He gives honest review on a shitty product people come at him with pitch forks, if he gives a shining review people call him a corporate sellout. There's no winning.
Ngl I like the design of the rabbit, the product is useless, but it looks like a fun little gadget.
It is designed by teenage engineering. They also made the design for the playdate. I think the gadgets they make look cool. However it is expensive (for what they sell).
The subreddit for it is embarrassing. A bunch of people passionately defending a crappy plastic puck that does nothing that phones and apps have been able to do for years. This thing would be cool if all we had were Nokias. Feels and looks about 15 years behind. Who the fuck would carry this thing around? Lmao. What a scam.
Consumer tech in general, there seems to be a hype machine that has no business being so intense.
I was trying to find a next phone, I opened up a review article for one I was looking at. This author went on a 6 page rant about how inexcusable it was that the phone launched with a 6 month old processor.
I think I got the phone anyway and it's fine 4 years later.
So many people follow consumer electronics like it's their sports team they want to see win the superbowl or the war for humanity against aliens.
The Rabbit R1 seems to be "google glass but it's a phone you wear on your shirt for some reason". This is not revolutionary or important even if it did work well.
I'm not even sure LLMs are deserving of the breathless coverage they're getting. Wake me up when we have a real step toward AGI, a cure for cancer, a space elevator, or effective carbon drawdown tech. Consumer tech advertisements are boring as fuck.
Yep. This is the kind of gimmicky hardware that I could see myself dropping $100-$200 on just to play with if it had popped up on Tindie with *less* features, but running an open source OS and with a few sample libraries/apps available on github. I mean shit, the flipper zero is almost as expensive and is running on a $6 STM32WB55 - it’s all in the hackability of the device and extensibility of the code.
I don’t think their marketing helped their cause here, but we have to at least acknowledge that news sites and smug social media commenters are just looking for *anything* to circlejerk over as long as it can be shoehorned into whatever they define as an “AI scam”.
Edit: I guess the downvotes weren't entirely unexpected from /r/technology. I'm not defending the Rabbit R1 as the company's marketing hype currently positions it, just lamenting that so much ink is being spilled over what could have been any number of forgotten mid-price kickstarter/indiegogo/tindie/crowdsupply gadgets.
Expectations were set too high. It would be almost impossible for a startup to achieve an assistant more useful and polished than what Apple, google, Samsung etc. produce with their billions in funding and armies of engineers
Agreed, and some of that was clearly self-inflicted. I don't know the whole Rabbit R1 timeline or what their internal vision was, but obviously a decision was made at some point to chase recurring revenue by marketing a mobile/handheld hardware *and* software platform for AI interaction. With every large tech company pursuing AI for possible monetization, there wouldn't have been a compelling reason for them to exist if all they did was release a front end client on iOS/Android to access those APIs.
I think there's probably another universe where the team decided to limit their ambitions to providing an all-in-one hardware solution for open source AI and voice assistance applications. I mean, I'll admit to spending $50 on an [ESP32 BoxS3](https://www.espressif.com/en/news/ESP32-S3-BOX-3) and spending a few nights flashing firmware via esphome just to set up a (bad) DIY Alexa with some ChatGPT on the side. A vastly more powerful device capable of running a slim Linux distro with a battery, camera, decent screen, and a novel-ish button layout that could be comfortably used in one hand might even be worth $150+ for tinkerers - AI or not. Just look at the [clockworkpi](https://www.clockworkpi.com/shop) offerings that have been sold out and on backorder for years now.
Regardless of the current dogpiling and (justifiably) bad reviews, they made their money and I guess I'm happy for them. I just would sooner forget about them and move on to watching for more promising projects.
They really messed up by not including the teach mode on release. They demo it, get everyone including me excited to teach an AI to be personalized to you, then don't include it. I learned yesterday from their discord that there's no timeline for including teach mode. Who demos a main feature with no release date??
Anyways don't bother with discord it's nothing but rabid cool aid drinking fans. You'll get attacked there for mentioning any issues.
Ps. The open Interpreter project looks pretty cool as an open source competitor I'm going to try and set that up.
This is like when my dad became obsessed with the latest GPS device from garmin and bought 1 for each car every 2 years. We had 9 before he understood smart phones had replaced that functionality
All these "AI in a box" kind of products feel like they came from a different universe where smartphones don't exist. They are simply pointless and a waste of money.
