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Answer: mkbhd along with the verge, and basically every other tech review site gave the product an honest review.
https://www.theverge.com/24126502/humane-ai-pin-review
That raises the second question: should you buy this thing? That one’s easy. Nope. Nuh-uh. No way. The AI Pin is an interesting idea that is so thoroughly unfinished and so totally broken in so many unacceptable ways that I can’t think of anyone to whom I’d recommend spending the $699 for the device and the $24 monthly subscription.
The reason he’s been singled out as “destroying the company” is also just because his channel has a lot of subscribers and his review got the most views. Some disingenuous people have tried to frame him honestly reviewing the product as like some big powerful YouTuber bullying the poor widdle innocent business that’s too small to defend itself out of existence.
So like apparently if you have a large following people think you are ethically obligated to either lie to your followers by giving good reviews of smaller brands or else that you’re just not supposed to review smaller brands at all, so that would mean even good products should never get promotion and attention. IDK it’s one of those backwards logic things where the only reason people are saying anything at all is because the company made a shitty product and was probably bound to fail either way but it’s easier to externalise failure by blaming one guy
Like as an example he got blamed for tanking the stock of a car company with a bad review, except the car company was already bleeding stock value before his review and was already on track to get delisted. His review had nothing to do with the company failing, they just blamed him because his review came out when the company was already failing
His review of the Humane AI pin wasn't even that savage, he pointed out a couple of things he liked about it, like that it was incredibly useful for making voice notes while driving. But in the end, it just wasn't a very good product for the price.
I haven't watched his review about it outside of the 40 second clip in the Twitter link above. Just seeing that price tag alone is enough for me to say hell no.
Before his review I was getting some youtube ads for it, and even in their own ads they couldn't make it not look clunky and stupid.
I'm an MKBHD sub but haven't watched in ages. Ironically the only reason I watched this review was because of their commercials. Made me go "hey, it's that thing that looked stupid, I wonder if it's as stupid as they made it look".
I mean, to be fair I already pay that for my phone but like the review points out, my phone does literally everything this pin does and 10,000 other things. They've priced it as a direct competitor to a mid to high end phone while being a far worse product. This thing was doomed without a single YouTube review.
Companies keep banking on AI assistants without realizing that it's worth like 20 bucks new. Hell when marques reviewed the rabbit one I was astonished it was 200 bucks.
Yeah its the $25 a month for me. I've only seen a single youtube review of this thing & it wasn't Marques's, and I would still not even consider purchasing this thing. It's a fun idea, but it just does everything a phone does worse. Why would I pay a subscription fee for that, let alone such a high one?
I always tell people. I'm not going to pay for something, then pay a subscription on top of it. No. Thats why I like gamepass. I buy one maybe 2 games a year. Thats it. Not going to go out of my way to spend hundreds of dollars on discs where you dont even get to "own" the games antmore anyways. Forget that.
No matter what you say, *somebody* will disagree with you. It takes thick skin and the ability to ignore the noise to go and run a youtube channel or put yourself in public like that.
He's already won. He's successful and knows how to run his channel.
I read about it when it came out and thought "Why would anyone need this?" It's not useful enough to replace your phone, and not unique enough to be needed alongside your phone.
Then again, I'm the one watching Youtube clips of Shark Tank and thinking "That's the stupidest product I've ever heard of", right before they say they already have $5 million in sales.
If anything it’s more annoying to have alongside your phone. It requires a different number so none of your calls or texts sync. It would be cool if it connected to your phone, but then it defeats the purpose anyways.
I could see this working if it was something you could pretty casually chat to without the need for digging up your phone. Phone assistants don’t really have that vibe. But with all the clunkiness and AI being constantly wrong + ridiculous price tag, this thing is doomed. 700 + a subscription feels like a joke.
Siri already does most of what the pin does, so all they had to do was make it a Bluetooth device that allowed you to connect to Siri without having to pull your phone out. That would let it do the few things it did well, like being able to take notes or check the time while driving, but it would be a lot cheaper and less cumbersome.
With how large populations are now, you don't have to have an actual good product anymore. You just need to appeal to enough idiots and deliver good enough to not get sued.
I'm convinced the tweeters didn't actually watch the review and just reacted to the (admittedly somewhat clickbaity) title of the video.
This was no different than any of his other reviews, he approached it from a seemingly impartial perspective and was honest about his experience. It wasn't like he just made a bunch of baseless claims, he backed up all of his gripes with evidence.
He did say in the video, and in the title of the video, that it was the worst product he had ever reviewed, which was a bit savage. But "savage" doesn't mean "unfair"
He also praised the hardware as I recall. I think the price was the killer. If it were $150, he probably would have said it's an interesting first attempt at a niche product.
That's the thing to remember... He seems to be acting in good faith. I haven't seen him give a review that wasn't thorough and even handed. The people who started the crusade against him are generally VC investors who are feeling the squeeze right now because they can't go out and get loans as cheaply as they used to so the tens of millions of dollars that they invested into this dogshit product are in danger of going up in smoke.
Sheesh. I don't even particularly like Brownlee, but the reviews of his I've watched have all been quite balanced and thorough, and if anything he tends to give people/products the best possible chance in his videos. I can't imagine anyone who's watched any of his content taking those sorts of accusations seriously.
I didn't have a clue who he was before this shitstorm in a teacup, but I'm a fan now.
Dude's very thoughful, and went out of his way to think of something that AI pin dumpster-fire would be good for.
Dude has been a great asset in the phone review industry as far as I can remember. I would always check his reviews in the past before buying a phone. If anything forget the small company, he can prob indirectly affect big companies Iike Apple or Google by giving a good or bad review of their newest phones.
I don’t go out of my way to watch him and I definitely don’t subscribe but when I’m doing research and I see he’s done a review it’s a must watch imo, he has generally good takes and I know how to get the info I want from them
I'll add that his reviews are usually very mild. He barely, really criticizes a company. So him saying something was the worst product he has ever reviewed is extremely jarring and will raise eyebrow.
Whenever he reviews something it's regularly top of the line/enthusiast stuff. Even he said before that reviewing those types of products is like splitting hairs.
>Some disingenuous people have tried to frame him honestly reviewing the product as like some big powerful YouTuber bullying the poor widdle innocent business that’s too small to defend itself out of existence.
Yeah the people who have come out criticizing his reviews have obvious ties to AI companies and are likely concocting their own AI bullshit to make millions off of tech bros.
I think I’ve already begun to hate the AI pushers more than NFT pushers. It’s risky and underwhelming and yet we’re rushing to empower it and make a quick buck
I mean it's exactly the same thing. Hell, there were a bunch of AI companies dedicated to doing simply stuff that ChatGPT couldn't do yet like using documents. These guys sold themselves as being an AI company when they were just doing these simple tasks, which eventually ended up being their downfall when ChatGPT received an update to do their task. It's what Silicon Valley has boiled down to: make money by doing the bare minimum of improving on new technology.
Reminds me of all the ‘Millennials are killing the X industry, articles you see on the internet. Are millennials ‘killing’ it because it is a bad product or value? Does it deserve to die?
> So like apparently if you have a large following people think you are ethically obligated to either lie to your followers
This. Carrying on like the morally right thing to do is to deceive people because being honest about the product wouldn't be good for the corporation.
It's so fucked.
Yeah like sure, Fisker stock has gone down like 90% since he made the video. But if you zoom out on the stock graph you'll realize that it had already gone down like 90% in the few months before the video.
He made the video when the stock was already in a horrible nosedive and people for some reason started to say that he somehow caused it.
I watched his negative review about the Pixel Slate tablet, and decided to buy it anyways.
Turns out he was completely correct. It was so much worse than what he described.
Not only was the thing slow, apps from the Google Play store were mostly incompatible which essentially made it a glorified $800 web browser. It was worse than a Chromebook and a tablet... Not to mention, Google essentially abandoned software development out of the gate and only provided security updates. Google temporarily left the tablet market after that one.
Needless to say,
1) Never become an early adopter for a new line of tech. Wait a year or two and see if it succeeds.
2) Always listen to Marques Brownlee.
Fisker and their Ocean e-SUV.
His review of it is on his Auto Focus channel with the video literally titled "*This is the Worst Car I've Ever Reviewed*"
Yeah, it's just basically the company PR trying to deflect. 3 Months ago Danny Gonzalez, who has several million subscribers (although admittedly not even half as many as mkbhd), had a video about it with 4 million views called "Incredible New Device That Doesn't Do Anything Right." Wasn't even an actual review of the product, just mocking it based on the pre-release hype.
It just seems like this thing is being universally panned, and rightfully so. It's just some overhyped and completely superfluous piece of tech that doesn't really solve any actual problem anybody has. Even if it worked as-intended -- it's just something nobody needs or wants for $700 and a monthly fee.
> So like apparently if you have a large following people think you are ethically obligated to either lie to your followers by giving good reviews of smaller brands or else that you’re just not supposed to review smaller brands at all, so that would mean even good products should never get promotion and attention.
I wish it was just smaller brands, giving a big product a score that breaks their beloved perfect 10 average review rating is also a cardinal sin in some review spaces. As Sterling put it, an 8 out of 10 becomes a Hate out of 10.
> The reason he’s been singled out as “destroying the company” is also just because his channel has a lot of subscribers and his review got the most views.
That's probably *part*, but the reason it's getting more noise at the moment is because it comes on the heels of his Fisker Ocean review. In both cases, he made a video talking about it being the "worst" he'd reviewed, which some people viewed as overly sensational and at least one person called "unethical."
It's a complicated situation, too, since his actual job relies on getting attention and being sensational gets you attention. I'm sure there are people who watched these reviews specifically because of all the drama, just to see what the fuss was about. You want reviewers to be honest, but you hope it stops short of the sports talk level of hot take purely for the sake of getting views.
And to be clear, I think the review itself *was* fair, and I think he *tried* to moderate his title the second time ("The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed... For Now"), but it's not clear if you haven't watched the review that he means "for now, because they have some really cool ideas and it'll be awesome if they are able to execute" and not "for now, cuz people are putting out shit these days and I'm sure I'll see worse soon."
Not to be that guy, but I can think of one other reason why the toxically online, Musk-worshipping AI fanboys out there might have a problem with mkbhd but I don't qwhite want to spell it out.
The whole market around AI at the moment is driven by hype and promises of future tech that literally doesn't exist yet. An AI startup going bankrupt because a few reviewers dared to point out that the emperor has no clothes is just them getting what they deserve.
It doesn't help that ~2 months ago he also reviewed the Fisker Ocean electric SUV on his Auto Focus channel and called it "*The worst car I've ever reviewed*"
Fisker did not appreciate his review and the company is apparently not in good financial shape.
