Humane Ai Pin

Humane announces 10 layoffs as CTO 'transitions' into advisor role

by with No Comment Tech

Humane Ai Pin

Image Credits: Humane / Humane

Much-hyped hardware startup Humane announced it’s laying off 10 employees — 4% of its workforce — before it has shipped a single one of its funky new ambient computing devices.

The company’s chief technology officer (CTO) is also “transitioning” into an advisor role after five years at the company.

“As we begin this new chapter of Humane, going from stealth to customer facing, we are making some changes to best prepare us for continued growth,” CEO and co-founder Bethany Bongiorno wrote in a LinkedIn post (as reported by The Verge).

Founded in 2017 by former Apple executives Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, Humane had raised a considerable chunk of change from big-name backers including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, before the company finally announced to the world last June what it was working on — the Ai Pin, a wearable device that packs a bunch of sensors and AI-smarts with a projector that beams information onto any surface.

Humane in action
Humane in action. Image Credits: Humane

Humane has been cranking its PR machine into overdrive these past few months, first revealing in November that the Ai Pin would cost $699 plus a $24 dollar monthly subscription to support its push into the MVNO realm, with shipping starting in March this year.

Two months before anything has left Humane’s factory floor, though, Bongiorno has made a handful of HR announcements, including a few internal promotions. However, buried in the announcement was the news that 4% of its 250 employees are leaving the company, alongside long-standing CTO Patrick Gates, who worked in a senior engineering capacity at Apple for 13 years before joining his former colleagues at Humane in early 2019.

Humane hasn’t revealed who the new CTO will be, or even if there will be a new CTO — but the official reason for Gates’ stepping down was that he wants to spend more time with his family.

It’s clear that Humane is aware of the optics around these changes, particularly in an economic climate that has seen many established companies struggle — let alone a fledgling hardware startup that has built a lot of buzz before it has brought a single product to market. This is likely why the departures were relegated to near footnotes in Bongiorno’s post, with its internal promotions and a new-hire positioned front-and-center — alongside a reminder that the company is still actively hiring (seven new roles, to be exact).

Humane Ai Pin

Humane announces 10 layoffs as CTO 'transitions' into advisor role

by with No Comment Tech

Humane Ai Pin

Image Credits: Humane / Humane

Much-hyped hardware startup Humane announced it’s laying off 10 employees — 4% of its workforce — before it has shipped a single one of its funky new ambient computing devices.

The company’s chief technology officer (CTO) is also “transitioning” into an advisor role after five years at the company.

“As we begin this new chapter of Humane, going from stealth to customer facing, we are making some changes to best prepare us for continued growth,” CEO and co-founder Bethany Bongiorno wrote in a LinkedIn post (as reported by The Verge).

Founded in 2017 by former Apple executives Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, Humane had raised a considerable chunk of change from big-name backers including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, before the company finally announced to the world last June what it was working on — the Ai Pin, a wearable device that packs a bunch of sensors and AI-smarts with a projector that beams information onto any surface.

Humane in action
Humane in action. Image Credits: Humane

Humane has been cranking its PR machine into overdrive these past few months, first revealing in November that the Ai Pin would cost $699 plus a $24 dollar monthly subscription to support its push into the MVNO realm, with shipping starting in March this year.

Two months before anything has left Humane’s factory floor, though, Bongiorno has made a handful of HR announcements, including a few internal promotions. However, buried in the announcement was the news that 4% of its 250 employees are leaving the company, alongside long-standing CTO Patrick Gates, who worked in a senior engineering capacity at Apple for 13 years before joining his former colleagues at Humane in early 2019.

Humane hasn’t revealed who the new CTO will be, or even if there will be a new CTO — but the official reason for Gates’ stepping down was that he wants to spend more time with his family.

It’s clear that Humane is aware of the optics around these changes, particularly in an economic climate that has seen many established companies struggle — let alone a fledgling hardware startup that has built a lot of buzz before it has brought a single product to market. This is likely why the departures were relegated to near footnotes in Bongiorno’s post, with its internal promotions and a new-hire positioned front-and-center — alongside a reminder that the company is still actively hiring (seven new roles, to be exact).

Amazon's CTO built a meeting-summarizing app for some reason

by with No Comment Tech

Werner Vogels

Image Credits: Johannes Simon / Getty Images

How does Amazon CTO Werner Vogels — a man worth untold millions, who during the COVID-19 pandemic outright bought the small Central Amsterdam Airbnb he’d been living in — spend his days? From the looks of it: building AI-powered meeting-summarizing apps. Go figure.

In a post this week on Vogels’ personal blog, he details Distill, an open source app he built with his “OCTO” (Office of the CTO) team to transcribe and summarize their conference calls. Distill takes an audio recording of a meeting (in formats like MP3, FLAC and WAV), analyzes it, and generates a summary along with a list of to-do items. It can optionally spit out that summary and list to platforms such as Slack via custom integrations. 

Distill
An example summary from Vogel’s Distill meeting summarizer, powered by Amazon tech.
Image Credits: Distill

As one might expect of an app from Amazon’s CTO, Distill relies conspicuously on paid Amazon products and services to do the computational heavy lifting. AWS Transcribe carries out Distill’s transcription; Amazon S3 provides storage for the meeting audio files; and Bedrock, Amazon’s generative AI development suite, handles summarization.

But why create a meeting summarizer when there are countless tools out there that would satisfy the purpose? Well, I have to imagine that Vogels thought, why not? He has tons of resources at his disposal and seemingly enough spare time for hobbyist programming projects. Per the blog, he’s already trying his hand at porting Distill’s codebase from Python to Rust. (Being the CTO is nice work if you can get it.)

One unique thing about Distill is that it lets you select which AI model performs the meeting summarizing. By default, it’s Sonnet, a midrange model in Anthropic’s Claude 3 family. (Amazon’s large stake in Anthropic might’ve had something to do with that design decision.) But any model hosted in Bedrock will work, like Meta’s Llama 3 and models from AI startups Mistral, AI21 Labs and Cohere. 

Vogels doesn’t promise that Distill won’t make mistakes. 

“Remember, AI is not perfect,” he writes. “Some of the summaries we get back … have errors that need manual adjustment. But that’s OK, because it still speeds up our processes. It’s simply a reminder that we must still be discerning and involved in the process. Critical thinking is as important now as it has ever been.”

I’d argue that having to be “involved” in summarizing kind of defeats the point of an automatic summarizer. You might as well hire a stenographer. But you’ll never catch Vogels badmouthing the tech his employer’s selling. And that, I’d wager to say, is why he’s still CTO.