Pinned spin?

Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno were sitting under a palm tree on a Hawaiian clifftop, watching dolphins swimming far below. They were there at the suggestion of their acupuncturistSomebody who is trained to insert thin needles into your skin at different points around the body. It is a form of traditional Chinese medicine. , Brother Spirit, who wanted them to meet a friend of his: Marc Benioff, head of the software company Salesforce. When they showed Benioff two devices, he pointed to one of them: "This one," he said, "is huge."

The device, using AIA computer programme that has been designed to think.  and designed to be worn on clothing, was the AI Pin. Weighing slightly less than a tennis ball, it is made from a single piece of aluminium and is about half the size of a cigarette packet.

Tapping it allows you to talk to a virtual assistant which can answer questions, help you make phone calls or send texts. It uses a laser to project text and images on your hand.

It can also take photos with a tiny wide-angle camera, summarise incoming messages and translate a conversation into another language as it takes place. It can even scan food to tell you how healthy it is.

A "trust light" shows when the AI Pin is photographing or recording, so that other people need not worry about being spied on.

The idea, says Imran Chaudhri, is to "create an experience that allows the computer to essentially take a back seat".

He and Bethany Bongiorno are a husband-and-wife team who met at Apple while working on the iPhone. Together they set up a company called Humane. It is now valued at £700m.

To create the AI Pin they collaborated with Microsoft and OpenAI, the company which created ChatGPTAn Artificial Intelligence chatbot released in November 2022. . The process took five years and cost £195m.¹

Many other tech companies have been searching for a successor to the smartphone. One, called Rewind AI, is working on a necklace that records what you say and hear. Apple and MetaThe new name of the company which owns Facebook and Instagram. have been investigating mixed-reality headsets - but Humane sees these as a barrier to human connection. "The future is not on your face," Chaudhri insists.²

He and Bongiorno wanted to create a device which was as useful as an iPhone but did not make people addicted. It would work for you without the temptation to follow a link or swipe to see another TikTok video.

One of their team, Jose Benitez Cong, said he joined to help him "get over my guilt of working on the iPhone". He was disgusted by what it had done to society, and was horrified to see his one-year-old son playing at swiping on one.

The AI Pin costs £570 plus a £20 monthly subscription, though some features such as videos will not be available to begin with. Further ones, such as a calorie-counter connected to the camera, are being worked on. Humane hopes to sell 100,000 devices in the first year.

"To tech insiders, it's a moonshot," write Erin Griffith and Tripp Mickle in The New York Times. "To outsiders, it's a sci-fi fantasy."

Can it live up to the hype?

Yes: Chaudhri and Bongiorno have huge experience in this field and have two of the world's leading tech companies as partners. They would not be releasing AI Pin if they did not believe it would work.

No: The more complicated devices like this are, the bigger the chance they will go wrong. At its launch the AI Pin was asked a general knowledge question about a solar eclipse which it got wrong.

Or... Even if it works, people may not want it. According to Erin Griffith and Tripp Mickle, "The tech industry has a large graveyard of wearable products that have failed to catch on."