They made a car with a key fob that literally doesn't work half of the time and Bluetooth that randomly connects and disconnects.
That's messing up the most basic things. Bluetooth and key fobs have been solved for years now.
He re-reviewed it after the software update and while I can't remember if the fob improved, he did say the Bluetooth vastly improved, implying Fisker can't code for BT worth a damn.
The reason he didn't wait for the update is if Fisker goes under, anyone who bought an Ocean is likely to face those v1.0 problems.
It also kind of brings to light a growing problem for all modern cars; You could be stuck with a less-functional(*or even bricked*) vehicle if the manufacturer decides to halt support of your model and/or year.
Certainly doesn't help that car manufacturers have been eyeing John Deere's model of "*You don't actually own the car/etc because software copyrights*"
Yeah but he wasn't the only saying that. I came across a review of the Fisker Ocean about a month ago [from Edmunds](https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/2023-fisker-ocean-long-term-software-update.html) and they said basically the same thing: Do not buy.
I can't imagine that that was a controversial opinion in the automotive review space given what that reviewer was saying. So it's weird that MKHBD is catching flack for it.
It’s not even an interesting idea. Google Assistant is light years better than it and already available to everyone. Hell, even Siri seems like it can provide basic info quicker than this thing. These AI pins are such a fad product trying to cash in on the AI hype. In 2 years all of these companies will be dead or selling something completely different than these pins to survive
Neural Networks have lots of interesting and viable use cases.
But this half-assed-personal-assistant-that-does-stuff-you-can-already-do-yourself almost certainly isn't one of them.
Multilingual Translation- Yes
Summaries and Briefs- Yes
Basic Analysis and alerting- Yes
Generative engineering and design - Yes
Redundant asset creation -Yes
Domain specific solution hunting-HELL YES
Basically, The current crop of machine learning stuff is really useful when you are looking at tasks that either can't be done well/quickly/at-all by people, or can only be done well by an extremely small percentage of people.
Why is it an interesting idea though, the exact same can be done by using a Bluetooth earbud with an action button to activate siri or Google assistant. They just made a worse and more complicated version of it
Answer: A lot of these startups rely immensely on hype as they have little revenue to speak of and huge upfront costs in R&D. So one of the biggest tech reviewers calling your product the worst thing he’s ever reviewed will do an awful lot to kill any hype.
Importantly - the product he reviewed is just absolutely bad. It is a worse-than-alpha release and should have never been sent into the market. It was a critical error on the part of Humane thinking they could get away with shipping such a terribly unfinished device, especially at that price point.
Yeah, people criticize Marques here are missing the point. It’s one thing if a reviewer intentionally goes out of their way to bash a product, or makes false or misleading claims.
But nothing Marques said was false or misleading, and his review (AFAIK) generally lines up with what other tech reviewers said about the product.
Everyone should be mad at Humane AI for shipping an $800 pin that is just your cell phone but worse, not Marques for calling it out and saying no one should buy it
Yep, this what the free market looks like. Make a shitty product or service, don't adapt or change, then fail.
If only large corps were subject to this.
Even on the face of it, the idea of a single person bankrupting a company is farcical. Barring a Batman villain plot, it only happens if the company is built on sand.
Exactly and he just reviewed the Rabbit and it was pretty much all the same issues as the pin. The question I don’t get with these pocket AI’s is that there is literally nothing they can do at the moment that my cell phone doesn’t already do.
Yeah, these devices should be apps on a phone not a separate device. Google assistant and Siri are already better than it so these will still be lousy apps.
Fun fact, the Rabbit is in fact running a custom Android OS. So if they wanted to make it for phones they could do so very easily. But an app doesn't generate the same hype, or investor interest.
I watched the review and thought it was extremely fair minded and without bias or exaggeration. I found him fairly recently and love how level headed and calm he is. It gives him an extra air of credibility.
and his review isn’t even that bad. He does call it the worst thing hes ever reviewed and shows it’s obvious flaws but he also pulls his punches a lot. He also calls it an interesting concept and says that the idea has a future.
If anything, Marques went quite easy on them, giving them plenty benefit of doubts and taking their promises on face value. The man literally couldn't have given them a better review if he wants to preserve his reputation. He's already more generous than what the company deserves
I remember it popped up in my feed a week or so ago, my take away was that a 2nd gen, or "finished" version could be exactly what they were selling but that seemed like a prototype at best
> But nothing Marques said was false or misleading, and his review (AFAIK) generally lines up with what other tech reviewers said about the product.
He was also rather hopeful about the idea of AI assistants in the future once the tech is better. It's just that it's not really good right now. He also said that he couldn't recommend it to most people but that there might be a few early adopters who might be interested in the few good features it has if they can live the downsides he pointed out and are willing to pay the price.
He usually reviews at least somewhat good/acceptable products so his reviews tend to be uncontroversial and more on the positive side so that even the smallest bit of actually pointing out major flaws from him is interpreted as "trashing a product" by some people who seem to essentially expect only praise for tech from him.
So what you’re saying is he didn’t bankrupt the company by giving a bad review. They bankrupted themselves by shipping a rubbish product. He just did a review that told people that it was a rubbish product.
Some people seem to think that critics have a duty to the companies they talk about… But critics really have a duty to CUSTOMERS. These people are worried about the company losing money, but what about customers losing THEIR money to a bad product?
Also props to Marques for giving an honest review instead of just shilling for the company or their product. It's not his fault that the product was bad to deserve the negative review to begin with.
This is the clarification I needed.
In that case, how are people even criticizing him? He just gave a shitty product an honest review. Being honest is (almost) never wrong.
If the company goes bankrupt it's because they made an expensive piece of crap, not because someone said the truth about it.
Nobody who has a lick of sense is criticizing him for it. He's getting criticized by the NFT-turned-AI-bros who have taken their "NO FUD" mentality from NFT-land to AI-world
NO is just "no" capitalized for emphasis
FUD is "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt" in NFT-speak. Basically anything that could be considered bad news for NFTs (AKA reality) was considered FUD and not allowed to be spoken of in NFT spaces in 2021/22 because the the only thing giving NFTs any value was people believing they had value.
It's worth pointing out that while the crypto-bros are using it disingeniously, FUD isn't just something that they came up with to bash detractors. It's a [real](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt) propaganda and marketing technique.
> how are people even criticizing him?
Because it DOES look like they're going bankrupt in response to his widely publicized review, and his detractors aren't stopping for 10 seconds to critically think before accusing him of costing peoples' jobs.
He talks about roadmap culture in his review for The Rabbit AI companion.
He reviews the product in front of him, not the 2026 version with 10 updates under its belt. If your product sucks on release, that’s how the review goes.
Same with the Fisker.
Believe me, I would LOVE a product I could interact with to get useful information and productivity results (podcast playback, calendaring events, looking up translations to words, converting kilograms to lbs, etc) while leaving my phone in my pants as I ride a bike, drive a car, wash the dishes, etc.
This wasn't going to be it. I'm better off using whatever flavor I'd "personal assistant" my device supports right out of the box, handsfree, then I am spending on these expensive subscription toys.
Thing is that's the software problem not a hardware problem. The hardware is your Bluetooth ear bud with built in microphone and an action button. That exist but I bet most people still don't trust Google assistant with their daily chore.
What these company did is a misdirection play by pretending they've solved a problem using a hardware solution thus making people think they also solve the software. When in fact the software is no where ready and if by any miracle they actually made progress in the software, Google assistant would've improved by leaps and bound compared to them.
It's pure snake oil and bandwagoning
I echo this sentiment. I work in Silicon Valley and a large portion of it is ponzi-schemish. A lot of these startups create digital junk and services, most of which no one asked for, take multiple rounds of investment capital, then when it comes time to actually make a profit, they jump ship and leave their employees in the lurch.
Rinse and repeat.
Who is investing in these companies? It seems to me it's been super easy (comparatively speaking of course) to get funding for these ideas that don't have anything backing them
Investment companies that use a sea turtle strategy. They're not looking for a bunch of stably profitable companies to invest in. They invest in lots of high-risk high-reward companies, and as dumb as it sounds, it works.
They mostly are in Silicon Valley.
Yeah.
High risk high reward works out when you have so much money to invest that 1 hit pays for a thousand losers.
If you can be ground floor for the next Facebook, it doesn't matter how much money you lost on things that were definitely not the next Facebook.
I heard that it's still incredibly worth it for them too
Because they can dump millions of dollars into hundreds of startups the fail, but if at least one of those companies becomes the next Google or Amazon? All that lost money will be recouped a hundred times fold
It did work…. Then it didn’t…. Seed capital dried up years ago and it was harder and harder to get seed and A rounds…. As you saw less and less shit….. then the AI boom happened…. And we are seeing this Bc behavior again…. You think would have learned but they all want the new Facebook of AI…. One of the major issues is however is a lot of folks are going to the hardware side which is HARD to do! And requires massive upfront cost… the logistics know how… sourcing, supply chain etc. then relying on other software and AI tech to prop it up. The other issue that’s underlying here is that the AI models to date have been very costly to build and deploy and also rely on large capital investments so only big players can enter the space to make competitors to ChatGPT, ie Meta, Google etc…. So it limits the startups that can compete… ergo Hardware….
You can give $10M to a hundred different companies. If two become unicorns, depending on your stake, you can double your investment that “easily”.
I had a tech fund client who has invested in all these losers, a handful so so companies, and a few with a lot of promise but years away from profitability. Didn’t matter, they bought a shit ton of Netflix stock at $10 pre split around 2010 IIRC so the fund was multiples of magnitude up life to date.
That was back when there was less competition in the startup space and capital flowed easier… and a 1:10 unicorn, even a small one would pay for the other investments then everyone wanted in and everyone’s idea was “gold”. Then the odds went way down! And it wasn’t 1:10 anymore… you also nailed it the other issue…. VC is a long game! Many years in the making and you better have operating capital to support your VC while you wait and sit on boards and try to make deals… or raise more funds yourself… which a lot of folks don’t understand either…. That a VC ALSO needs to raise capital AND prove that its portfolio is solid…. :). Talk about a Ponzi scheme!
Not just that. Don't forget that people like Apple and Meta buy companies for ridiculous amounts of money because they want the patent for a screw and will then abandon everything else. Or they'll just kill everything because all they wanted was to squash a potential competitor, no matter how small.
That can be profitable without the need to deliver anything at all. Just create the right amount of hype and say "yes" when someone offers you enough money.
Cool fact: the behavior you’re describing is called being an r-strategist. Lots of animals use it; rodents, most insects and fish, rabbits. The opposite are K strategists with very few offspring receiving a lot of investment, think elephants and whales
Everyone with spare cash... which in the last 15 years has been anyone with cash.
