Marques Brownlee

Marques Brownlee (born 1993), known online as MKBHD, is the most influential tech reviewer of the YouTube era — a creator whose verdicts can move markets, delivered from a New Jersey studio to more than twenty million subscribers. He started reviewing gadgets as a high schooler in 2009 and built a reputation on production polish and even-handedness; he is also, improbably, a professional ultimate frisbee player.

The reviewer AI products have to survive

Brownlee has become the de facto quality bar for consumer AI. His April 2024 video “The Worst Product I’ve Ever Reviewed… For Now” dismantled the $699 Humane AI Pin — “bad at almost everything it does, basically all the time” — and sparked a debate about whether honest reviews kill startups. (Humane collapsed within a year; Brownlee’s defenders noted the product did that on its own.) In December 2024 OpenAI gave him early access to Sora, and his first review was the same mix of fascination and rigor: genuinely impressed by the landscapes and animation, unsparing about broken physics, and pointed about training data — asking on camera, “Are my videos in that source material?”

None of this makes him an opponent of the technology. He covers every major AI launch with evident enthusiasm on his channel and the Waveform podcast, treats AI features as the central story of modern hardware, and warned that Sora-style tools move us “further into the era of not being able to believe anything you see online” while still calling the tech impressive. His September 2024 wallpaper app Panels drew its own backlash — partly over pricing and data collection, partly because some of its artists used AI in their work, which critics called hypocritical. He conceded the launch was a “misjudgement,” and the app shut down at the end of 2025.

Brownlee’s stance is best read as pro-AI, anti-hype: the technology is coming and much of it is genuinely good, but products get judged on what they do today, not what the keynote promised.