Humane Ai Pin Debuts at Paris Fashion Week

Models strutted the runway at Coperni’s 2024 Spring Summer show during Paris Fashion Week, but it was Humane’s Ai Pin that stole the show. The hardware startup confirmed that its mysterious gadget will be unveiled on November 9.

“We have been admirers of Arnaud and Sébastien at Coperni for some time and our shared passion for the union of design, creativity and technology is at the heart of this collaboration,” co-founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno said in Humane’s press release. “Our relationship with technology is changing profoundly, becoming even more personal as our devices morph into extensions of our bodies, minds and hearts.”

Close up photos from the runway show that the Ai Pin is a screenless device with front-facing sensors, potentially with more sensors on the top of the gadget aimed at the user’s face.

The Ai Pin runs on a “software platform that harnesses the power of AI.” Qualcomm Technologies’ advanced Snapdragon platform powers the device’s AI optical recognition and laser-projected display. ChatGPT creator OpenAI is serving as a key AI technology collaborator.

In their statement, Chaudhri and Bongiorno describe the Ai Pin as “a new paradigm of ambient, AI-driven computing… designed to weave seamlessly into users’ day-to-day lives.” Humane stressed the Ai Pin is a “privacy-first” device with no “always on” listening, reflecting its vision to create products that users can trust.

Tech enthusiasts first saw the Ai Pin peeking out of Chaudhry’s breast pocket during his TED talk in early May. In June, the mysterious gadget received a name when Humane revealed it’s “a connected and intelligent clothing-based wearable device [that] uses a range of sensors that enable contextual and ambient compute interactions.”

In simpler words, the Ai Pin will be able to perform tasks that a smartphone can do, like initiating and answering phone calls, translating between languages, and providing access to email, calendars, and other apps. Humane emphasized the “standalone” nature of the device across multiple statements, meaning it can function on its own without connecting to a smartphone or other device.

Humane is a hardware startup founded in 2017 by former Apple employees. Since its inception, the secretive tech company has raised $241 million in funding over four rounds. OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO Sam Altman is a big investor in the company, along with Microsoft, Tiger Global Management, Forerunner Ventures, SoftBank Group, BOND, Qualcomm Ventures, and Kindred Ventures.