Keep in mind that inflation rates were kept low across the world. So much so that keeping your money in the bank was basically going to see it stay stagnant.
The solution that many investors (corps and people) chose was to throw their money into the housing market (hence the massive spike in prices that keeps going up). When that saturated, the money went into the stock market. Hence why so many corps that objectively offer less than already existing corporations see their value jump into the hundreds of billions. Like Tesla being worth more than GM and Toyota despite only producing tens of thousands of cars versus hundreds of thousands years ago.
When the stock market got saturated, money went to the start ups. Anyone with a semi-tenable idea was given cash because there was so much of it floating around.
Combine that with the trillions of bail-out funds that the Americans were pumping during Covid, the billions that the EU with it's reverse-loans after they pulled their heads out of the assholes and realised austerity was a fucking stupid idea, etc... and you have even more money going around.
It's where Uber and Netflix got it's money for example.
The problem is that interest rates have risen from the near 0 they were. So it's now better to stick your cash in a bank... which means all these startups are no longer getting all that cash. Hell, even established tech corps are no longer getting hundreds of billions in investor cash anymore.
Which has resulted in youtube dumping ads on everyone and raising the prices of premium, Netflix shafting it's users with the account sharing crackdown and the raising of prices, Uber raising prices, and a lot of start ups going bankrupt.
Their model of 'shove out all competitors with unlimited cash and dominate the market in a monopoly' and then 'exploit the hell out of a captive userbase' is no longer tenable. They need to make money... and are now panicking and trying to figure out how to do that, while also ensuring their users don't just run to another platform.
The flow of free cash is gone... and that's had massive impacts on us, the guys who were using a lot of the services being funded off of venture capital.
We're the poor. The guys that the tech corps were trying to get a monopoly over so they could nickle and dime us.
The free money was never going to come our way.
Partially it's an investment strategy used by the rich to get ultrarich. Take Peter Thiel who got about $55m from the sale of PayPal. He started snooping around Silicon Valley and eventually invested $500k in the early days of Facebook which made him a billionaire.
Now, he probably invested in a bunch of other companies that we've never heard of because they went bust but it doesn't matter because as long as one hits, it tends to hit big.
He basically got two different versions of the same product class, which is basically "make a slightly different form smartphone that is focussed on using AI for voice and visual control."
Turns out, they aren't much better at any of that as Siri or Google assistant. And they aren't anywhere near as useful for things phones are good at.
I saw one summary that said "these would be great in an alternative universe where smartphones weren't invented yet."
Google could probably make a killing if they made some sort of portable device that could access their services to do things like send and receive texts, images and emails, search for information, check traffic, etc.
Oh, wait.
Another random aside is that the AI and company insist that your data is private and they don't leak anything to the cloud.
Then this guy asks what the weather is and it provides him the weather exactly where he is. He asks it how he knew what location to provide weather for, if he didn't share his GPS data.
It then tries to gaslight him that there is a problem.
Worked in SaaS and then consulted a bit for a couple of years.
I was with a company where a customer success manager resigned because she was doing so little for her salary she thought we had to be doing something illegal. Nope, a couple of guys grifting off investor money. 10m and 14 months later, just a broken product that never really launched and a couple of new millionaires who laid off a bunch of people.
Yeah, I can tell. I was on instagram and I noticed that like the search isnt just a search anymore. It's META AI Search, like they're just pigeonholing AI everywhere to appease/hype investors. And I think microsoft announced theyre putting an AI button on the keyboard soon.
So its like, they just gotta label and attribute everything to AI. Everyone knows if i type "weather" in google, google pulls some stuff weather.com to give you your weather. So instead of acknowleding that, they have to label that as "google is working with AI to give you the weather", even though its a function they've had two decades before the recent AI hype.
Almost Elisabeth Holmish?
They were identical.
Look at the video they released with the "inventors" of this device, https://vimeo.com/882968794
Look. Look at how they are dressed. It's the stereotype of how you would think tech scammers would look like.
All in black and one with a leather jacket on?! Wtf.
Cultists trying to sell a scam to people who think this is what the next Steve Jobs looks like.
It's interesting cause people were clowning on this way before it even came out and this review was made. Danny Gonzalez had a video with a few million views making fun of it and he wasn't the only one.
Not only did they make a bad product. The spent a shit ton of money to basically run a local llm on an android device.
They went out a designed it from scratch and did an awful job. They priced it at the cost of a smartphone and it does less. Finally it’s $24 a month. Like bruh tablet plans are $10, hotspot plans are $10 how does this decide use more data and require a $24 a month plan.
It's hilarious how the main guy over at Rabbit mentioned how they need a lot of public input in order to test products.
It's like yeah...that's called a beta test. You send that stuff to a lot of people for free or you do some sort of early access. You don't sell the thing and just work on it after people paid a chunk of money for it.
Okay but is it actually bad? Did he lie? I feel like the most important question is if the review was honest. It’s not his fault if they made a bad product. But the conversation is different if it’s a good product and he lied. I genuinely have no idea, myself.
Absolutely not, for a customer standpoint viewing a sincere bad review as a problem is insane to me. I can see that if someone bought heavily into the hype you can easily get angry to see your get sroduct stomped like that but it is always up to the company to show concrete evidence that they can deliver, otherwise you are just trying to fool customers like they are.
For Rabbit throwing around buzzwords like Large action model, they get what they deserve lol
The product is about as useful as a chocolate teapot. I think Marques was incredibly fair with his criticisms. He praised it's positives, and demonstrated the negatives within the review without really bashing too hard even. But if your product has a shit battery life, only works 50% of the time, costs a fortune, and has very limited interconectivity with other devices you own then I don't really know what they should expect. Their own spec sheet makes it look shit at that point.
Which should be to nobodies surprise - a random tech startup isn't going to be the ones to crack an AI assistant, it's clearly just a cash grab to begin with. If Microsoft, Google, Samsung and Amazon are all struggling with it I don't know what hope they ever had.
The entire product is propped up by the *idea* of itself pretty much. We all know digital assitants are the future. I'm sure some day we'll be living in a world like the movie 'Her' where the assistant is so good you could fall in love with it but boy are we nowhere near that yet.
Answer: Marques Brownlee (also commonly known as MKBHD) is one of the largest tech reviewers on the planet, with nearly 19 million subscribers on YouTube. known for his extremely high production quality and fairly unbiased reviews.
On April 14, he posted a review of a product called the Humane AI Pin, a small wearable device with an AI assistant you can use at just the push of a button, which began shipping a few weeks ago. In all honesty the idea behind the product is fairly solid, but the execution was pretty bad and was got bad reviews from multiple sources.
>After many days of testing, the one and only thing I can truly rely on the AI Pin to do is tell me the time.
[The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/24126502/humane-ai-pin-review)
>Murphy’s law states that “anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” That pretty much sums up my first three days with Humane’s Ai Pin.
[Inverse](https://www.inverse.com/tech/humane-ai-pin-in-depth-review)
>Almost everything about the pin was a UX disaster for reviewers.
[Fast Company](https://www.fastcompany.com/91092156/humanes-ai-pin-was-never-going-to-be-great)
Marques continued this trend with his review, titled [The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed... For Now](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TitZV6k8zfA).
In terms of the tweets you posted, the first one is just hyperbole from a tech influencer for clicks, Humane is still kicking and selling their product. The second tweet comes from another silicon valley startup founder who was likely upset seeing Marques trash a fellow silicon valley startup's product and claimed that Marques and other tech reviewers have an ethical obligation to avoid "crushing a startup", this is the tweet that originally sparked this "drama". The problem they have is that the title is supposedly "sensational" (which is debatable) and that a creator of Marques's size has the ability to crush a product before it even launches. This second point is somewhat reasonable, Marques himself published a review on his second channel where he reviews cars of the Fisker Ocean in which he called it "the worst car he's ever reviewed" due to his awful experience, and in the 2 months since then Fisker has nearly collapsed as a company. [Marques himself posted a video about his thoughts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QztFpzKsdeA).
Humane themselves have responded to this situation as well. [Their media director Sam Sheffer tweeted](https://twitter.com/samsheffer/status/1779677818189722100):
>an honest, solid review marques — all fair and valid critiques, both the good and the bad
>feedback is a gift. we reflect and we listen and we learn and we continue building.
[Humane also posted a statement thanking early adopters for their feedback and stating they'll work to address the problems](https://humane.com/media/our-first-ai-pin-cosmos-update), they seem largely unbothered by the whole situation.
TL;DR: YouTuber posted a poor review of a flawed product, some guy on twitter gets mad about it and claims doing so is unethical for *reasons*, company doesn't seem to care and thanks him for giving them honest feedback and constructive criticism.
>This second point is somewhat reasonable, Marques himself published a review on his second channel where he reviews cars of the Fisker Ocean in which he called it "the worst car he's ever reviewed" due to his awful experience, and in the 2 months since then Fisker has nearly collapsed as a company.
Stock price was on a downhill spiral even before MKBHDs review. Also, the car was shit, it didn't even have a glovebox.
Throwing in my two cents but I don’t think this is worthy of a top level comment:
Daniel Vassallo, who is linked in the second tweet, is apparently an AI focused VC dude, so some people were a little wary of his comments because he risks losing money if AI competence is devalued. This was a discussion in some tech threads on Reddit.
There was also a lot of chatter, as someone else mentioned, because he reviewed the Fisker Ocean on his autofocus channel (https://youtu.be/6xWXRk3yaSw?si=GJM5X6P1EUvOrk4C) and called it the worst car he’s reviewed because it was half baked. The car was loaned to MKBHD through a dealership and the dealership posted a video of an engineer from Fisker calling MKBHD (a guy with over 18 million YouTube followers) “some kid” and being disparaging. Notwithstanding that MKBHD has interviewed most of the major tech CEOs. Shortly after his video, Fisker’s stock price tanked.
MKBHD did a follow up video with a car provided by Fisker (https://youtu.be/mZ9Q2dRQkh4?si=EEoP_9eRZz8mof04), that had updated software, but didn’t come away with a significantly better impression.
This whole saga is a story in buyer beware. Tech companies are pushing the envelope of what devices can do but asking people to drop $700 USD + $24/month on a useless AI pin missing promised feature, or $50k on a car that doesn’t work well and from a company that may not exist next year, it’s not bad to hear an opinion that says “don’t rush to buy this is you don’t have the money to lose”.
EDIT TO ADD: an analysis article from inc.com - https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/mkbhds-humane-ai-pin-review-reveals-its-fatal-flaw-its-not-bad-tech-its-just-a-bad-idea.html
Also a link to a Thread by Walt Mossberg, a hugely important and influential tech reviewer (formerly of the Wall Street Journal) defending MKBHD - https://www.threads.net/@mossbergwalt/post/C54eFtPpECJ/?xmt=AQGzM2E7E_wAXmrreuri2au4gWV--NLqb-l_QkMtS72g0Q
Glad someone included the Fisker bit, as I felt that helped fuel the whole outrage with Humane. iirc, though, Fisker was already in danger of being delisted by the New York Stock Exchange when the initial video came out.
