How I Built This with Guy Raz - AI that can be your second brain with Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri of Humane

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

Imran Chaudhri and his wife Bethany Bongiorno are responsible for bringing some of the most widely-used screened products to market—like the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. And while these devices have connected humans like never before, Imran and Bethany couldn’t help but wonder about the downsides of spending so much time tethered to screens. After leaving Apple, they eventually brought a new tool to life; something screenless...This week on How I Built This Lab, Imran and Bethany’s wearable pin capable of being your personal assistant. Plus, how they believe that AI can be regulated without stifling innovation.This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Kerry Thompson. You can follow HIBT on Twitter & Instagram, and email us at [e-mail] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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message there. That's 1-800-433-1298. And that's it. Hope to hear from you soon and we are so excited to have you come on the show. And now, onto the show. Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So wherever you are right now, chances are there is a screen within arm's reach. Maybe it's a phone or a tablet or a smart watch. And over the past decade, we've come to depend on these screens to conduct most of the business in our lives. Transportation, communication, scheduling, entertainment. We now do all of this pretty much on our screens. But what if you could do all these things without the distraction of a screen?

Well, that's the idea behind the humane AI pin. It's a little square device that can do many of the same things as our screen devices. Think of it a little like an AI assistant. The difference is the humane pin is controlled by the sound of your voice. The pin has a touchpad, a camera, a built-in projector, and it's made to pin right to your clothes with a little magnet. The AI pin was created by Humane co-founders Imran Chaudry and his wife Bethanye Bonjourno. Before they got into the world of artificial intelligence,

the two of them worked at Apple, leading the design of some of the very screens I was just talking about. Imran started their first in the late 1990s when working for Apple meant kind of being the underdog. Our team started by redefining what a Mac was, building macOS 10 that just really had an eye towards how do you actually build a new type of computer that was easier to use that wouldn't crash and max used to crash all the time back then but that was our boot camp and then we got to work on things like multi-touch which went on to propel things like iPhone and iPad and and watch all all stuff that you know my team and I worked on.

I mean, of course, there's the famous presentation that Steve Jobs gives and says, Stylist, who needs a stylist, right? When you've got five digits on each hand. And that's something that you worked on. You worked on that touchscreen, the technology that enabled that. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think that was the fundamental unlock for making the transition from remote interactions from a keyboard and mouse to really allowing people to do what we call direct.

manipulation, and that's literally just being able to touch the screen and have a far more intimate relationship with the things that you're really using on a day-to-day basis. Yeah. I mean, both of you were at Apple at just such an incredibly historic time. Bethany, you joined about 10 years after Imran started, but still, I mean, right after the iPhone kind of shipped is when you joined. And soon, I guess, you were kind of put in charge as a project manager involved with the iPad. Yeah, I joined Apple in 2008.

And I, you know, I was a BlackBerry user. I was a PC user. I didn't have an iPhone. But I had a lot of admiration for what they were doing. And a couple months after I joined the iPhone team, which was pretty small. at the time still and still treated like a startup within the company and had, you know, a lot of secrecy around what that team was up to. A lot of, you know, locked doors where the teams were meeting and doing our work. But a couple months after I joined, they asked me if I would take on a

new project. And at the time, they told me that they couldn't tell me what the project was, but that it would require that for the next year and a half to two years of my life, I would have to work many, many hours, and it would be really challenging and really difficult, and it was this new project that Steve wanted to do. They couldn't tell me what it was, but they would need to know in 24 hours if I would take it on. And so I said yes and walked into a room, signed an NDA, and then they told me that I was going to be leading a project to build a tablet it and bring together a group of engineers and work really closely with the design team and just

figure out how we could make it possible. And that started that project for me. It's so interesting to me because, of course, Apple is famously as secretive as like the Pentagon, right? And many companies talk about like breaking down silos and breaking down walls and creating cross-collaboration. And Apple really took a and has taken and continues to take a completely different approach, which is it's very siloed. But I wonder, having been inside, it seems like it works. Like, there is method to that madness and that kind of secrecy is probably necessary. Or do you think that with some perspective, looking back on it, it's sometimes a little bit too much? You know, there's some advantages. You get an amazing amount of focus, which is good. And I think