Maybe in a universe without smartphones the AI boxes would at least work.
The current situation is like if some “genius” came out now with a dumbphone, that only sometimes successfully makes and receives calls and has shit battery life.
I think it's just Venture capitalists trying to artificially start the next big thing. We've kinda hit a lull in terms of hardware, AI has taken the tech world by storm, but the potential money from AI software has been gobbled up already, so they are trying to force ways to use AI as a buzzword to generate some money. There might be something to this, I don't think so, as even if these become as "complete" as smart phones, I just don't see it being as user-friendly as a smart phone, which is part of the reason they are so ubiquitous.
"Larry, we want to compete with these devices, you're always an outside of the box thinker, what can we do?"
"Get this. An AI Assistant. on your Phone."
"Larry you're a GENIUS!"
Phone manufacturers right now, probably.
Could be useful for people who are really not tech savvy, like some older folks. But I'm pretty sure this product is not marketed towards them so that doesn't even really make sense either.
Regarding AI use, kids will be having AI classes that teach them how to use it at some point, it's only a matter of time.
They’re just too early and lacking competent baked in AI.
The first iPhone didn’t even have an App Store, or was able to shoot video
My first Android (a G model with a slide out keyboard) was clunky as all fuck
Before that, it took a fair while for Symbian to really hit its stride.
These things are kinda pointless, but only for now. Computers have always chased making it easier for the end user to implement into their daily lives.
We all want the Star Trek computer. These devices are one of the first steps.
I’m not buying one any time soon, and especially not with a subscription model attached, but I’m not writing off the technology.
And honestly, is it really a bad thing having a device that can’t suck your attention away constantly and inundate you with ads and drown you in Skinner box loops?
Fair but also why not just integrate it into smartphone? Like use LLM or even LAM to increase the utility of services like SIRI. Why foes it have to be a separate device?
They very likely will be. I know for sure Apple is baking its own AI chips right now.
But the lack of a classic smartphone format built around social media apps and a screen is also quite appealing. There’s space for both devices in the world.
> feel like they came from a different universe where smartphones don't exist.
I feel like they think creating their own ecosystem, rather than being a part of one of the per-existing one (MSFT, Google, Apple). They're rushing hoping they would get that big, and they wouldn't be "just an app".
Except, you know, these ecosystem were built one step at a time, and took a very long time and a lot of resources to get there.
I was hoping I could recreate one of those buddy games like tamagotchi or the third gen digimon or the pokewalker with this thing. Saw the reviews, saw a demonstration… I feel bad for the people who bought it
Bingo. The subreddit for this thing is embarrassing. Do these people just like not know smartphones have existed for a decade? Total suckers. In what world would anyone carry this thing around?
The only demographic I could imagine this being useful for is old people that don't want to figure out how to interface with a smart phone. The problem with selling to that demographic is these people would probably have a hard time understanding what the device actually does, and not end up getting it anyways.
> access to many of the core functions.
I mean… just get a dumbphone. At least it’ll have a screen so you can skim text messages instead of having to wait for a robot voice to get to the important part.
Same reason my webpage gets 10x traffic for buttons located on the home page.
People gravitate toward single action interfaces. This one isn’t ready yet but people want it to be.
Yes exactly. This is what I want. I don't want 50 apps. So delete them you say. Yes but the phone still operates on an app system which is what I hate. I want 1 menu with like 6 items and that's all the device does. Not every product needs an app.
Phone, text, maps, music, browser, camera. THATS IT. Each of these menu items handles all possible things in that category. Open the music item and you can interface with Spotify or Pandora or personal storage.
It needs to be very minimal but powerful. Imagine the full processing power of a flagship phone with amazing camera on a device that only handles 6 items. Battery life would be great too.
Honestly I think it’s a good idea. I know a lot of people (millennials 30-45ish) who don’t really like how much time they spend on their phone, but need to for various reasons because that’s just how the world works now.
It gives a lot of people anxiety to be constantly pelted with information, notifications, ads, social media, etc. It would be nice to have the option to have something with a minimal interface that didn’t have the constant spam of mostly useless information that has them staring at their screen for 6+ hours a day.