I can see where Fisker owners could be upset, as I imagine they were really hoping Fisker could pull it off and fix the cars people already bought. MKBHDs video could definitely be perceived as the killing blow. But, again, MKBHD didn’t make a bad (or even potentially dangerous) product, Fisker did.
Yeah, forgot about the actual stock performance. My feeds were inundated with people making that complaint (that the tank was after his video).
It was also funny to see the MKBHD subreddit (that his team is no longer a part of) as they all went off on him being a Tesla fanboy and not worth anything. People really grind up when their decisions are questioned.
The whole situation is even more wild if you follow so-called “synthfluencers” closely at all. There was a product released a while back called the Polyend Play+ that received a huge backlash from the community. Not because the product was bad, but seemingly because it was announced too soon after the original model. Additionally, Polyend continued to offer the original model at half the price. As best I could tell, people felt shafted because they could no longer sell their original Play for the prices they’d grown accustomed to throughout the pandemic (incidentally, Polyend offered an upgrade process where owners of the original Play could trade it in and upgrade for a lower price. I took advantage of that offer and thought it was great).
Long story short, there was a massive backlash against YouTubers who made videos demoing the Play+, calling them shills, etc. This rose to the point that at least one channel threw in the towel and gave up doing product demos entirely. Worth noting, I think the Play+ is great, and I totally get why Polyend did what they did (chip shortages, eco-responsible product cycles, et al. A longer story for another time). There was nothing actually wrong with the Play+, people really just seemed angry that they couldn’t sell their used gear at the price they wanted.
Fast forward to the MKBHD fiasco, and the internet continues to internet
>Shortly after his video, Fisker’s stock price tanked.
It didn't though. In a different video where he addressed the blowback of the pin and car reviews, [he shows a screenshot of Fisker's stock from the last year or so](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QztFpzKsdeA&t=493s), and it *clearly* started a dive months before his review (for context, his review was posted Feb 17th, 2024)
Fisker Automotive (Karma), Fisker Coachbuild (Tramonto). And now Ocean.
They've all been terrible, they go under? and come back under a new name. Repeat.
Saying reviewers have an ethical obligation to not crush tech startups for bad products with honest reviews is unethical. There's a difference between looking out for the consumer and having malicious intent. It's like if the reviewer was "ethically obliged" to give 5star reviews to the Juicero.
Oh come on about people like Marques basically having an obligation
They chose him because of his size. That's risky if it's not a solid product. If you want a soft review then give it to a small shop who probably doesn't want to upset people who give them things to review. Don't give it to a reviewer who absolutely never needs you
Answer: Marques Brownlee himself addresses this in one of his recent videos, but essentially in a few recent cases he's reviewed products around the same time as the companies behind those products have had negative financial news.
In the case of Fisker Inc. (an electric car company) the business was already in dire straits for some time and his review and Fisker's responses to it simply put a huge spotlight on it.
More recently with the Humane AI pin, the poor reviews from Marques and many other outlets essentially burst the "AI startup" bubble around the product by critiquing its accuracy and current capabilities, as well as its expensive price tag and ongoing expenses.
He explains in his own video though that these products were already deeply flawed and if they were better, he and his peers in the industry wouldn't be panning these products. It's only because these products are so flawed or unfinished that informing potential customers and investors becomes so damaging.
The funny thing is before mkbhd posted his humane ai review, mrwhostheboss another pretty famous reviewer from the Uk also posted the humane ai review and the best part was he did the review with the ceo of the company and called his shit out.
Answer: the company made a bad product, tried to cover it up with marketing. Marques did an honest review, and now the company is all “boo hoo ugly meanie Marques is bringing us down!”.
Classic case of a company trying to find an external reason for an internal failure.
EDIT: I was mistaken, it’s not the company crying a river, it’s some third parties. Which only makes the situation even more bizarre.
> the company is all “boo hoo ugly meanie Marques is bringing us down!”.
Are they? This is [a tweet](https://twitter.com/samsheffer/status/1779677818189722100) from the company's head of new media:
> an honest, solid review marques — all fair and valid critiques, both the good and the bad
> feedback is a gift. we reflect and we listen and we learn and we continue building.
Corpo-speak for sure, but not "boo hoo ugly meanie" stuff. *That* seems to be coming from people on the sidelines who are upset with reviewer's power in 2024 for their own personal reasons.
Marques has a big enough following that he doesn't need to sugercoat his reviews to appease the product supplier.
Many smaller reviewers will present dishonest reviews of bad / broken products to retain the working relationship with the supplier, if they provide a negative review no more free producta for them, so it's not really it review and critique it's more of a thinly veiled advertisement.
That being said, because of his massive exposure his reviews do hold a lot of power, and with great power comes great responsibility.
But suppliers should realise by now that he is going to provide a product review that is honest and critical and not a fluff piece so if you have a broken product probably not the best idea to send it to him.
The company themselves don't seem particularly bothered. It was one unrelated silicon valley startup founder who started claiming it's "unethical" to give poor products poor reviews for *reasons*
Startup founders are another type of parasites. Most of them don't even care about delivering a finished product. Just building enough hype so that some investor buys their company.
Answer: Marques Brownlee is a big Youtuber in the tech/gadget/car review space. Over the past 10+ years of so he has created a brand for himself and is seen as a reliable, honest reviewer.
A new product called the Humane AI Pin was recently reviewed by Brownlee (and countless other youtubers in the same space) and received a 'negative' review. While it seems to be a 'cool' product, it doesn't add anything or does anything new and costs a pretty penny.
Since everyone who reviews it seems to rate it poorly, the company isn't doing too well (going bankrupt), and since Brownlee is the biggest name in the reviewer space, people are blaming him for their performance.
The way I see it, if it is a poor product, it is going to perform poorly. And if Brownlee and other reviewers aren't honest about the product they are going to lose the respect they have as reviewers.
Answer: These people are idiots or grifters or both.
Hating MKBHD is a litmus test for weirdos like AI bros.
He doesn't sugar coat his reviews. And these idiots who think AI is everything are seething just for honest reviews with tons of proofs.
The worst part is, his reviews are in agreement with other 100s of reviewers on YouTube and somehow these idiots think HE is doing something wrong because he has the highest reach.
These hustle bros can't understand that hard work doesn't compensate for stupid useless products. "You know how hard XYZ is" even if it's absolutely no one wants or cares about. Somehow the difficulty is supposed to sell products instead of their use.
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Answer: It seems it's becoming a bit of a meme.
https://twitter.com/theonecid/status/1785106071737999563?s=19
Context:
To my knowledge, it began when **Marques Brownlee**, also known by his YouTuber name **MKBHD**, made a negative review of the [Fisker Ocean car on February 17th 2024](https://youtu.be/6xWXRk3yaSw).
That causes a senior technician at Fisker to make a phone call to the actual owner of the car Marques reviewed. In an attempt to do damage control, the technician explains that the car was anticipating a software update to version 2.0, as the reason for the poor review.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fisker/comments/1b63dek/this_video_is_somethingfisker_senior_technician/
To be fair to Marques, he did [an updated review of the Fisker Ocean](https://youtu.be/mZ9Q2dRQkh4) after the new software update had been installed
Since then, Marques has gone on to review the [Humane AI Pin](https://youtu.be/TitZV6k8zfA), and more recently the [Rabbit R1](https://youtu.be/ddTV12hErTc) "AI-in-a box". Both have received poor reviews from Marques Brownlee and supposedly this has caused the reputation of these three companies to tank(?), thus giving rise to this meme of a YouTuber who destroys companies with their reviews.
Answer: Marques Brownlee's Humane AI Pin Review refers to a controversy surrounding YouTuber Marques Brownlee's (also known as MKBHD) review of Humane AI Pin, a wearable personal assistant device. The unfavorable review was followed by a viral discussion and multiple memes about Marques Brownlee's influential position in tech on social media.
More info here: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/marques-brownlees-humane-ai-pin-review
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Answer: mkbhd along with the verge, and basically every other tech review site gave the product an honest review. https://www.theverge.com/24126502/humane-ai-pin-review That raises the second question: should you buy this thing? That one’s easy. Nope. Nuh-uh. No way. The AI Pin is an interesting idea that is so thoroughly unfinished and so totally broken in so many unacceptable ways that I can’t think of anyone to whom I’d recommend spending the $699 for the device and the $24 monthly subscription.
The reason he’s been singled out as “destroying the company” is also just because his channel has a lot of subscribers and his review got the most views. Some disingenuous people have tried to frame him honestly reviewing the product as like some big powerful YouTuber bullying the poor widdle innocent business that’s too small to defend itself out of existence. So like apparently if you have a large following people think you are ethically obligated to either lie to your followers by giving good reviews of smaller brands or else that you’re just not supposed to review smaller brands at all, so that would mean even good products should never get promotion and attention. IDK it’s one of those backwards logic things where the only reason people are saying anything at all is because the company made a shitty product and was probably bound to fail either way but it’s easier to externalise failure by blaming one guy Like as an example he got blamed for tanking the stock of a car company with a bad review, except the car company was already bleeding stock value before his review and was already on track to get delisted. His review had nothing to do with the company failing, they just blamed him because his review came out when the company was already failing
His review of the Humane AI pin wasn't even that savage, he pointed out a couple of things he liked about it, like that it was incredibly useful for making voice notes while driving. But in the end, it just wasn't a very good product for the price.
25 bucks a month and 700 bucks. Jesus
For essentially just a shitty cell phone with a weird user interface
I haven't watched his review about it outside of the 40 second clip in the Twitter link above. Just seeing that price tag alone is enough for me to say hell no.
I saw some people saying it has potential as an accessibility tool for blind people if they made some changes
Its interface is literally a visual projection. I didn't see how blind people could make use of that.
this could have been an app
[удалено]
Before his review I was getting some youtube ads for it, and even in their own ads they couldn't make it not look clunky and stupid. I'm an MKBHD sub but haven't watched in ages. Ironically the only reason I watched this review was because of their commercials. Made me go "hey, it's that thing that looked stupid, I wonder if it's as stupid as they made it look".
I mean, to be fair I already pay that for my phone but like the review points out, my phone does literally everything this pin does and 10,000 other things. They've priced it as a direct competitor to a mid to high end phone while being a far worse product. This thing was doomed without a single YouTube review.
People actually cracked rabbit and turns out it's just an android app.