the projects that I worked on were all essentially 1.0s that turned into something else and that really siloed protected space allows for those kinds of things to happen. I think where it becomes difficult is when you come out of stealth, so to speak, you start to have to really need different functions of the organization to come in. And that's where it gets a little messy. Because you don't have the relationships. Yeah, you don't. And I think some of us, over time, at Apple, built those relationships. But in some cases, you'd end up with duplicative work that would build, you know, some

animosity and things like that. So those are the things that you have to struggle with. And essentially, Beth, I'm curious about your perspective, because obviously the two of you met at Apple and then fell in love and got married and, and, and, and, and, you know, and, now here you are today. But when the two of you were both at Apple and a couple, did you often, presumably you had to keep what you were working on from Imran and vice versa. You probably couldn't really talk about what you did. It would be like two people who worked for the CIA. Well, actually, we had the good fortune that we were building basically

everything together. There were very few, very few things that Imran was working on, mainly, that I didn't know about. For the most part, he knew everything I was, you know, directly involved in. And actually, we met on my first day at Apple. And we didn't really like each other that much, mainly because we were very polar, we're polar opposites. And my job was to make sure that things were on schedule and on time and that everybody was at the table and were having the right conversations, you know, it runs the vision.

My job was about pushing the boundaries of what's possible and what, you know, what the world really needed in that moment. Yeah. And so we used to get into quite a few arguments, actually. And I would go up to him and say, Imron, what are you doing? Like, we can't do all of this or this, or this idea is too big or the team can't do it. And he would push back on me and say, well, we have to do it. You know, we have to make this happen?

And have you tried this? His favorite line was, have they tried this? have they tried this? And he was always right, which was always the really frustrating part of it in most moments. And so, yeah, we had the opportunity to build a lot of things together, whether it was new hardware and totally new product categories or software, things like FaceTime and IMessage, you know, that were really complicated things for billions of people that involved a lot of challenges along the way. In 2016, you both left Apple and presumably with the idea of maybe trying to create something yourselves.

But was that the reason? Was it, did it feel like, did you feel like it was time to move on that you'd kind of done everything you wanted to do there? Yeah, you know, that equation of like why somebody decides to move on is always such a complicated one. I had an amazing opportunity there and was really blessed with the things that we were able to. achieve. Around that time, we were working on iPhone 10, which in and of itself is kind of like a bit of like a Groundhog Day thing. It's just a newer version of the same thing. Yeah, you know, we definitely were some new things we were thinking about. But what I was really into was being able to push the limit of compute. And what I found for myself was that the environment had changed

a bit and I really needed to think about where else I'd want to go. I wasn't at all done in terms of thinking where I wanted to take compute, but I felt as if I had reached my personal limit at Apple because everything had really started to mature. When the two of you decided to leave, tell me a little bit about some of the ideas that you had thought about. things that you could do because it wasn't what we are going to talk about humane AI wasn't the original idea you had maybe there was going to be like a fitness app or wellness app or a maternal care app you guys had talked about a couple of different ideas right yeah we we actually started ideating on a couple of ideas and imron took his passion and started really digging into

AI and that's uh that this was in 2017 he was very passionate about it and And I really started to look into women's health. And it was something, the other area that Imran and I were very interested in, mainly because women actually suffer because we were never really taught how our bodies work and we don't have the right tools to be able to care for ourselves ultimately. And so we essentially started building two prototypes. And we had one in the space of women's health. And the other was this idea that Imran was pushing around.

a new kind of computer. Imran, tell me about that idea that you had in mind. What were you thinking? Yeah, so always was fascinated with AI. And when I was in high school, I had a job at a computer shop where I used to be able to get books and magazines and read them, right?

And I used to read AI journals when I was in high school and just be fascinated by that stuff. And a lot of it theoretically was something that was moving into a place of practice around that time frame, 2017 or so. And sparked a lot of inspiration to say, hey, I actually really want to build a new kind of computer, something that is really going to help humanize the ability to be able to interact with AI. And around 2017, I was able to convince Bethany that if we started now, that we would be where we needed to be by the time we would be able to actually practice this stuff, which is kind of like right now. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, the dinner date that convinced one of the inventors of the touchscreen to go screenless.

Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2017, which is a really pivotal year for AI research. And Imron and Bethany are thinking about how their experience working for Apple might help launch their next venture. So, all right, so you knew that you wanted to do something around computing. Now, you had, I mean, you were intimately involved in developing and helping to develop your names on patents around so many the products we use, my Apple Watch, my, my iPhone, like you're in this thing. You had spent so much of your career working on screens, right?

Things that we can look at. And so were you, I mean, already back in 2017, were you sort of saying a version of this to yourself, which is, can I make something that doesn't require a screen? Were you literally thinking that granular? Yeah. That's exactly right. Like how do you actually elevate compute? Because, you know, I think smartphones are great. They're really, really great at what they can do now.

But they're very limited in terms of how much more they can do. And if you think about if they're able to leverage some of these multimodal inputs that use text and voice and sound and image and eventually video, you need a new kind of computer that really allows for you to take advantage of that kind of processing. And at that point, you don't need to use screens the same way. You need screens because screens confirm everything that you're doing, whether you're typing in something properly or whether you've tapped the right button. But if you can actually take that away, take the burden of that away, You don't need a screen other than something for a lightweight confirmation, which is kind of the underpinnings of what we've built.

Bethany, I gather after sort of a year and a half of consulting and considering maybe doing something in the women's health space, I think around 2018, you both agree to pursue this. How did Imron describe what this product could be to you initially? Yeah, I had been out for the day and I came home and he was. He said, this is what we're going to build. And he pulled out, he had made a one-pager on the computer that basically described the vision for this operating system. And he said, this is what we need to do. And so I said, okay, well, let's start it.

Let's see, is it possible? And I'm the person who definitely questions sometimes, like, is this technically feasible? Like, are we going to be able to do this? What are the things that would prevent us from being successful? And so, and Imran is always, you know, 10 to 100 steps ahead of me. In his head, he already knows where we're going and what's possible and what's not. We definitely think about things in a different way. But that really started it once we said, okay, let's build some prototypes now.

How specific was that one page or did it say a wearable device in the shape of a square with a camera? I mean, we'll get there. But how specific was it? He had a diagram of the device. He had a drawing that he had done that looks very much. much like it does today with a couple minor exceptions. It even had the magnetic attachment and also had a description of what it would do. Like here are the things that you would do with it. Here's what it has, what it doesn't. And I remember at the time having worked on the iPhone and

having had some experience there, my first thought was this is impossible to build a phone this small and to be a standalone device. You know, you're talking about four radios. It has to have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and GPS and a pretty powerful chip to run what he wanted. So my first instinct was to say this is impossible, but I also know my husband pretty well. So I said, okay, let's let's give it a go and see if we can prove it to ourselves that we can be built this. Imron, at the time in 2018, this is before chat GPT. Like chat GBT, I mean, people are using it in so many different ways, like, I'm going to Italy this summer. And I was like, give me the seven essential restaurants I need to eat at in Rome. And I gave it some parameters and it's great.

Okay. But in 2018, ChiteGBT wasn't out yet. How confident did you feel that within the next three years that the things that you wanted this thing to do could be done? Pretty confident. I used to say this thing at Apple, you know, if you can dream it and if you can describe it, you can make it. And I don't think a lot of people, like, really believe that. But if you have those parameters in place and you understand how you get there and how long it's going to take, it's at a much larger scale than, say, like, a chef that imagines a recipe because they can taste the notes in their mouth and through it as imagining things,

I sort of feel that way with this. This is the medium I understand the most. So when you guys embarked on this project, you really went underground. You kind of went underground. You had to operate like Apple, right? You had to be super secretive. What was that like basically going underground until 2023 when you kind of came out of the underground and reveal this product? What, I mean, how did you operate?

I mean, was it, you couldn't talk about this. with anybody outside of the company. Yeah, it was a challenge because we also needed to hire. So we knew that there was a risk involved in sharing with people who were joining or thinking about joining what we were building. And so we actually, you know, up until the fall of last year, every single person that joined Humane didn't know what they were joining to build. We didn't even tell candidates what it was, which was kind of a radical.

decision, but we felt it was pretty important, one, to make sure they were joining for the right reasons, also to protect the idea because it was still pretty, it's still pretty fragile in the early stages. But it was a challenge. And I think we also started building really in earnest in late, late 2018, early 2019. And we were self-funding for a good amount of that time up until the summer of 2019. And then at that point started to bring a team together. And, and only had a couple of months, really, of building together before COVID forced everybody into lockdown. So there were a number of challenges along the way that were hard for a startup. Tell me what the vision was as you continue to kind of develop what this product would be.

