The Story of Humane AI, Pixar, and Their Ugly Babies.

Good morning. When I go to YouTube these days, about 50% of the thumbnails show unhappy faces. Is it the economy, is it a new thumbnail style for more views, or is it that I am following a lot of tech vloggers, and they are all unhappy about the products they get sent for review? It’s the latter. Are expectations too high? Are high costs of capital harming product quality? And what can these new AI wearable companies do to be more like Pixar? A company that consistently beats expectations?

This weekend, we had a family movie night. The flick was “Ratatouille”, and it fits the theme perfectly. You’ll see it at the end.

5-minute read

The tales of wearable AI and Pixar’s success

Last week, we saw the first reviews of the wearable AI device Humane AI Pin. It was sent out to tech (v)bloggers. One of the biggest, and I am personally a huge fan, is Marques Brownlee and his high-quality tech reviews.

The Humane AI Pin is a wearable device that leverages AI. It can also project a Laser Ink display on your hand to extend some more functions. The pin is attached to your body and acts as your assistant.

It is a take on redefining how we interact with technology—completely different trained behavior. On top of that, it is incredibly hard to put this much compute in a small device, and AI is still in the early stages. These factors make this product risky in the sense of whether we are ready from a tech perspective to have a device like this that people will love.

The recent criticism of testers does not sound like it. In fact, critics found it so terrible that some of them should consider forming a support group after the traumatizing experience they had…

If you haven’t seen a review, the TL;DR is that both products performed poorly. Reviewers are dunking on many of the devices' shortcomings, and there are indeed many issues.

I get it; the companies sent him a half-baked product, likely under false premises. These are not products that are ready for the market.

Maybe the companies should have branded their first version as a beta or “early access” - that way, you can launch any half-finished game these days, and the “early access label” basically says to testers: “Yes, we know it still kinda sucks.”

It’s an ugly baby.

Situations like this make me appreciate the consistent delivery of high-quality, creative, innovative products.

How do some companies constantly deliver high-quality, innovative, outstanding products?

Let’s take a quick look at Pixar and how they do it.

Creating a product based on an idea must be similar to having an idea for a movie storyline and then having to make it a success. Pixar is one of the world's most successful animation studios. We all know their movies. They consistently broke box office records and kept the high expectations for incredibly creative films up. Just look at them raking in box office gold and raving reviews since 1995.

The way Pixar is able to connect business with creativity, you would think their CFO is a unicorn, consistently delivering multiples of their budgets and beautiful colors.

How does Pixar do it?

The Hungry Beast and the Ugly Baby

In the book Creativity Inc., Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar Studios and CEO until 2018, discusses how Pixar remained successful and nurtured new ideas, not knowing if they could be a success or not at an early stage. The most important thing is understanding that a new idea is vulnerable and needs time to grow. He calls it an ugly baby.

The ugly baby. When a baby is born, you can’t judge or anticipate what kind of person it will become or what life it will live. This is the new idea.

Originality is fragile, and thus, we need to protect it. Originality is, by definition, not established. That’s the exciting part about it. It can’t be held to the standards that we see in mature products. A baby is pure and full of potential. But yes, it definitely keeps you up at night.

Recent economic shifts are bringing out a greater need to “feed the beast.” And while capital dries up, we are asking for assembly-line creativity—coming up with new, better, more creative things that are amazing from the start because we don’t have much time or capital.

Ed Catmull says that all of Pixar’s early reels were ugly babies, and they all needed nourishing. He describes how, during their work on “Finding Nemo”, from the first story pitch to the final movie, many prototypes made the plot seem confusing and difficult to communicate with the viewer.

They booted reel after reel. Even though the script was written, they struggled to put together a non-confusing story during production. And so they had to go back and change the script again and again.

We tend to think that getting to the final product is easy if we come up with a great idea. However, unexpected problems, decisions, and changes in direction need to be made. Nurturing the baby takes a lot of tinkering and sleepless nights.

Businesses strive to make processes cheaper, more efficient, and faster, and that is an important aspiration. We need deadlines and urgency, but

…the process is not the goal.

The goal is to make something great.

Ugly babies are often deprioritized to save other projects—the money-makers. This is more true than ever in an environment of high capital costs. The beast gets really hungry.

But Pixar found the balance. Just being aware of the facts described above seems to help them stay creative and nurture important ideas.

They put the beast on Ozempic!

What are our key takeaways?

1. Be aware of the ugly baby - not everyone will like it. Be aware that new ideas are vulnerable, and nurture and protect them.

2. Businesses need to make a profit—that’s not greed. Businesses need to be efficient now more than ever.

3. Balance the two—there is no one answer. Creatives need babies to flourish, and companies need a hungry beast to survive. Neither the baby nor the beast is overpowered.

4. With innovation and originality, the schedule can’t drive the output. Strong ideas are the output.

5. Even a business with creativity at its core is not immune to business needs. But what made Pixar successful and innovative consistently was its awareness.

6. Constant communication between the forces is key. Let business be part of the creative process to understand the hurdles and vice versa.

7. It is difficult to narrow down how to achieve this balance. It comes by doing. Starting with the right mindset is key. Growth Mindset: Nothing is great from the beginning.

To close the loop, I strongly feel that new, groundbreaking AI hardware devices are ugly babies. We need to treat them as such, communicate and accept that, and accept that they will not be amazing from the start. It’s not a finished product, but let's not kill it yet. The same is true for Virtual Reality, new forms of mobility, and all else that is new and original.

Critic work is easy, and the risk is low. A critic truly risks something in the defense of something new, and the world is often unkind to new creations.

The new needs a friend.

Finds that made me spit out my drink this week…

Magazine ad from 1996 - Nearly 30 Years Ago

That’s it for the week. If you know someone who would be interested in this email, please forward it to them. It would mean the world to me.

I have one question to consider: How do you know when to throw the baby out? We can’t tinker forever… just like this email. I don’t have the answer, but I must send and feed the beast now.

Cheers,