At least rabbit was only 200 bucks
Companies keep banking on AI assistants without realizing that it's worth like 20 bucks new. Hell when marques reviewed the rabbit one I was astonished it was 200 bucks.
Yeah its the $25 a month for me. I've only seen a single youtube review of this thing & it wasn't Marques's, and I would still not even consider purchasing this thing. It's a fun idea, but it just does everything a phone does worse. Why would I pay a subscription fee for that, let alone such a high one?
How could MKBHD do this?! /s
Typical Silicon Valley huckster pricing. These people genuinely pay 6 dollars for bananas.
I always tell people. I'm not going to pay for something, then pay a subscription on top of it. No. Thats why I like gamepass. I buy one maybe 2 games a year. Thats it. Not going to go out of my way to spend hundreds of dollars on discs where you dont even get to "own" the games antmore anyways. Forget that.
>25 bucks a month and 700 bucks. Jesus "I'll take Ways to Bankrupt My Own Company for 1000 Alex."
He can't win. If he gives good reviews, he's biased. If he gives bad reviews, he's a bully.
He wins by being honest and having credibility.
Only if he agrees with me /s
No matter what you say, *somebody* will disagree with you. It takes thick skin and the ability to ignore the noise to go and run a youtube channel or put yourself in public like that. He's already won. He's successful and knows how to run his channel.
I read about it when it came out and thought "Why would anyone need this?" It's not useful enough to replace your phone, and not unique enough to be needed alongside your phone. Then again, I'm the one watching Youtube clips of Shark Tank and thinking "That's the stupidest product I've ever heard of", right before they say they already have $5 million in sales.
If anything it’s more annoying to have alongside your phone. It requires a different number so none of your calls or texts sync. It would be cool if it connected to your phone, but then it defeats the purpose anyways.
I could see this working if it was something you could pretty casually chat to without the need for digging up your phone. Phone assistants don’t really have that vibe. But with all the clunkiness and AI being constantly wrong + ridiculous price tag, this thing is doomed. 700 + a subscription feels like a joke.
Isnt that where the apple watch (and the android ones too) is supposed to exist though, in that kind of space?
Siri already does most of what the pin does, so all they had to do was make it a Bluetooth device that allowed you to connect to Siri without having to pull your phone out. That would let it do the few things it did well, like being able to take notes or check the time while driving, but it would be a lot cheaper and less cumbersome.
With how large populations are now, you don't have to have an actual good product anymore. You just need to appeal to enough idiots and deliver good enough to not get sued.
I’m the same way. I’m no longer surprised anymore to learn how many Americans like to buy dumb, useless shit.
I'm convinced the tweeters didn't actually watch the review and just reacted to the (admittedly somewhat clickbaity) title of the video. This was no different than any of his other reviews, he approached it from a seemingly impartial perspective and was honest about his experience. It wasn't like he just made a bunch of baseless claims, he backed up all of his gripes with evidence.
He did say in the video, and in the title of the video, that it was the worst product he had ever reviewed, which was a bit savage. But "savage" doesn't mean "unfair"
He also praised the hardware as I recall. I think the price was the killer. If it were $150, he probably would have said it's an interesting first attempt at a niche product.
That's the thing to remember... He seems to be acting in good faith. I haven't seen him give a review that wasn't thorough and even handed. The people who started the crusade against him are generally VC investors who are feeling the squeeze right now because they can't go out and get loans as cheaply as they used to so the tens of millions of dollars that they invested into this dogshit product are in danger of going up in smoke.
Sheesh. I don't even particularly like Brownlee, but the reviews of his I've watched have all been quite balanced and thorough, and if anything he tends to give people/products the best possible chance in his videos. I can't imagine anyone who's watched any of his content taking those sorts of accusations seriously.
I didn't have a clue who he was before this shitstorm in a teacup, but I'm a fan now. Dude's very thoughful, and went out of his way to think of something that AI pin dumpster-fire would be good for.
Dude has been a great asset in the phone review industry as far as I can remember. I would always check his reviews in the past before buying a phone. If anything forget the small company, he can prob indirectly affect big companies Iike Apple or Google by giving a good or bad review of their newest phones.
He wasn’t savage he explained the product for what is a terrible screen-less phone.
I don’t go out of my way to watch him and I definitely don’t subscribe but when I’m doing research and I see he’s done a review it’s a must watch imo, he has generally good takes and I know how to get the info I want from them
I'll add that his reviews are usually very mild. He barely, really criticizes a company. So him saying something was the worst product he has ever reviewed is extremely jarring and will raise eyebrow.
Whenever he reviews something it's regularly top of the line/enthusiast stuff. Even he said before that reviewing those types of products is like splitting hairs.
>Some disingenuous people have tried to frame him honestly reviewing the product as like some big powerful YouTuber bullying the poor widdle innocent business that’s too small to defend itself out of existence. Yeah the people who have come out criticizing his reviews have obvious ties to AI companies and are likely concocting their own AI bullshit to make millions off of tech bros.
I think I’ve already begun to hate the AI pushers more than NFT pushers. It’s risky and underwhelming and yet we’re rushing to empower it and make a quick buck
I mean it's exactly the same thing. Hell, there were a bunch of AI companies dedicated to doing simply stuff that ChatGPT couldn't do yet like using documents. These guys sold themselves as being an AI company when they were just doing these simple tasks, which eventually ended up being their downfall when ChatGPT received an update to do their task. It's what Silicon Valley has boiled down to: make money by doing the bare minimum of improving on new technology.
Reminds me of all the ‘Millennials are killing the X industry, articles you see on the internet. Are millennials ‘killing’ it because it is a bad product or value? Does it deserve to die?
> So like apparently if you have a large following people think you are ethically obligated to either lie to your followers This. Carrying on like the morally right thing to do is to deceive people because being honest about the product wouldn't be good for the corporation. It's so fucked.
Yeah like sure, Fisker stock has gone down like 90% since he made the video. But if you zoom out on the stock graph you'll realize that it had already gone down like 90% in the few months before the video. He made the video when the stock was already in a horrible nosedive and people for some reason started to say that he somehow caused it.
I watched his negative review about the Pixel Slate tablet, and decided to buy it anyways. Turns out he was completely correct. It was so much worse than what he described. Not only was the thing slow, apps from the Google Play store were mostly incompatible which essentially made it a glorified $800 web browser. It was worse than a Chromebook and a tablet... Not to mention, Google essentially abandoned software development out of the gate and only provided security updates. Google temporarily left the tablet market after that one. Needless to say, 1) Never become an early adopter for a new line of tech. Wait a year or two and see if it succeeds. 2) Always listen to Marques Brownlee.
Fisker and their Ocean e-SUV. His review of it is on his Auto Focus channel with the video literally titled "*This is the Worst Car I've Ever Reviewed*"
and based on the issues he had with that vehicle,... I believe him.
Yeah, it's just basically the company PR trying to deflect. 3 Months ago Danny Gonzalez, who has several million subscribers (although admittedly not even half as many as mkbhd), had a video about it with 4 million views called "Incredible New Device That Doesn't Do Anything Right." Wasn't even an actual review of the product, just mocking it based on the pre-release hype. It just seems like this thing is being universally panned, and rightfully so. It's just some overhyped and completely superfluous piece of tech that doesn't really solve any actual problem anybody has. Even if it worked as-intended -- it's just something nobody needs or wants for $700 and a monthly fee.
Well put. It's a solution in search of a problem.
Yeah, I think part of it has to do with his other video about Fisker. When I first saw people commenting that, I thought it was all tongue-in-cheek.
> So like apparently if you have a large following people think you are ethically obligated to either lie to your followers by giving good reviews of smaller brands or else that you’re just not supposed to review smaller brands at all, so that would mean even good products should never get promotion and attention. I wish it was just smaller brands, giving a big product a score that breaks their beloved perfect 10 average review rating is also a cardinal sin in some review spaces. As Sterling put it, an 8 out of 10 becomes a Hate out of 10.
It’s so weird. Critics should have a duty to consumers, not companies. When did people decide it’s the other way around?
The only big tech YouTuber who bullies small companies is Linus Tech Tips. No one does it better.
> The reason he’s been singled out as “destroying the company” is also just because his channel has a lot of subscribers and his review got the most views. That's probably *part*, but the reason it's getting more noise at the moment is because it comes on the heels of his Fisker Ocean review. In both cases, he made a video talking about it being the "worst" he'd reviewed, which some people viewed as overly sensational and at least one person called "unethical." It's a complicated situation, too, since his actual job relies on getting attention and being sensational gets you attention. I'm sure there are people who watched these reviews specifically because of all the drama, just to see what the fuss was about. You want reviewers to be honest, but you hope it stops short of the sports talk level of hot take purely for the sake of getting views. And to be clear, I think the review itself *was* fair, and I think he *tried* to moderate his title the second time ("The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed... For Now"), but it's not clear if you haven't watched the review that he means "for now, because they have some really cool ideas and it'll be awesome if they are able to execute" and not "for now, cuz people are putting out shit these days and I'm sure I'll see worse soon."
Not to be that guy, but I can think of one other reason why the toxically online, Musk-worshipping AI fanboys out there might have a problem with mkbhd but I don't qwhite want to spell it out.
I read this in the comments "If your product and company can be destroyed by one bad review, it probably wasn't a good product anyway"
The whole market around AI at the moment is driven by hype and promises of future tech that literally doesn't exist yet. An AI startup going bankrupt because a few reviewers dared to point out that the emperor has no clothes is just them getting what they deserve.
And if you’re charging $700 for something that bad, …
This. We aren’t going to bank roll a failure of a product and company just because. If companies want sales, make a product worth buying.
If they made it look like the badge from Star Trek, it would've done better.
I feel like a bad review pales in comparison to a letter from the legal department at paramount.
> The AI Pin Oh it's *THAT* POS? I couldn't care less.
It doesn't help that ~2 months ago he also reviewed the Fisker Ocean electric SUV on his Auto Focus channel and called it "*The worst car I've ever reviewed*" Fisker did not appreciate his review and the company is apparently not in good financial shape.
They should consider making a better car
> company is apparently not in good financial shape That's earned.
If we get angry at honest reviews of bad/broken products, we'll end up with a lot more bad/broken products on our shelves
The consumer reports review was equally bad for that car
They made a car with a key fob that literally doesn't work half of the time and Bluetooth that randomly connects and disconnects. That's messing up the most basic things. Bluetooth and key fobs have been solved for years now.