Imran, did you think, okay, I want this to be, and again, forgive me, because I'm oversimplifying it. I know it's much more complex, but just for the illustrative purposes, right, were you sort of thinking, okay, this will be like the best, personal assistant. How are you thinking about what this could do? Yeah, this was really more like a companion or an expert that you could take with you. And this piece that would allow you to be liberated from having to really use a computer in a conventional way. You know, I think it's this always with you piece that the moment you could think of something, it would, allow you to act on it. And it was just always there.

And the results that you would get would happen, I used to say, at the speed of thought, right? And even mundane things like text messages would start to feel a lot more lightweight because of that. I want to just describe what it is for people who haven't seen the demos, but it's essentially it's a square, a little sort of square, Maybe this is a little bit bigger than an Apple Watch face, right? Yeah.

Okay. Yep. And you can, it sticks onto your clothing through a magnet. And it has a camera so it can capture images and it's got a cell phone so you can wear earbuds or not. And then it has a projector that it can project like text messages or other things on your hand. So it's got all of the, more or less the things that your phone has, right? but it's designed to answer questions. Walk me through, what was the hardest,

what's the hardest hurdle that you had to kind of overcome to pack all that in such a small little package? Yeah, you know, I'd say the hardest part was really ensuring that everything was going to be something we could fit in. So we call that miniaturization, making all the components small enough so that they sit there, and then making sure that they work well together. Like the laser display has its own challenges,

and then the wireless power that allows you to not have the problems of a wearable that when you take it off, it's because the battery is dead and you can no longer use it. This allows you to keep going. Even that alone has its own challenges. But when you bring them all together, that interference, electrical interference, happened, the management of the heat and the weight, all of the packaging aspects and the runtime issues, bringing it all together was the biggest challenge. You know, the first time I saw this product, the thing that seemed appealing about it to me

was the absence of a screen, right? I think that you were so good, you and your colleagues were so good at Apple, you designed such good products that it enabled many of us to become addicted. And it's really distressing because I actually think that these products as incredible as they are. I'm holding up an iPhone right now. And as life-changing and groundbreaking as they are have also changed our brain chemistry. It's changed my attention span has been dramatically affected by this. And as much as I try to build in, I have a screen time on my phone. My phone turns off from six at night until seven in the morning. But then I find myself like, it's like a smoker trying to sneak a cigarette. Like, I find myself, like, temporarily, like, undoing that on apps. And so the,

the idea of a screenless thing just appeals to me on so many levels. And I wonder, how much were you motivated by having maybe some residual guilt over making something so good that it actually addicted people? When we left Apple, there was this moment where we were out to dinner and there was a family sitting next to us at the dinner table. They had three kids, two parents, and all of them were on their phone. The entire family and none of them were talking to each other. And I remember Imron looked at me and he said, man, you know, what we built was so incredible. But there have been some downsides that feel that feel pretty heavy. And I think that of course that was something we were thinking about. And for me, I started doing some research on happiness. And I was really interested in

the question of, you know, has it made us happier? And what is happiness ultimately? And one of the things that I found in my research was that people reported higher levels of happiness when they were truly present in a moment. And I think that was something that Imran and I talked a lot about, which is if being present truly in a moment does help you, you know, feel happier, how does that play into what we're building? And I think what we are building here is something. something that brings a lot of freedom and the ability to remain present. Yeah, you know, I think the things that you were saying, Guy, I think, are things a lot of people struggle with. You've got this incredibly powerful tool that makes you more powerful.