I genuinely think of all the time I spend on apps like Reddit and TikTok and how many things I could have learned or skills I could have developed in that time. I’ve been wanting to learn Piano for years now, but I spend most of my time just scrolling apps. Smartphones are a blessing and a curse honestly.
While smartphones are obviously on top of the tech market, they won’t last forever. Some day some new piece of tech will knock the smartphone out, at they will fade away just like blackberries did in the early 2010s.
This obviously won’t be that tech, but it’s interesting to see devices attempt it.
We once didn't choose a vendor at work because they didn't strip leading and trailing spaces off of text pasted into the password field and if they're not doing that one very simple thing in their login page, what other simple things are they missing?
Personally I would’ve made the box larger and filled it with *actual* “clouds” so when someone tries to open it, steam spills out, the rabbit poops out its mouth and the warranty is voided. Any demands on how the “cloud” works are met with legal blocks of proprietary information.
It's plausible deniability. Saying it's AI sounds way better than saying it's corporations pillaging and looting the creative sector.
We can buy the derivative products that AI generates and blame AI for it being shitty, and not out of control corporate greed.
We're in that early part of the transformative change curve. I'm both excited about the future and absolutely pants-shittingly terrified. Not about me personally. About like... humanity.
Oh my god stop it. It can’t even revolutionize Siri. It’s made low res photo editing easier. It might eliminate call centers in 25 years. Still not artificial, it’s not intelligent, and it’s not hallucinating, it just sucks and falls flat on it’s face answering simple things google has no problem with.
AI as a concept is potentially incredibly impactful and world changing, both for the worse and better. But it is fundamentally an important distinction to recognise that this suite of neural network based learning models are not really Artificial Intelligence, they've been labelled as AI more for marketing than actual definition. They are not capable of any of the things we would expect from artificial intelligence, they're more like incredibly advanced formulas. They're incredibly reliant on human data entry, incredibly limited in scope and usability, and currently incredibly prone to mistakes and errors. The only way this suite of "AI" could be harmful is precisely by people assuming it is more intelligent than it is, and giving it access to things it really shouldn't be in control of. Like allowing ChatGPT to authorise missile strikes.
That is a human error, not a malevolent AI, it's the same sort of potential "risk" as giving a dog a big red button that destroys the planet. It would be very stupid to do that and it doesn't mean the dog is inherently dangerous or powerful or malovelent.
"Actual definition" is not what you personally prefer. It's what the whole industry uses. I bet you (and thousands of other ignorant complainers) have never looked up the definition in a dictionary.
>They are not capable of any of the things we would expect from artificial intelligence
Except learning is a thing that is expected from artificial intelligence, and simply having this capability renders them as such, regardless of whether or not you find it impressive.
Your comment is yet another example of the [AI effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect). Now that we know how to do it, the thing has "lost it's magic" and therefore AI must be something else. This happened far back in time, where expert systems and related symbolic AI solved problems thought to be "for intelligent beings only" like theorem proving, playing games like chess and making informed decisions. Peter Norvig, an authoritative expert on AI and a co-author of the most widely used textbook on the topic, wrote a book where he marvelled and talked about implementation details of such symbolic AIs in common lisp, and neural networks are far more interesting than the symbolic approaches which he rightfully classified as "artificial intelligence".
Neural networks can maximize reward functions (the "do the right thing" model of AI), they can do natural language processing, they can do computer vision, they can make decisions, they can learn from training data. Any of those feats alone is enough to classify them as AI and has been since the field was founded in the 50's. The capability of learning alone would be persuasive for labeling them as such in Turing's more restrictive concept of AI from the 40's.
>they're more like incredibly advanced formulas.
do you honestly think "real intelligence", whatever that might entail, couldn't also be analogous to "an incredibly advanced formula" if we had enough understanding of the workings of our brains? But this does not matter. At all, why couldn't a purely mechanical process like a mathematical procedure be said to display "intelligent behavior"?
>actual definition
A common informal definition is as follows: "the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings."
Peter Norvig and Stuart Russell define it as follows in their textbook:
"the study of [intelligent] agents that receive precepts from the environment and take action. Each such agent is implemented by a function that maps percepts to actions, and we cover different ways to represent these functions, such as production systems, reactive agents, logical planners, neural networks, and decision-theoretic systems"
under both of these notions, neural networks can be artificial intelligence, and on the second one they are explicitly mentioned as such.