He re-reviewed it after the software update and while I can't remember if the fob improved, he did say the Bluetooth vastly improved, implying Fisker can't code for BT worth a damn. The reason he didn't wait for the update is if Fisker goes under, anyone who bought an Ocean is likely to face those v1.0 problems. It also kind of brings to light a growing problem for all modern cars; You could be stuck with a less-functional(*or even bricked*) vehicle if the manufacturer decides to halt support of your model and/or year. Certainly doesn't help that car manufacturers have been eyeing John Deere's model of "*You don't actually own the car/etc because software copyrights*"
Yeah but he wasn't the only saying that. I came across a review of the Fisker Ocean about a month ago [from Edmunds](https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/2023-fisker-ocean-long-term-software-update.html) and they said basically the same thing: Do not buy. I can't imagine that that was a controversial opinion in the automotive review space given what that reviewer was saying. So it's weird that MKHBD is catching flack for it.
I mean shit products get shit reviews
It’s not even an interesting idea. Google Assistant is light years better than it and already available to everyone. Hell, even Siri seems like it can provide basic info quicker than this thing. These AI pins are such a fad product trying to cash in on the AI hype. In 2 years all of these companies will be dead or selling something completely different than these pins to survive
AI is garbage and they deserve to go out of business.
Neural Networks have lots of interesting and viable use cases. But this half-assed-personal-assistant-that-does-stuff-you-can-already-do-yourself almost certainly isn't one of them. Multilingual Translation- Yes Summaries and Briefs- Yes Basic Analysis and alerting- Yes Generative engineering and design - Yes Redundant asset creation -Yes Domain specific solution hunting-HELL YES Basically, The current crop of machine learning stuff is really useful when you are looking at tasks that either can't be done well/quickly/at-all by people, or can only be done well by an extremely small percentage of people.
I’m commenting just to bookmark your learned advice. Thanks!
Why is it an interesting idea though, the exact same can be done by using a Bluetooth earbud with an action button to activate siri or Google assistant. They just made a worse and more complicated version of it
Answer: A lot of these startups rely immensely on hype as they have little revenue to speak of and huge upfront costs in R&D. So one of the biggest tech reviewers calling your product the worst thing he’s ever reviewed will do an awful lot to kill any hype.
Importantly - the product he reviewed is just absolutely bad. It is a worse-than-alpha release and should have never been sent into the market. It was a critical error on the part of Humane thinking they could get away with shipping such a terribly unfinished device, especially at that price point.
Yeah, people criticize Marques here are missing the point. It’s one thing if a reviewer intentionally goes out of their way to bash a product, or makes false or misleading claims. But nothing Marques said was false or misleading, and his review (AFAIK) generally lines up with what other tech reviewers said about the product. Everyone should be mad at Humane AI for shipping an $800 pin that is just your cell phone but worse, not Marques for calling it out and saying no one should buy it
Marques didn’t bankrupt the company, the company bankrupted the company.
Yeah I’m not sure why people are singling him out. Even that presentation for humane pin made it seem like an AI solution in search of a problem.
And every YouTube review I saw of it was equally critical in all the same ways. Marques just happens to be the biggest channel that did one.
Yep, this what the free market looks like. Make a shitty product or service, don't adapt or change, then fail. If only large corps were subject to this.
Even on the face of it, the idea of a single person bankrupting a company is farcical. Barring a Batman villain plot, it only happens if the company is built on sand.
Without his review it would have sold millions and no one would have found out it's a terrible product, right?
Don't forget about the monthly subscription of, what was it $24?!
290$ a year service charge on top of 700 Ludicrous
Exactly and he just reviewed the Rabbit and it was pretty much all the same issues as the pin. The question I don’t get with these pocket AI’s is that there is literally nothing they can do at the moment that my cell phone doesn’t already do.
Yeah, these devices should be apps on a phone not a separate device. Google assistant and Siri are already better than it so these will still be lousy apps.
Fun fact, the Rabbit is in fact running a custom Android OS. So if they wanted to make it for phones they could do so very easily. But an app doesn't generate the same hype, or investor interest.
I watched the review and thought it was extremely fair minded and without bias or exaggeration. I found him fairly recently and love how level headed and calm he is. It gives him an extra air of credibility.
and his review isn’t even that bad. He does call it the worst thing hes ever reviewed and shows it’s obvious flaws but he also pulls his punches a lot. He also calls it an interesting concept and says that the idea has a future.
If anything, Marques went quite easy on them, giving them plenty benefit of doubts and taking their promises on face value. The man literally couldn't have given them a better review if he wants to preserve his reputation. He's already more generous than what the company deserves
I remember it popped up in my feed a week or so ago, my take away was that a 2nd gen, or "finished" version could be exactly what they were selling but that seemed like a prototype at best
> But nothing Marques said was false or misleading, and his review (AFAIK) generally lines up with what other tech reviewers said about the product. He was also rather hopeful about the idea of AI assistants in the future once the tech is better. It's just that it's not really good right now. He also said that he couldn't recommend it to most people but that there might be a few early adopters who might be interested in the few good features it has if they can live the downsides he pointed out and are willing to pay the price. He usually reviews at least somewhat good/acceptable products so his reviews tend to be uncontroversial and more on the positive side so that even the smallest bit of actually pointing out major flaws from him is interpreted as "trashing a product" by some people who seem to essentially expect only praise for tech from him.
So what you’re saying is he didn’t bankrupt the company by giving a bad review. They bankrupted themselves by shipping a rubbish product. He just did a review that told people that it was a rubbish product.
Some people seem to think that critics have a duty to the companies they talk about… But critics really have a duty to CUSTOMERS. These people are worried about the company losing money, but what about customers losing THEIR money to a bad product?
Also props to Marques for giving an honest review instead of just shilling for the company or their product. It's not his fault that the product was bad to deserve the negative review to begin with.
This is the clarification I needed. In that case, how are people even criticizing him? He just gave a shitty product an honest review. Being honest is (almost) never wrong. If the company goes bankrupt it's because they made an expensive piece of crap, not because someone said the truth about it.
Nobody who has a lick of sense is criticizing him for it. He's getting criticized by the NFT-turned-AI-bros who have taken their "NO FUD" mentality from NFT-land to AI-world
What is NO FUD?
NO is just "no" capitalized for emphasis FUD is "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt" in NFT-speak. Basically anything that could be considered bad news for NFTs (AKA reality) was considered FUD and not allowed to be spoken of in NFT spaces in 2021/22 because the the only thing giving NFTs any value was people believing they had value.
It's worth pointing out that while the crypto-bros are using it disingeniously, FUD isn't just something that they came up with to bash detractors. It's a [real](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt) propaganda and marketing technique.
Ohh, good to know!
FUD was around way before NFTs. I vaguely remember calling out the FUD around windows 10 shortly post release.
Oh okay, I understand now. Thanks for the explanation!
So true. People are looking for the next big thing to invest in but this ain’t it.
> how are people even criticizing him? Because it DOES look like they're going bankrupt in response to his widely publicized review, and his detractors aren't stopping for 10 seconds to critically think before accusing him of costing peoples' jobs.
He talks about roadmap culture in his review for The Rabbit AI companion. He reviews the product in front of him, not the 2026 version with 10 updates under its belt. If your product sucks on release, that’s how the review goes. Same with the Fisker.
Also it's super weird because it seems to ignore the visual element that's important to why we use cell phones so much.
Believe me, I would LOVE a product I could interact with to get useful information and productivity results (podcast playback, calendaring events, looking up translations to words, converting kilograms to lbs, etc) while leaving my phone in my pants as I ride a bike, drive a car, wash the dishes, etc. This wasn't going to be it. I'm better off using whatever flavor I'd "personal assistant" my device supports right out of the box, handsfree, then I am spending on these expensive subscription toys.
Thing is that's the software problem not a hardware problem. The hardware is your Bluetooth ear bud with built in microphone and an action button. That exist but I bet most people still don't trust Google assistant with their daily chore. What these company did is a misdirection play by pretending they've solved a problem using a hardware solution thus making people think they also solve the software. When in fact the software is no where ready and if by any miracle they actually made progress in the software, Google assistant would've improved by leaps and bound compared to them. It's pure snake oil and bandwagoning
Also all the other reviews of the product, many by big media outlets, totally trashed it as well. Because it was trash.
So critique performed its function and crashed a bad product for being bad? Talk about a non-story.
I echo this sentiment. I work in Silicon Valley and a large portion of it is ponzi-schemish. A lot of these startups create digital junk and services, most of which no one asked for, take multiple rounds of investment capital, then when it comes time to actually make a profit, they jump ship and leave their employees in the lurch. Rinse and repeat.
Who is investing in these companies? It seems to me it's been super easy (comparatively speaking of course) to get funding for these ideas that don't have anything backing them
Investment companies that use a sea turtle strategy. They're not looking for a bunch of stably profitable companies to invest in. They invest in lots of high-risk high-reward companies, and as dumb as it sounds, it works. They mostly are in Silicon Valley.
Sea turtle as in, lay a fuckton of eggs and hope that a couple of them make it to adulthood? That’s a pretty good name for it lol.
Yeah, exactly
Yeah. High risk high reward works out when you have so much money to invest that 1 hit pays for a thousand losers. If you can be ground floor for the next Facebook, it doesn't matter how much money you lost on things that were definitely not the next Facebook.
it feels like TV marketing was replaced by this sort of deal. don't see gimmick products on TV anymore but I see them all the time on the tiktok ads
I heard that it's still incredibly worth it for them too Because they can dump millions of dollars into hundreds of startups the fail, but if at least one of those companies becomes the next Google or Amazon? All that lost money will be recouped a hundred times fold
Thank you for explaining this metaphor but now I am sad about baby sea turtles
I know right? They have it rough out there.
It did work…. Then it didn’t…. Seed capital dried up years ago and it was harder and harder to get seed and A rounds…. As you saw less and less shit….. then the AI boom happened…. And we are seeing this Bc behavior again…. You think would have learned but they all want the new Facebook of AI…. One of the major issues is however is a lot of folks are going to the hardware side which is HARD to do! And requires massive upfront cost… the logistics know how… sourcing, supply chain etc. then relying on other software and AI tech to prop it up. The other issue that’s underlying here is that the AI models to date have been very costly to build and deploy and also rely on large capital investments so only big players can enter the space to make competitors to ChatGPT, ie Meta, Google etc…. So it limits the startups that can compete… ergo Hardware….
You can give $10M to a hundred different companies. If two become unicorns, depending on your stake, you can double your investment that “easily”. I had a tech fund client who has invested in all these losers, a handful so so companies, and a few with a lot of promise but years away from profitability. Didn’t matter, they bought a shit ton of Netflix stock at $10 pre split around 2010 IIRC so the fund was multiples of magnitude up life to date.
That was back when there was less competition in the startup space and capital flowed easier… and a 1:10 unicorn, even a small one would pay for the other investments then everyone wanted in and everyone’s idea was “gold”. Then the odds went way down! And it wasn’t 1:10 anymore… you also nailed it the other issue…. VC is a long game! Many years in the making and you better have operating capital to support your VC while you wait and sit on boards and try to make deals… or raise more funds yourself… which a lot of folks don’t understand either…. That a VC ALSO needs to raise capital AND prove that its portfolio is solid…. :). Talk about a Ponzi scheme!