Yeah. Or in the know, or, you know, where, or connected, all of these, these tangents that come off off of this tool, they just really, they enable certain characteristics. That is the piece that becomes addicting. You want to be more of that. You want to know more. You want to be able to speak out more. And so I think the trouble as a designer is that you really need to be able to be responsible for not only the tool, but how the tool is used and how the tool is sold

and how the tool is actually safeguarded. Yeah. Even in Apple, I was the champion for Do Not Disturb. And it was something that, you know, I added in because I had coexistence experiences like the one you described. There definitely are some things that I wish didn't happen, things like social media as prevalence. Which exacerbate. I mean, that's really, it's not the iPhone. It's all the things on the iPhone.

Yeah, exactly. The iPhone is an amazing tool. It's just the things that you're allowing on to the tool and doing on the tool are the things that are tough. And so, as Bethany mentioned, you know, we certainly started to think about some of these things in a very different way in terms of how memories are formed. You know, when you, even the act of taking a photograph with a large preview takes you out of the multi- sensory biology that allows you to form a memory. And that's because your concentration is more on trying to get the image than it is on actually experiencing the thing you're experiencing. We absolutely rely upon our devices as much as the air we breathe and the electricity that runs through our cities and homes. We can't really live without it. And what Humane is really all about is taking a more considered look at what is that coexistence or that relationship with technology. What should it look like? It's something we think about all the time. We're going to take another quick break, but when we come back, how Bethany and Imran think

about a business model that doesn't rely on a traditional app store plus the humane AI pin in action. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to how I built this lab. Hey, welcome back to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. So my guest today are Imran Chaudry and Bethany Bonjourno, founders of Humane. They describe the company's first device as a wearable personal assistant, and they call it the Humane AI pin. Bethany, I noticed you have one with you. Is it possible to just show us one thing on it? Or is that possible? It might be hard to hear it. I'm wearing it on my... Oh, I heard that as a little speaker. Yeah, I heard that, yeah. Can you ask it, I don't know, can you ask it to tell you something about me?

Sure, let me make sure my device is unlocked. Don't get my pass code. What time is it? 2.1 p.m. Okay. What's the weather like outside? Just making sure we're ready. Checking weather.

The current weather. San Francisco is partly sunny with a temperature of 54 degrees Fahrenheit. Yep. Who is Guy Raz? Searching for Garaz. Guy Raz is an American journalist and podcaster known for his popular podcasts such as how I built this in 10 Radio Hour. That's so cool. I mean, a very narcissistic question for me to have you ask.

But it's almost like that movie, Her, you know, it's like having, right? Have you ever thought about that parallel? Yeah, and the thing about it is that, you know, obviously you can ask it very tactical things, right? So what's the weather like outside? What's going on this weekend in the city? But you could also ask it, you know, to store memories for you. And it really is about being your second brain. How does it do that? Yes. So for me personally, the way that I use it is I ask it, my AI, I ask it to remember my entire travel. itinerary, where I'm going to be when the hotel I'm staying at is this, my room is this. So then if somebody asks me, like, hey, Bethany, can you do this thing on this date? I can say, am I going to be in San Francisco on this date? Right. And it tells me. But it's also not just for tactical things, right? I can use it as a live journal. I can have it record things and

notes for me that I'm thinking about make lists of places I want to go visit or things I need to talk to Emrod about, which is like one of my favorite things. So you treat it almost like your second brain. And what happens is that you create this incredible data set that's very personal and it uses it and it can use it to then offer suggestions. So now that I teach my AI everything it should know about me and everything it should know about my life, when I'm in a new city and I say, hey, I have an hour, I'm in Tokyo, what should I do?

It's using what it knows about me to offer suggestions, right? Or if I'm saying, hey, I'm in Tokyo and I need to buy a gift for Imran, what should I get him while I'm here. Now it's using what it knows about Imron that I've told it to help me figure out what's by him. So this is the power of this very personal computer that we've built. And where is, I mean, Google has Gemini and obviously there's chat GPT and there's other platforms and operating systems. Does it use a specific one or will it have access to all of it? Is it a proprietary one? Yeah, so we will be using whatever's best based on what it is you're trying to do. And so our

architecture allows for multiple models, things are made by companies like Open AI. We have a good relationship with the team there. And smaller models are things that are proprietary to us. And these will change and evolve over time. And we are able to add these into our, operating system whenever we feel like there's a new type of capability. And that's key to how we've built not only the device, but also the operating system that runs underneath it. So when you, let's say talking about it as a second brain, a memory tool, right? You can imagine just journaling, using it as a journal, right? You would say, hey, record, I just want to record my thoughts for now. What does it then do with that information? Like, it's stored somewhere in the client. And the

