Adam Gastineau Looks to Bring Humane's Ai Pin Back From the Dead with PenumbraOS

Developer Adam Gastineau is looking to bring the ill-fated Humane Ai Pin back from the dead, with a fresh open source operating system that looks to turn the wearable gadgets from expensive bricks into functional tools again — eventually, at least.

"I've spent ~400 hours building PenumbraOS to make the [Ai] Pin into a dev platform," Gastineau explains. "We [provide] easy access to privileged APIs [Application Programming Interfaces]. The Humane Ai Pin is extremely locked down. Normal apps you install aren't even allowed to open a socket. After months of reverse engineering effort, I built an init system around CVE-2024-31317, which gives us almost any non-root perms on the system."

The Ai Pin was the first, and final, product from Humane, a startup that believed that the future of large language models (LLMs) was in wearables. Designed to be pinned to clothing using a two-part magnetic clasp, the Ai Pin provided a two-way system for communicating with remotely-hosted LLMs via speech — while a projector and camera could turn the user's hand into a gesture-controlled display.

Sadly, none of the features really worked. Early adopters were given hardware that overheated — including a product recall for the battery-life-extending accessories — while the projector was a damp squib in daylight. Even when operational, the device failed to live up to its marketing hype — and required its own cellular plan, paid monthly, on top of the one used on the phone to which it connected.

Technology giant HP picked Humane up lock, stock, and barrel, but showed no interest in supporting its hardware. Those who had bought an Ai Pin were left with a brick as Humane's servers were shut down — which is were Gastineau's work comes in, working to find security holes in the device's customized Android operating system that will remove the restrictions put in place by Humane and allow the hardware to live again.

"I can't emphasize enough that this release is for devs only," Gastineau admits of the current state of his project, PenumbraOS. "Everything is very experimental and breaks in a number of ways. I wouldn't usually release stuff in this state (there isn't even a user facing app yet), but I greatly need help as there's so much to do."

PenumbraOS is split into two key parts. The first is a software development kit (SDK), which Gastineau says, allows the Ai Pin to be treated "like a mostly normal Android device." This will then be used to develop MABL, a modular assistant application that provides the ability to choose between local, self-hosted, and remote large language models, enable text-to-speech and speech-to-text, and bring back as much of the Ai Pin's promised functionality as possible. "This hasn't been built yet," Gastineau admits.

More information on the project is available on GitHub, where the SDK is made available under the permissive MIT license; with Humane no longer producing or selling Ai Pins, though, its audience will be limited to those who already have one languishing in a desk drawer.