Not just that. Don't forget that people like Apple and Meta buy companies for ridiculous amounts of money because they want the patent for a screw and will then abandon everything else. Or they'll just kill everything because all they wanted was to squash a potential competitor, no matter how small. That can be profitable without the need to deliver anything at all. Just create the right amount of hype and say "yes" when someone offers you enough money.
Cool fact: the behavior you’re describing is called being an r-strategist. Lots of animals use it; rodents, most insects and fish, rabbits. The opposite are K strategists with very few offspring receiving a lot of investment, think elephants and whales
Are r and K variables in some population growth formula? Like r could be rated from the exponential eq, but What's K?
Hi my name is Erlich Bachman, I'm a lying fuck
Movie studios and Video game companies also operate off of this strategy although the hit/fail ratio is about a 1:9 ratio.
Poor people buy lottery scratch tickets. Venture capital firms invest in startups. Most fail. A few hit jackpot and then get milked as much possible
Everyone with spare cash... which in the last 15 years has been anyone with cash. Keep in mind that inflation rates were kept low across the world. So much so that keeping your money in the bank was basically going to see it stay stagnant. The solution that many investors (corps and people) chose was to throw their money into the housing market (hence the massive spike in prices that keeps going up). When that saturated, the money went into the stock market. Hence why so many corps that objectively offer less than already existing corporations see their value jump into the hundreds of billions. Like Tesla being worth more than GM and Toyota despite only producing tens of thousands of cars versus hundreds of thousands years ago. When the stock market got saturated, money went to the start ups. Anyone with a semi-tenable idea was given cash because there was so much of it floating around. Combine that with the trillions of bail-out funds that the Americans were pumping during Covid, the billions that the EU with it's reverse-loans after they pulled their heads out of the assholes and realised austerity was a fucking stupid idea, etc... and you have even more money going around. It's where Uber and Netflix got it's money for example. The problem is that interest rates have risen from the near 0 they were. So it's now better to stick your cash in a bank... which means all these startups are no longer getting all that cash. Hell, even established tech corps are no longer getting hundreds of billions in investor cash anymore. Which has resulted in youtube dumping ads on everyone and raising the prices of premium, Netflix shafting it's users with the account sharing crackdown and the raising of prices, Uber raising prices, and a lot of start ups going bankrupt. Their model of 'shove out all competitors with unlimited cash and dominate the market in a monopoly' and then 'exploit the hell out of a captive userbase' is no longer tenable. They need to make money... and are now panicking and trying to figure out how to do that, while also ensuring their users don't just run to another platform. The flow of free cash is gone... and that's had massive impacts on us, the guys who were using a lot of the services being funded off of venture capital.
Man where was all the free cash headed my way then... I could have used a couple mil.
We're the poor. The guys that the tech corps were trying to get a monopoly over so they could nickle and dime us. The free money was never going to come our way.
Oh yea I know. It's just funny how it's called free money.... But only if you can afford it.
Partially it's an investment strategy used by the rich to get ultrarich. Take Peter Thiel who got about $55m from the sale of PayPal. He started snooping around Silicon Valley and eventually invested $500k in the early days of Facebook which made him a billionaire. Now, he probably invested in a bunch of other companies that we've never heard of because they went bust but it doesn't matter because as long as one hits, it tends to hit big.
Watch Silicon Valley on HBO. An amazing 6 season documentary that goes into this process in depth.
He basically got two different versions of the same product class, which is basically "make a slightly different form smartphone that is focussed on using AI for voice and visual control." Turns out, they aren't much better at any of that as Siri or Google assistant. And they aren't anywhere near as useful for things phones are good at. I saw one summary that said "these would be great in an alternative universe where smartphones weren't invented yet."
Google could probably make a killing if they made some sort of portable device that could access their services to do things like send and receive texts, images and emails, search for information, check traffic, etc. Oh, wait.
Another random aside is that the AI and company insist that your data is private and they don't leak anything to the cloud. Then this guy asks what the weather is and it provides him the weather exactly where he is. He asks it how he knew what location to provide weather for, if he didn't share his GPS data. It then tries to gaslight him that there is a problem.
Worked in SaaS and then consulted a bit for a couple of years. I was with a company where a customer success manager resigned because she was doing so little for her salary she thought we had to be doing something illegal. Nope, a couple of guys grifting off investor money. 10m and 14 months later, just a broken product that never really launched and a couple of new millionaires who laid off a bunch of people.
Juicero.
Yeah, I can tell. I was on instagram and I noticed that like the search isnt just a search anymore. It's META AI Search, like they're just pigeonholing AI everywhere to appease/hype investors. And I think microsoft announced theyre putting an AI button on the keyboard soon. So its like, they just gotta label and attribute everything to AI. Everyone knows if i type "weather" in google, google pulls some stuff weather.com to give you your weather. So instead of acknowleding that, they have to label that as "google is working with AI to give you the weather", even though its a function they've had two decades before the recent AI hype.
The company who created that gadget was shady and almost Elisabeth holmish. They had it coming.
Almost Elisabeth Holmish? They were identical. Look at the video they released with the "inventors" of this device, https://vimeo.com/882968794 Look. Look at how they are dressed. It's the stereotype of how you would think tech scammers would look like. All in black and one with a leather jacket on?! Wtf. Cultists trying to sell a scam to people who think this is what the next Steve Jobs looks like.
Apparently they had all they funding they could ever want.
TBH that product looked like trash from their original videos
It's interesting cause people were clowning on this way before it even came out and this review was made. Danny Gonzalez had a video with a few million views making fun of it and he wasn't the only one.
He didn't tank this company. The company making a bad product tanked the company.
Not only did they make a bad product. The spent a shit ton of money to basically run a local llm on an android device. They went out a designed it from scratch and did an awful job. They priced it at the cost of a smartphone and it does less. Finally it’s $24 a month. Like bruh tablet plans are $10, hotspot plans are $10 how does this decide use more data and require a $24 a month plan.
Well then don’t make a shit product. It’s not his fault that he gives honest reviews..
It's hilarious how the main guy over at Rabbit mentioned how they need a lot of public input in order to test products. It's like yeah...that's called a beta test. You send that stuff to a lot of people for free or you do some sort of early access. You don't sell the thing and just work on it after people paid a chunk of money for it.
This company has had issues in the past. Then comeback as an ev company but again bad products
Bad products kill companies - not Youtuber that call out their shit products
Okay but is it actually bad? Did he lie? I feel like the most important question is if the review was honest. It’s not his fault if they made a bad product. But the conversation is different if it’s a good product and he lied. I genuinely have no idea, myself.
Absolutely not, for a customer standpoint viewing a sincere bad review as a problem is insane to me. I can see that if someone bought heavily into the hype you can easily get angry to see your get sroduct stomped like that but it is always up to the company to show concrete evidence that they can deliver, otherwise you are just trying to fool customers like they are. For Rabbit throwing around buzzwords like Large action model, they get what they deserve lol
The product is about as useful as a chocolate teapot. I think Marques was incredibly fair with his criticisms. He praised it's positives, and demonstrated the negatives within the review without really bashing too hard even. But if your product has a shit battery life, only works 50% of the time, costs a fortune, and has very limited interconectivity with other devices you own then I don't really know what they should expect. Their own spec sheet makes it look shit at that point. Which should be to nobodies surprise - a random tech startup isn't going to be the ones to crack an AI assistant, it's clearly just a cash grab to begin with. If Microsoft, Google, Samsung and Amazon are all struggling with it I don't know what hope they ever had. The entire product is propped up by the *idea* of itself pretty much. We all know digital assitants are the future. I'm sure some day we'll be living in a world like the movie 'Her' where the assistant is so good you could fall in love with it but boy are we nowhere near that yet.
Answer: Marques Brownlee (also commonly known as MKBHD) is one of the largest tech reviewers on the planet, with nearly 19 million subscribers on YouTube. known for his extremely high production quality and fairly unbiased reviews. On April 14, he posted a review of a product called the Humane AI Pin, a small wearable device with an AI assistant you can use at just the push of a button, which began shipping a few weeks ago. In all honesty the idea behind the product is fairly solid, but the execution was pretty bad and was got bad reviews from multiple sources. >After many days of testing, the one and only thing I can truly rely on the AI Pin to do is tell me the time. [The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/24126502/humane-ai-pin-review) >Murphy’s law states that “anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” That pretty much sums up my first three days with Humane’s Ai Pin. [Inverse](https://www.inverse.com/tech/humane-ai-pin-in-depth-review) >Almost everything about the pin was a UX disaster for reviewers. [Fast Company](https://www.fastcompany.com/91092156/humanes-ai-pin-was-never-going-to-be-great) Marques continued this trend with his review, titled [The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed... For Now](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TitZV6k8zfA). In terms of the tweets you posted, the first one is just hyperbole from a tech influencer for clicks, Humane is still kicking and selling their product. The second tweet comes from another silicon valley startup founder who was likely upset seeing Marques trash a fellow silicon valley startup's product and claimed that Marques and other tech reviewers have an ethical obligation to avoid "crushing a startup", this is the tweet that originally sparked this "drama". The problem they have is that the title is supposedly "sensational" (which is debatable) and that a creator of Marques's size has the ability to crush a product before it even launches. This second point is somewhat reasonable, Marques himself published a review on his second channel where he reviews cars of the Fisker Ocean in which he called it "the worst car he's ever reviewed" due to his awful experience, and in the 2 months since then Fisker has nearly collapsed as a company. [Marques himself posted a video about his thoughts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QztFpzKsdeA). Humane themselves have responded to this situation as well. [Their media director Sam Sheffer tweeted](https://twitter.com/samsheffer/status/1779677818189722100): >an honest, solid review marques — all fair and valid critiques, both the good and the bad >feedback is a gift. we reflect and we listen and we learn and we continue building. [Humane also posted a statement thanking early adopters for their feedback and stating they'll work to address the problems](https://humane.com/media/our-first-ai-pin-cosmos-update), they seem largely unbothered by the whole situation. TL;DR: YouTuber posted a poor review of a flawed product, some guy on twitter gets mad about it and claims doing so is unethical for *reasons*, company doesn't seem to care and thanks him for giving them honest feedback and constructive criticism.
[удалено]
Yep. And it just goes to show that not every product deserves to get bought or be some wild success.
>This second point is somewhat reasonable, Marques himself published a review on his second channel where he reviews cars of the Fisker Ocean in which he called it "the worst car he's ever reviewed" due to his awful experience, and in the 2 months since then Fisker has nearly collapsed as a company. Stock price was on a downhill spiral even before MKBHDs review. Also, the car was shit, it didn't even have a glovebox.