cloud and then what if you want to access that? Like do you say, hey, can you like put my life story in a book? Like, what would you do with that? Yeah. So for right now, what you can do on the device is you can, with your, with your pin, is you can ask it, right? So when I have it, remember all of my thoughts and all my notes and things I need to do in places I need to be, I can just speak to it like I would speak to a person, right? Like, where, where's Bryn's birthday party again? Like, oh, it's at the park. You told me it was at the park. Okay, it's at Rossi Park. Great. And then you also can access all of your data on a website. So you have your own, think of it like your own Google homepage that you go to. That's your personal page that has all

of your data. It has every question you've ever asked it. It has every answer it's ever given to you. It has every photo and video that you've ever taken. All of the data we've collected. And you can go in and view it. You could also delete your data. So let's say there's something that you don't want it to be there anymore. You can delete every individual query or you can delete a certain note that you've created. And I think our vision has always been that we want to create OS that is very personal and that eventually you're building this really rich data set that you own and it's yours. And eventually you can decide where your data goes. I don't mean to take this to a dark place, but I'm sure I'm not the first person whose head went to that Black Mirror episode where every

memory was recorded and then he like picks the chip out of his head and um but i mean i i see incredible value in being able to store memories um i guess part of me is just worried about the security side of that but we already do store a lot of our memories like google cloud so that version of that already exists right so i don't think it's like totally outrageous to be slightly concerned about securing this data, right? Yeah, you know, I think you should be concerned, and I wish more people were concerned, and it's something that we care about a lot.

We understand how this data has been used in the past. We believe that everything that you create or collect and store using your AI pin belongs to you and only you, and is something that only you should know about. We don't have a way to access your data. We don't use it in training or anything else. It's literally yours. And any time you use it to access a memory,

it's actually doing so in your own protected space. It's a foundational thing for us to protect people's data and to make sure that it's not being used by anyone but you. You know, we also, it was very intentional from the beginning that we didn't have a wake word. You know, we didn't want to build a device that was always listening. We're not recording at all. We're not recording from the cameras or the microphone unless you engage with the device. And when you do engage with it, you know, you heard the sound when I was using it before.

When I engage with it, the LED turns on to tell you and everyone around you that the microphone is on. And that's something that we actually built into the hardware that the LED will turn on when the microphone's on, when the cameras are on. And that's something that it was really important that we wanted to be more transparent than the devices you have today. So your phone today, you know, somebody could be sitting across from you, taking pictures of you, recording audio of you, and you would have no idea. It's not transparent at all. And Imran was pretty clear from the beginning that we care about this stuff. And it is important that privacy and transparency are at the forefront of it. And that's a big part of our ethos.

Do you, I mean, can, like right now, this, the pin can't replace a smartphone because you can't order an Uber from it or transfer money on your bank account, for example. But do you imagine that it will be able to do all of the things that we've become unfortunately dependent on? Like I went to a coffee shop the other day and I wanted a coffee and I didn't bring my phone and I couldn't see the menu. And I was like, what do you guys have? And they're like, oh, just scan your phone. And I was like, I'm on my phone. So they were very kindly dictated the menu to me. Yeah.

But you know what I mean? Like it's almost impossible to get to the day without a smartphone in most world today. Absolutely. I think people, post-COVID, the QR code is reigning supreme right now. And I think when you have a vision-based computer like ours, you can play in that world. It works really well. But, you know, what we have here is, again, a computer that really allows you to have those kinds of interactions without you really being the driver of all that. You're just the person that takes the benefit from it.

