India has great passion and has a lot of things going on in technology: Humane AI founders

Humane AI Pin recently became a viral device globally. Developed by two former Apple designers, this AI pin aims to minimise screen time. It comes with a tiny projector, a camera, speakers, and a battery and can be worn over clothing using magnets. Tech Today’s Aayush Ailawadi spoke to the two founders: Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno at MWC 2024 in Barcelona, Spain. 

In an exclusive conversation with Tech Today, Imran Chaurdhri stated, “We're really excited about what it means to have a new kind of coexistence with technology, one where something like the AI Pin allows you to maintain a level of presence and freedom that's driven by AI that you wouldn't get otherwise if you're really using a screen. The pin allows you to have all the compute that you are used to having, but then return to a little bit of your presence as well.” 

Talking about working together on such a major project as a couple, Bethany Bongiorno told Tech Today that the Humane AI Pin was Chaudhri’s brainchild. She said, “It's Imran's vision, and we know nothing but working together. That's how we met. And so for us, that's our happy place. One of the things that's really different about him and I is that we have a lot of respect for one another in terms of our skill sets and strengths, and we give each other the space to really own what we're great at, but we also communicate all the time.” 

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who rattled the technology industry with the launch of ChatGPT, has also invested in Humane AI. Talking about Altman’s contribution to the company, Chaudhri revealed that he has been a “great supporter” of Humane AI. He added, “I think when we started early in 2018. One of the burdens that we had was actually trying to explain to the world the benefit of what we're doing. OpenAI and ChatGPT really helped with that problem, and it really helped people understand what the true benefit of being able to actually have these LLM models really do a lot of execution for you.”

Bongiorno emphasised that the technology in the AI pin is “truly global”. She explained that they aimed to make an independent company and wanted to leverage the best of technologies out there. She stated, “Our OS, which is called cosmos, is really about building a layer, that Humane has developed, that helps route either the best LLM or the best service and also do our own processing on it to end up giving the customer what they really want.”

Talking about the responsible use of AI and the importance of guardrails, “We've built in certain types of safeguards to make the device not only secure but also quite transparent. Our view on data is also really important. We believe that customers should own their own data and not really have anyone else be able to peruse and exploit that data as well. So you have the ability to view and also delete and manage all your data as well.”

Chaudhri underlined his interest in creating more opportunities in India because the country is witnessing several technological developments. He told Tech Today, “For me, India is a very special place. There's just an amazing amount of energy, and an amazing amount of passion when it comes to technology, and great things are going on there. And we want to figure out how we can actually harness and create a lot of opportunities in India for what we're doing. So it's an amazingly important market for us.”

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