This week, the startup Humanewhich raised $240 million to build an iPhone-killing Ai Pinannounced its sale to HP for $116 million. While far short of the companys original $1 billion asking price, its astonishing that the brand scrapped for anything at all. A product that had promised to change the world instead became a worldwide laughingstock, indicative of the worst tendencies of Silicon Valley-founder hubris. Universally panned, Humane sold fewer than 10,000 units. Sometimes, its returns outpaced its sales. Units could catch fire.Humane cofounders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno thanked their few loyal customers by announcing their Pins would no longer work in 10 days. Well, for anything but checking the battery level.This investment will rapidly accelerate our ability to develop a new generation of devices that seamlessly orchestrate AI requests both locally and in the cloud, said Tuan Tran, president of technology and innovation at HP, in a press statement. Humanes AI platform Cosmos, backed by an incredible group of engineers, will help us create an intelligent ecosystem across all HP devices from AI PCs to smart printers and connected conference rooms. This will unlock new levels of functionality for our customers and deliver on the promises of AI.Heh. I can understand why the world was fooled by the Ai Pin when it launched in 2024. I have a little less sympathy now for HP execs, who have just completed one of the most tone-deaf acquisitions in corporate history.The Ai Pin was flawed from the beginningMystique around Humane had been swirling for years by the time Chaudhri took the stage at TED in May 2023 to present the idea of the disappearing computer. After spending his career at Apple working on some of its most important launches such as the iPhone, he pitched a screenless AI interface that allows us to get back to what really matters: a new ability to be present. By simply asking his computer to catch me up, it was able to cut through endless notifications to tell him what was important. By Chaudhri holding up a candy bar, his computer could tell him if it jibed with his lactose intolerance condition. And when his wife (and company cofounder) called, well, her name magically appeared right on his hand.Little did the audience realize: The computer had merely disappeared into Chaudhris jacket with a needle and thread.Even a bad magic trick can fool people who want to be fooled. And Humanes vision struck a chord with a society that felt guilty for using its phones all the time. Freeing our eyes and hands sounded like liberation, and the promise that an AI could do everything from translate languages in real time to examining the foods youd eaten that the day to determine if youre aligned with your diet seemed like the sort of just-out-of-reach magic that could finally be real. And, wait, was that a LASER BEAM THAT JUST SHOT ONTO HIS HAND?[Image: Humane/TED]The next time the Ai Pin arrived on stage, it (well, a prototype of it) would be worn on the lapel of Naomi Campbelltrue supermodel royaltyat Paris Fashion week. The closest parallel I could remember was Beyonc donning an Apple Watch around its announcement. The product was starting to feel too big to fail. Its investorsincluding Tiger Global Management, Microsoft, Qualcomm Ventures, and Softbank, alongside individuals including Salesforces Marc Benioff and OpenAIs Sam Altmanfed an $840 million valuation. It felt like something that deserved to be taken seriously.Naomi Campbell wore a prototype of Humanes Ai Pin at the Coperni spring/summer 2024 show during Paris Fashion Week. [Photo: Francois Durand/Getty Images]Still, the TED Talk had struck me as funny for reasons I couldnt articulate. Later, Chaudhri canceled an on-stage interview with me where hed promised to speak about the product for the first time. He also declined an interview after my in-person demo (Ive experienced a hundred or more product walkthroughs in my career, and Ive never been unable to ask a question of the company after any of them, except this time with Humane). What I generously interpreted as shynessChaudhris soft-spoken magnetism cannot be deniedseemed, increasingly, to be protecting a thin veneer.Five months before Marques Brownlee nuked the Ai Pin into oblivion by calling it the worst product hed ever reviewed, Id been saying the same to friends in the industry who eagerly asked about my experience with the device. It was difficult to explain to people that this wasnt hyperbole, that when I arrived in San Francisco in November 2023, the demo was really that bad. That every query took painfully long to answer, even inside a perfectly closed environment. That all the magical dietary foodstuff computations didnt seem to work. That I was expected to ooh and ahh when the Pin told me the weather. That I wasnt even allowed to use the device myself.Still, Chaudhri and Bongiorno (who, note, always wore the Pin on a thick jacket lapel to support its weight) had already planned for countless special-edition releases, with the Pin in all sorts of limited-edition candy colors. It didnt work, mind you. The Ai Pin was nothing more than a smartphone without a screen, stuck to your chest. Its limited capabilities somehow put technology in the way more. But the entire brand and packaging promised to usher us into a new era of computing, because Humane was focused more on optics than function.The project didnt seem salvageable, though I was actually surprised (impressed?) when the world of tech reviewers mirrored my initial take. These are people who review Android phones for a living! And they hated the thing.Where this leaves HPHumane was always going to sell as scrap. There was just too much invested in the company for there to be nothing to show. Its carefully engineered chipset (the Ai Pin used little off-the-shelf hardware) is unlikely to be worth much of anything outside the device itself, but perhaps HP has a purpose. Humanes 300 patents around various AI/UX interactions likely have an appeal to any tech company, if only because AI isnt going anywhere. And the purchase price isnt beyond what companies will spend to acquire tough-to-recruit technologists.Im more surprised that HP has made such a public bet on the ashes of Humane, which has been immortalized in memes as a pile of bogusness. If this was some attempt at capturing whatever lingering spirit was left in the Humane brand, the two companies snuffed it out when bricking their devices.HP says that Humane will form HP IQ, HPs new AI innovation lab focused on building an intelligent ecosystem across HPs products and services for the future of work. For a company thats still making billions in profits annually from predatory printer ink subscriptions, perhaps its a fitting end. The worst AI company of the past decade will linger as some sort of smart notification that your magenta is low.