Bungie's Marathon arrives on March 5 How to claim Verizon's $20 outage credit Apple needs a better Siri, not an unproven wearable. So it's come to this: Apple is reportedly working on a wearable AI pin . According to, it is going to be a small device with multiple cameras, a speaker, microphones and wireless charging. It sounds like the perfect gadget to pair with the long-awaited AI-powered Siri update, which will also reportedly work as a chatbot . But while many Apple rumors conjure up an air of excitement, the notion of an Apple AI pin sounds downright baffling. Worse, it just seems desperate.

The story of the infamous Humane Ai Pin is coming to an end. This week, the company announced that HP--known for its computers and printers that always seem to need a refill--will acquire several assets from Humane in a 116 million deal expected to close at the end of the month. HP will get more than 300 patents and patent applications, a few Humane employees--including founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno--and Humane's Cosmos operating system. Late in 2024, Humane looked to license this operating system so that third parties could inject the AI voice assistant into other products, like cars. Humane became Silicon Valley's "next big thing" in late 2023 when it unveiled its AI wearable, equipped with a ChatGPT-powered assistant and a laser-projected display, that promised to replace your smartphone.

The new year is a time for reflection, renewal, and rampant speculation about what wonders (or fresh hell) the future might hold. No place does this mix of anxiety and forward-looking techno-evangelism spring forth more profusely than at CES. The giant consumer tech showcase is barreling down on Las Vegas starting January 7, bringing with it a whirlwind of fuss about the newest gadgets and devices. And yes, you bet all these things are going to be packed full of AI features. You're probably going to be asked to wear many of them.

The tricky thing about naming the year's biggest losers in tech is that in 2024, it once again felt like everyone lost. Amid the depressing spiral that is social media, the will-they-or-won't-they dance of banning TikTok in the US and the neverending edited and deepfaked content that has everyone questioning what's real, the world lost. But a few areas this year stood out as particularly troubling. Specifically, AI and dedicated AI gadgets proliferated more than ever, spreading not only to our digital assistants and search engines but to our wearables as well. We also saw more deterioration in Intel's standing and bid farewell to a robot maker, as well as Lightning cables.

The year began with such promise. Back in January, I remember sitting in a presentation hall at a Las Vegas hotel during CES 2024 as Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu unveiled the R1. This colorful and fun pocket-sized AI companion promised to do everything, from ordering an Uber to answering all your vexing questions. My story on the R1 had just gone live and within hours--I'm not trying to pat myself on the back here--there were a lot of eyeballs on it. The device was unlike anything that had come before, and showed us a novel vision of how these newfangled AI agents would fit into our lives.

Its universally derided AI pin was a flop, so Humane now pivoting to software. The company just released a video showing how its CosmOS software could work in other devices like a car, TV and smart speaker as "an AI operating system built for a universe of connected devices." The only problem is that the software was a big part of what made the AI pin bad, and much of what Humane shows are "simulated experiences" for "illustrative purposes" rather than the AI in actual use. The video starts out with a person talking to CosmOS in a car (with the brand blurred out), asking for takeout restaurant suggestions and when guests are coming over, and commanding it to turn up the thermostat. Once at home, the user asks an unknown smart speaker (again, blurred out) for a recipe and a soccer player's scoring stats from their smart TV.

Standalone AI devices have crashed and burned harder than the Hindenburg. They are, as one might say, not ready for prime time. However, the show must go on, so here's another AI pin that will likely cause Marques Brownlee's hair to fall out when it officially launches. The Plaud NotePin could solve some of the issues that plagued rival products by limiting the scope. This thing isn't a purported digital assistant that will streamline every aspect of modern life. The NotePin automatically records and transcribes conversations, and that's pretty much it.

Silicon Valley startup Humane has told users to stop using the charging case that came with its AI Pin, citing safety concerns. In an email, the firm asks users to'immediately stop using and charging your Charge Case' due to an issue with'certain battery cells'. Battery cells – containers that chemically store energy in the charger – are defective and'may pose a fire safety risk', it warns. AI Pin is the bizarre gadget that projects a display onto your palm, but it's been blasted for issues including overheating and AI that delivers'incorrect answers'. It comes as Humane reportedly attempts to sell itself to US tech giant HP for around 1 billion.

Earlier today, OpenAI announced its newest product: GPT-4o, a faster, cheaper, more powerful version of its most advanced large language model, and one that the company has deliberately positioned as the next step in "natural human-computer interaction." Running on an iPhone in what was purportedly a live demo, the program appeared able to tell a bedtime story with dramatic intonation, understand what it was "seeing" through the device's camera, and interpret a conversation between Italian and English speakers. The model--which was powering an updated version of the ChatGPT app--even exhibited something like emotion: Shown the sentence I ChatGPT handwritten on a page, it responded, "That's so sweet of you!" Although such features are not exactly new to generative AI, seeing them bundled into a single app on an iPhone was striking. Watching the presentation, I felt that I was witnessing the murder of Siri, along with that entire generation of smartphone voice assistants, at the hands of a company most people had not heard of just two years ago.

After years of development, startup Humane launched a 700 wearable in early April that leans heavily on artificial intelligence. The original pitch for the Ai Pin was that you no longer need to juggle different apps; its operating system can "search for the right AI at the right moment," allowing it to play music, translate languages, and even tell you how much protein is in a palmful of almonds. And because it doesn't have a traditional display, the Ai pin was supposed to be a tiny tincture for the disease of screentime; smartphones were on their way out. The pin has been panned. WIRED's Julian Chokkattu scored the Ai Pin a 4 out of 10. Popular YouTuber Marques Brownlee complimented the device's hardware design but still called it "The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed … For Now." The company has since massaged the message that it's meant to replace your phone.