If you think about ride share services, you know, you can just say, hey, I need a car. And your AI understands, as Bethany was saying, where you need to be. And you could say, I need to get there quickly versus I need to get there in the most cost-efficient way. And, you know, the device and the OS and the AI experience will figure that out for you. And so we do see there being a tremendous benefit for having these AI-first interactions. for these things that we do today because they can help you out. You know, it just feels more like an extension of you. Both of you guys are very intimately involved in this sort of this AI kind of revolution

that's happening and certainly center around San Francisco. And there's very much been an open debate around where it's heading and what to expect. I understand that what you're working on and you're working on and you're. sort of the way you see your role in it is to create responsible AI technology. But just in general, where do you sort of stand on where this is headed? I mean, it's already growing and scaling at such a fast pace that it's hard for the people who have created this technology to even understand how quickly it's growing and how powerful it's becoming. And I wonder whether like I'm not smart enough to articulate why that scares me,

but I can tell you that part of it does scare me. And I wonder, you guys are a lot smarter than me, does any of that scare you? Yeah, you know, this is an accelerated pace unlike anything we've ever seen before. You take compute and you couple it to the internet and you add in the processing capability. I think what really needs to happen is

there needs to be a good balance of making sure that bad things don't happen, and there needs to be an openness to allow for good things to happen. You need a way to make sure that these regulations keep people safe, but then don't stifle innovation. And the best way to do that is to involve the people that are really intimate in understanding how to do that. And we have been involved in a few conversations about shaping regulations around this, which we really appreciate and we want to be able to be involved in a lot more. But you really do need that right now. This is not only something that's important on a regional or national level, it's also important on a global level. Bethany, I want to ask you a business-related question.

My assumption, I'm just going back to Apple, for example, for example. as an example, but a huge source of Apple's revenue is the App Store, right? I mean, they have multiple revenue streams, the phones, the hardware, their software, the App Store. I mean, it's an incredible company in how they can really harness different ways of making money. You have a closed device. You will not have apps, right? So we will or we do integrate with third parties, and we already have some that exist on our platform, there will be many, many more over time. And so the services side is also a part of the business. Right. So you'll have the device and then the monthly fee, which right now is low.

And then over time, part of the business model will be. There will be apps available and that could be another revenue stream. And we see it a little bit differently in that the traditional idea of what an app is is effectively going to disappear. and it kind of already has. And so for us, we work really closely with some third parties that run on our platform. There will be some that we don't need to have partnerships with where we'll be using things that they have publicly available. And right now we obviously, we still make money on the hardware, which is incredible.

And over time, we're just going to be constantly shipping new experiences. And that's the beauty of having a like a lightweight client on the device backed by a really powerful cloud that can just continue to evolve over time. And you wake up and your device does something new, just like you own a Tesla. You wake up. Your Tesla has a new software update. It has a new feature. It's the same model. And so what does success look like for you in the next sort of two to five years? I'm going to bring it back to something that Bethany said. When you feel like you have a better relationship with technology, you have people that are just generally happier, but then aren't forsaking a lot of the capabilities, that's when I think

we'll feel really good about what we've done. To me, that's what success is, is just having that impact of redefining our relationship with technology to make it better. Yeah, and I hope that our work inspires other people. We've already seen that kind of we started this momentum in the AI hardware space, which is really exciting, and I think it will ultimately benefit all of us. And, you know, we, we are building something that we want to, right? We started building this because we wanted it in our life. And I think, of course, success for us means financial success, of course. That has to be a factor. We're building a business. This is, that's a huge part of it. But I'll say that the thing for me personally, you know, that really impacts me is when even people who have pins today,

Our entire company has them. Some friends and family have them. We're living with them day to day. But as we get ready to ship, we have channels internally at our company where people post, you know, photos, videos, experiences that they have with their device and kind of share their thoughts. And when I read ones that involve people talking about how they, you know, went away for the weekend with their family and they were able to capture all these moments and, you know, go to an event with their child and capture the entire thing. like be able to look them in the eyes the whole time and stay really present in the moment. Those are the things that get me pretty emotional, honestly, because I do care a lot about the impact what we build has on people's day-to-day lives.

Like, that for me is a huge motivator every day. Bethany, Imran, thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks, Guy. That's Bethany, Bonjarno and Imran Chaudry, founders of Humane. Thanks for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss an episode of the show. And as always, it's free.

This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music composed by Rumtin Ereblewe. It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Carrie Thompson. Our audio engineer was Neil Rouch. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, Chris Messini, Catherine Seifer, Malia Agadello, Neva Grant, and Sam Paulson. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to you've been listening. listening to how I built this lab.