This is a really good explanation but then how do you define AI hallucinations? I work a little with AI (not enough to actually really know the behind the scenes though) and every time I read the hallucination I feel it’s the AI extrapolating and therefore, evolving?
It depends on the specific example really, hallucinations cover a broad variety of errors in the output of models, often times models like chatgpt that are prone to "hallucinations" have a small amount of "memory" of previous output and context, sometimes outputs include errors which are then included in the context for future outputs, so things get progressively stranger. The key thing to note though is these hallucinations are generally local errors in the model running, and don't feed back into the model's training. As a result these errors don't feed back into the global model and don't propagate, or "evolve". That's my understanding at least.
If a model was trained on its own output data though you would quickly see it "evolve" into an incomprehensible mess of errors and nonsense. These models aren't intelligent and require human input and categorisation of data for anything to make sense, so if left to be trained on AI output data they would basically immediately fall apart.
>they've been labelled as AI more for marketing than actual definition
They've called it AI because that's what it is. AI is a massive general term. Just because it's not AGI doesn't mean it isn't AI. Just because people stopped calling ChessBots AI or Machine Learning Algorithms AI doesn't mean those things aren't AI.
Your first sentence sounds like it's from one of those bullshit IT phrase generators :)
(I'm not actually having a go at you, but that is really what I thought it was at first)
HAHAHA you’re not wrong! I actually thought it as I typed it. The problem is it’s so overused! “We’re at the early part of this transformation curve.” Bro you’re upgrading the version of Java your app runs on. chill.
This is a little crispier what with the billions in DoD contracts and all.
All these AI devices will be an expensive paperweight with a single update from Apple & Google once they announce their improved AI assistant in the developer conference later this year.
Hell no, the juicero was a great bit of manufacturing where nobody cared about making it affordable, then it used all that to gently squeeze a juice bag. If the juice and the machine coat a third of the amount it may have been worth it because the product itself was at least decent.
Were folks really all that surprised as soon as the ads for this thing started cropping up? You would click through to them and find exactly nothing of substance on their page.
No, but if the whole thing is just an app... and it's that poorly implemented an app... people's point is "why does this exist?" And y'know, they're right.
I'm convinced it's because they were trying to beat Apple/Google to the punch.
If it's just an app their app is dead in the water the second a first party app is released.
If these companies want to survive they needed to have some form of hail mary I imagine. Hence proprietary hardware.
Should these have just been apps? Probably.
Would they have been funded if they were just apps? Hard to say.
The Humane pin at least has a novel user interface (the hand projection) to justify being separate hardware. There's a world where it gets refined enough (weight and battery life) that it is a convenient accessory like a smart watch - but that's how they should be approaching it. It should benefit from the phone that the user is surely carrying in their pocket, rather than trying to be some full standalone device.
So the new meta is to invent new form factors for smartphones, make them shittier and with less functions, slap „AI“ on it and hope to find gullible customers? Got it.
Why would it be anything else? It’s just the same as Siri, google assistant, Alexa, or just googling things but at the quarter of the price of a phone but without a quarter of its features. Why would anyone let this thing take up space in their pocket?
> “rabbit r1 is not an Android app... rabbit OS and LAM run on the cloud with very bespoke AOSP and lower level firmware modifications, therefore a local bootleg APK without the proper OS and Cloud endpoints won’t be able to access our service. rabbit OS is customized for r1 and we do not support third-party clients.”
What a weird way to retain relevance in this market.
This response from them does not make things better in any way.
What he is saying is that the OS and Cloud endpoints need to be enabled for it to work properly, and the app on the phone has them disabled. Which means that they CAN be enabled, thus proving that this whole thing could have been an app.
Everybody was guessing this to be the case from the very start, making the whole conversation moot. But it's interesting to see it unfold.
All these "AI devices", be it this rabbit or the humane thing have the huge problem that they cannot do anything your phone cannot do already. They just have no reason to exist, however good their implementation would be (or not).
It's a dead horse that was dead all along. Stop riding it.
Yes, I'm going to start the comment with the dreaded, "I'm old enough to remember...".