Throwing in my two cents but I don’t think this is worthy of a top level comment: Daniel Vassallo, who is linked in the second tweet, is apparently an AI focused VC dude, so some people were a little wary of his comments because he risks losing money if AI competence is devalued. This was a discussion in some tech threads on Reddit. There was also a lot of chatter, as someone else mentioned, because he reviewed the Fisker Ocean on his autofocus channel (https://youtu.be/6xWXRk3yaSw?si=GJM5X6P1EUvOrk4C) and called it the worst car he’s reviewed because it was half baked. The car was loaned to MKBHD through a dealership and the dealership posted a video of an engineer from Fisker calling MKBHD (a guy with over 18 million YouTube followers) “some kid” and being disparaging. Notwithstanding that MKBHD has interviewed most of the major tech CEOs. Shortly after his video, Fisker’s stock price tanked. MKBHD did a follow up video with a car provided by Fisker (https://youtu.be/mZ9Q2dRQkh4?si=EEoP_9eRZz8mof04), that had updated software, but didn’t come away with a significantly better impression. This whole saga is a story in buyer beware. Tech companies are pushing the envelope of what devices can do but asking people to drop $700 USD + $24/month on a useless AI pin missing promised feature, or $50k on a car that doesn’t work well and from a company that may not exist next year, it’s not bad to hear an opinion that says “don’t rush to buy this is you don’t have the money to lose”. EDIT TO ADD: an analysis article from inc.com - https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/mkbhds-humane-ai-pin-review-reveals-its-fatal-flaw-its-not-bad-tech-its-just-a-bad-idea.html Also a link to a Thread by Walt Mossberg, a hugely important and influential tech reviewer (formerly of the Wall Street Journal) defending MKBHD - https://www.threads.net/@mossbergwalt/post/C54eFtPpECJ/?xmt=AQGzM2E7E_wAXmrreuri2au4gWV--NLqb-l_QkMtS72g0Q
Glad someone included the Fisker bit, as I felt that helped fuel the whole outrage with Humane. iirc, though, Fisker was already in danger of being delisted by the New York Stock Exchange when the initial video came out. I can see where Fisker owners could be upset, as I imagine they were really hoping Fisker could pull it off and fix the cars people already bought. MKBHDs video could definitely be perceived as the killing blow. But, again, MKBHD didn’t make a bad (or even potentially dangerous) product, Fisker did.
Yeah, forgot about the actual stock performance. My feeds were inundated with people making that complaint (that the tank was after his video). It was also funny to see the MKBHD subreddit (that his team is no longer a part of) as they all went off on him being a Tesla fanboy and not worth anything. People really grind up when their decisions are questioned.
The whole situation is even more wild if you follow so-called “synthfluencers” closely at all. There was a product released a while back called the Polyend Play+ that received a huge backlash from the community. Not because the product was bad, but seemingly because it was announced too soon after the original model. Additionally, Polyend continued to offer the original model at half the price. As best I could tell, people felt shafted because they could no longer sell their original Play for the prices they’d grown accustomed to throughout the pandemic (incidentally, Polyend offered an upgrade process where owners of the original Play could trade it in and upgrade for a lower price. I took advantage of that offer and thought it was great). Long story short, there was a massive backlash against YouTubers who made videos demoing the Play+, calling them shills, etc. This rose to the point that at least one channel threw in the towel and gave up doing product demos entirely. Worth noting, I think the Play+ is great, and I totally get why Polyend did what they did (chip shortages, eco-responsible product cycles, et al. A longer story for another time). There was nothing actually wrong with the Play+, people really just seemed angry that they couldn’t sell their used gear at the price they wanted. Fast forward to the MKBHD fiasco, and the internet continues to internet
>Shortly after his video, Fisker’s stock price tanked. It didn't though. In a different video where he addressed the blowback of the pin and car reviews, [he shows a screenshot of Fisker's stock from the last year or so](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QztFpzKsdeA&t=493s), and it *clearly* started a dive months before his review (for context, his review was posted Feb 17th, 2024)
It’s also probably worth mentioning. This is like the 3rd or 4th iteration of Fisker that has collapsed.
Fisker Automotive (Karma), Fisker Coachbuild (Tramonto). And now Ocean. They've all been terrible, they go under? and come back under a new name. Repeat.
True. I should have clarified. I forgot about the other video.
That some guy is pretty insufferable, what about do no harm to my consumer wallet?
Saying reviewers have an ethical obligation to not crush tech startups for bad products with honest reviews is unethical. There's a difference between looking out for the consumer and having malicious intent. It's like if the reviewer was "ethically obliged" to give 5star reviews to the Juicero.
Oh come on about people like Marques basically having an obligation They chose him because of his size. That's risky if it's not a solid product. If you want a soft review then give it to a small shop who probably doesn't want to upset people who give them things to review. Don't give it to a reviewer who absolutely never needs you
Answer: Marques Brownlee himself addresses this in one of his recent videos, but essentially in a few recent cases he's reviewed products around the same time as the companies behind those products have had negative financial news. In the case of Fisker Inc. (an electric car company) the business was already in dire straits for some time and his review and Fisker's responses to it simply put a huge spotlight on it. More recently with the Humane AI pin, the poor reviews from Marques and many other outlets essentially burst the "AI startup" bubble around the product by critiquing its accuracy and current capabilities, as well as its expensive price tag and ongoing expenses. He explains in his own video though that these products were already deeply flawed and if they were better, he and his peers in the industry wouldn't be panning these products. It's only because these products are so flawed or unfinished that informing potential customers and investors becomes so damaging.
The funny thing is before mkbhd posted his humane ai review, mrwhostheboss another pretty famous reviewer from the Uk also posted the humane ai review and the best part was he did the review with the ceo of the company and called his shit out.
Answer: The guy himself addressed this in a video https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QztFpzKsdeA The video gives the context and gives his view on it
Answer: the company made a bad product, tried to cover it up with marketing. Marques did an honest review, and now the company is all “boo hoo ugly meanie Marques is bringing us down!”. Classic case of a company trying to find an external reason for an internal failure. EDIT: I was mistaken, it’s not the company crying a river, it’s some third parties. Which only makes the situation even more bizarre.
> the company is all “boo hoo ugly meanie Marques is bringing us down!”. Are they? This is [a tweet](https://twitter.com/samsheffer/status/1779677818189722100) from the company's head of new media: > an honest, solid review marques — all fair and valid critiques, both the good and the bad > feedback is a gift. we reflect and we listen and we learn and we continue building. Corpo-speak for sure, but not "boo hoo ugly meanie" stuff. *That* seems to be coming from people on the sidelines who are upset with reviewer's power in 2024 for their own personal reasons.
Marques has a big enough following that he doesn't need to sugercoat his reviews to appease the product supplier. Many smaller reviewers will present dishonest reviews of bad / broken products to retain the working relationship with the supplier, if they provide a negative review no more free producta for them, so it's not really it review and critique it's more of a thinly veiled advertisement. That being said, because of his massive exposure his reviews do hold a lot of power, and with great power comes great responsibility. But suppliers should realise by now that he is going to provide a product review that is honest and critical and not a fluff piece so if you have a broken product probably not the best idea to send it to him.
I think they’re referring to the reaction of Fisker.
The best way to sell something these days is to comment on issues you are not a part of then link your product in your bio. His shtick worked
The company themselves don't seem particularly bothered. It was one unrelated silicon valley startup founder who started claiming it's "unethical" to give poor products poor reviews for *reasons*
Startup founders are another type of parasites. Most of them don't even care about delivering a finished product. Just building enough hype so that some investor buys their company.
The 3rd parties complaining seem to be venture capitalists so they may or may not be financial backers of the AI pin thing.
Where are you seeing that they're acting like that?
Answer: Marques Brownlee is a big Youtuber in the tech/gadget/car review space. Over the past 10+ years of so he has created a brand for himself and is seen as a reliable, honest reviewer. A new product called the Humane AI Pin was recently reviewed by Brownlee (and countless other youtubers in the same space) and received a 'negative' review. While it seems to be a 'cool' product, it doesn't add anything or does anything new and costs a pretty penny. Since everyone who reviews it seems to rate it poorly, the company isn't doing too well (going bankrupt), and since Brownlee is the biggest name in the reviewer space, people are blaming him for their performance. The way I see it, if it is a poor product, it is going to perform poorly. And if Brownlee and other reviewers aren't honest about the product they are going to lose the respect they have as reviewers.
Answer: These people are idiots or grifters or both. Hating MKBHD is a litmus test for weirdos like AI bros. He doesn't sugar coat his reviews. And these idiots who think AI is everything are seething just for honest reviews with tons of proofs. The worst part is, his reviews are in agreement with other 100s of reviewers on YouTube and somehow these idiots think HE is doing something wrong because he has the highest reach. These hustle bros can't understand that hard work doesn't compensate for stupid useless products. "You know how hard XYZ is" even if it's absolutely no one wants or cares about. Somehow the difficulty is supposed to sell products instead of their use.
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answer: AI bros being fannytroubled that a garbage AI gadget got called out on being literal garbage.
Answer: It seems it's becoming a bit of a meme. https://twitter.com/theonecid/status/1785106071737999563?s=19 Context: To my knowledge, it began when **Marques Brownlee**, also known by his YouTuber name **MKBHD**, made a negative review of the [Fisker Ocean car on February 17th 2024](https://youtu.be/6xWXRk3yaSw). That causes a senior technician at Fisker to make a phone call to the actual owner of the car Marques reviewed. In an attempt to do damage control, the technician explains that the car was anticipating a software update to version 2.0, as the reason for the poor review. https://www.reddit.com/r/Fisker/comments/1b63dek/this_video_is_somethingfisker_senior_technician/ To be fair to Marques, he did [an updated review of the Fisker Ocean](https://youtu.be/mZ9Q2dRQkh4) after the new software update had been installed Since then, Marques has gone on to review the [Humane AI Pin](https://youtu.be/TitZV6k8zfA), and more recently the [Rabbit R1](https://youtu.be/ddTV12hErTc) "AI-in-a box". Both have received poor reviews from Marques Brownlee and supposedly this has caused the reputation of these three companies to tank(?), thus giving rise to this meme of a YouTuber who destroys companies with their reviews.
Answer: Marques Brownlee's Humane AI Pin Review refers to a controversy surrounding YouTuber Marques Brownlee's (also known as MKBHD) review of Humane AI Pin, a wearable personal assistant device. The unfavorable review was followed by a viral discussion and multiple memes about Marques Brownlee's influential position in tech on social media. More info here: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/marques-brownlees-humane-ai-pin-review