; it would certainly be strained. What happens, for example, when a dog enters the system, and it is difficult or even impossible to rehome or, at least rehome in a timely manner? The system backs up, fills up and slows down. Dogs that might otherwise come into the system and be adopted relatively easily can’t even get to that point because there’s no room. So we decided to build a sanctuary – a dog sanctuary that would take in some of the very dogs that are so problematic for rescues and shelters.”
Dog Lodge Sanctuary also has an educational component to its mission with the newly developed Dog Lodge Radio: Animal Issues That Matter, an internet radio/podcast show that will have in-studio guests and various segments dealing with various animal welfare issues and topics. In addition, Rick and Elaine are happy to share their experience of building and establishing Dog Lodge with anyone who might be considering a similar venture.
Please visit our website at www.doglodge.org to learn about holiday donations to help support this impactful sanctuary, become a volunteer, watch and listen to Dog Lodge Radio and learn more about this labor of love and how you can get involved. Dog Lodge can also be contacted via Facebook at Doglodgetx (don’t forget to follow us) or by emailing info@doglodge.org
NOTE: Private tours of Dog Lodge Sanctuary can be arranged. All media inquiries are welcome, and we encourage site visits, interviews with our founders, and feature stories to help us create awareness of the impact of such sanctuaries. The full article from Houston’s Pet Talk Magazine can be found here:
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