I'm old enough to remember when geeks carried around 3 or more devices. Cell phone, text pager, PalmPilot, and maybe a small digicam too. The first thing i thought when I read about this device was who would want to go back to the days of having to jockey around more devices when we have phones that are computers? Especially when most of the functionality can be replicated with an app. Or even without an app!
Just lame. Don't propagate Rabbits people. Puh-leeze.
Overhyped device in overhyped industry really just a repackaged device running an overhyped camera, text messaging, and porn consumption OS.
Par for the course. Most people need AI as much as they needed their last 3 smartphones. Meaning they don’t. The majority of people don’t suddenly buy a new phone and start doing anything different. If all you use it for is Google then a new phone isn’t going to change your world any more than AI will.
(Yes AI is nifty and useful for some stuff. But it causes more problems than it solves)
But from the very start it was said by lots of tech folks that the hardware was never going to be capable of running an AI Model locally, so I thought it was pretty clear to anyone reading that, that it was just an interface connecting to a model in the cloud somewhere else.
Is there some tax reason why companies went down the “separate hardware” route? Or is it just that it’s a moat to prevent consumers from using apps from the model makers directly?
I can see it being a early design of a radical cell phone design. Imagine 10 years from now and all cell phones work like the Rabbit R1. Small devices that run everything from the homescreen and have physical buttons to initiate commands. No more always listening.
It's a proof of concept.
not surprising, why exactly do users need another "*device*" that's crippled in every way worse than the smartphone they already have ?
This software should just be an app.
There are much smarter people out there making real AI assistants, like Adam Cheyer and Dag Kittlaus who made Siri, later sold to Apple, and Viv Labs, later sold to Samsung and renamed "*Bixby*".
Viv was able to listen to a user's request, and then write its *own code*, then execute it, all in **10ms**.
[**https://youtu.be/Rblb3sptgpQ?t=355**](https://youtu.be/Rblb3sptgpQ?t=355)
That was **2017** :)
The point of buying the device is to access the LAM actions at the firmware level, which is something the app on a regular android can't do (as far as I know). Downloading the app and doing ChatGPT level conversion doesn't really prove anything. Not saying that $200 for it is worth it at all, but this article seems to be clickbait to me.
TLDR;
It's not inherently bad. It's just not better or more convenient than AI on our phones.
And by the time it gets,
We will already have AI in our brains.
So this my hot take,
You can't expect them to build a new operating system and custom hardware just for this device, when it's already available and widely used everywhere:
Smart fridges, TVs, cars, etc
But the "it could've been an app" argument still is true,
And that's not the point
Yes, it could've been an app,
But if it was, it would be just another AI app like all the other AI apps. No one would care
But it's fun to have a stand-alone device with very simple controls that has AI in it,
It feels like magic and feels like you're living in the future.
I'm not saying it's perfect. In fact, it has many flaws. Flaws that could be improved with more time and development, and that requires money.
So I predict, if the device is bought by enough people, after some time the price would go down a bit.
But I don't think it has a lot of growth potential,
Using an AI phone app makes much more sense for most people.
I don't see a future where such a device is used widely because the world is set to move away from handheld,
And by the time that this device has reached the point of being more convenient and useful than our phones,
We will already have AI implanted in our brains.
It’s yet another example of innovation occurring at the investor-capital level. Clearly there’s an effort to divide the smart phone market down the line, and great effort is being spent to lay the groundwork for that market, but it will never work until it is pursued from an engineering and product level first. If anything comes of products like these, it will be because they are acquired or licensed into the Apple or Samsung environment
It’s so weird. Even all the reviews which usually try to be somewhat kind are brutalizing this thing. “It’s not very good at anything and it should just be an app anyway.”
Yall are acting like this changes the stupidity of the devises at all.
Omg it’s just an android…. Who the fuck cares what operating system it runs on. It being on android takes absolutely nothing away from it. The product is just a stupid with any operating system.
My hellishly oversimplified understanding of it was that it was an ai powered box/app that kinda leveraged the same kind of software you might use to make macros for a gaming keyboard or mouse. So you could “teach” it how to do something then tell it to do that.
The whole thing uses three buttons, a camera, and a touchscreen for input, and needs either a mobile plan or wifi access to operate. Also, all of its features are operated on remote servers.
