The Humane Ai Pin Has Already Been Brought Back to Life

In the Discord voice chat, Marcel broke the news by sharing his screen and playing a video. In it, he held out his hand, and across his palm the Humane Ai Pin’s laser projector played the music video for Nomico’s “Bad Apple,” which has become a meme as the first video hackers put on a jailbroken device. The chat went wild. The Ai Pin was theirs.

Marcel's proclamation caused chaos, as some of the people in the community who also knew about this development were hoping to hold off a week or two longer. If they tinkered away quietly, after all the fuss had died down, perhaps invested interests like the remnants of Humane and HP would be less inclined to force another update to undo the access that had been granted.

“If we had been quiet about this,” Marcel said in the voice channel, “it would have taken months and people would have just sold the device and just forgotten about it. This has been a very cool send-away from Humane services, and hopefully a new era for these devices.”

However, a Humane employee, who requested anonymity due to not being authorized to speak publicly on such matters, also expressed his frustrations with the community's actions. He pointed out that using proprietary access certifications without permission is an IP violation—one that HP, which now owns Humane’s IP, may or may not want to pursue.

He also says that Humane owners wouldn’t have had to wait all that long for a legitimate fix. Employees at Humane were in the process of going through the proper channels to put out an OTA that would give people access without compromising IP rights. Now, that process might be stalled.

“We did not want those Pins to remain bricks on desks, and have been working hard to figure out ways around it,” the Humane employee tells WIRED. If anything, he seems disappointed. “Discussing making Android apps and the quirks of developing for the Pin is one thing. But this is crossing the line.”

What exactly Pin users even want to do with the device after they crack it open depends on who you ask. Some of them have grand ambitions, like a user in the voice channel who said, “I keep telling them they should just make this thing shoot lasers.” Marcel wants to figure out how the thing works, and back up the data to explore later. Brannock and 23 both want to use the Pin for precisely what it is: a smartphone replacement that doesn’t require staring at a screen. Others in the community feel the same.

“One of my favorite things about the Pin was capturing memories without a screen between us and our son,” wrote one poster on the Discord, sharing a video of his toddler’s first steps, captured by the Pin.

Ultimately, the people breaking these devices open really want what they felt like Humane promised them, then ultimately failed to keep alive. They want a device that can capture photos and videos, support some large language model or another, and be used to interact with the world without having to pull a phone out of their pocket.

“There’s a reason we got these devices,” 23 says. “We want to get back to where we were as a society before we had to stare at screens. A lot of us really do just want to touch grass sometimes.”

After Marcel made his announcement, the Discord voice chat wound down. Except now the channel had a different description. In place of “The death of Ai Pin,” it read, “We’re so back.”

Updated March 1, 2025 at 2:39 am: Included a response from a Humane employee who reached out to WIRED after this story published, including details about potential IP rights violations and internal efforts at Humane to provide access. We also corrected references to Humane AI Pin's authentication, which were previously incorrectly referred to as encryption.