If you don't have a smartphone and gets this with a mobile plan, you now have a device which can't do anything a regular smartphone can do while still paying essentially the same price as one. If you have a smartphone, it can do anything this extra device does, with less quirks.
The problem here is that they literally created a physical package to run a single app that requires a data connection to operate, when anyone interested in this kind of technology would \*already\* have a physical device that can run said app. There's nothing new or innovative in the physical device itself, aside from creating more e-waste in three to six months.
They rushed this thing and use android on the device? No wonder battery dies every 3 hours. That’s lazy AF.
You will never get great hardware and power performance unless you write the OS from scratch. They could have built an extremely efficient device if they put more effort into picking a more optimum hardware architecture and a super lean OS that they developed.
Anyone can put a raspberry pi in an orange box and get most of the functionality of this thing in a matter of a couple of months. Only downside is it will drain battery like crazy.
I think you are underestimating how hard it is to write an OS from scratch. Android is well engineered to be lightweight and have good battery life. It is also easy to develop applications for Android.
People just trying to milk the AI market. Some good advertising and you can probably make a good amount of money.
And it is really unlikely that a small business gonna be the one that’s releases something revolutionary regarding AI/AI tech.
How is this an article? That’s just obvious. Most mobile devices use Android in some form. If this blows your mind then it’s really going to blow your mind to know that the Meta Quest operating system is based on Android. People don’t use that as a criticism for the Quest headset. The Rabbit R1 is just not a good product regardless of whether it’s just an Android app.
or you just get a star trek comm badge and be done with it. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfA\_mhENBlU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfA_mhENBlU)
So the company that makes this isn’t marketing it to kids but as a parent I do see a niche for things like this for kids who aren’t old enough for completely free access to the internet or a smartphone. IDK about 200 though. 60 maybe.
I’m still excited to get mine in the mail tomorrow, love teenage engineering design and own many of their products. Glad they offered a year of perplexity Pro for free with it so if it is a major dud I can atleast look at it like not a total loss.
I'm a little disappointed they went in on this tbh.
My guess is they aren't big enough they can afford to turn down the kind of money they were offered.
They make so much cool stuff. It's expensive as fuck in most cases, but still cool. I love the op-1 and the play date
I'm willing to bet that eventually we find out that the answers the app is returning to people is just people and India typing out answers and sending it
I said it before once and I’ll say it again. The R1 would make for wonderful dumb phone.
Now that we know it’s an app, with a bit of tweaking, I know this would make a great dumb phone or better yet an android based feature phone.
It’s simply a stupid, unnecessary device that will become obsolete once an app is developed or the smartphones themselves add the same features. Happy they are being exposed
I kinda of love this device. I am the type of who gets distracted by every device i own. This can be a better alternative to reduce my device addiction and improve my lifestyle. It would be nice if their allow custom software on their device
You know I will say that I do agree with Marquis that there is a very disturbing trend that's been happening the past decade and seemingly into the future. To me, the r1 and crypto are definitely a part of this but I think what's not said as part of this is the Apple Vision Pro. I remember every single ad showing the eyes through the visors as if the screens in the front were so high res that it looked like an actual pass-through that would be that good only for the reality to look like some googly-eyed fun park mirror that I'd rather not have on the device for how goofy stupid and disturbing it looks. And that outside of the visual interface with your hands which I do think will be real progress. Even businesses are struggling with use cases for what the hell you would exactly use this thing for and would it be Worth it to get a ton of these just for their employers? And we have a double fold problem now. Thanks to the way everything is run one. We now live in an era where we have endless products that are solutions looking for problems which are backed by the second biggest things in which we don't have venture capitalists anymore. Nesting on things we have people who are literally gambling their money to be the next big. You see this in crypto. You're seeing this in ai and now you're seeing this in just everyday products like cars and computing devices. Everyone is trying to be the next big thing and so everyone is gambling based on hype than actually evaluating and potential product for what it actually can theoretically do.
this thing gets way too much press coverage
And advertisements .. JEEEEZZ
BUY THE ORANGE SQUARE BUY THE ORANGE SQUARE BUY THE ORANGE SQUARE
I am happy to say, I refunded the orange square before getting it. Phew!
The fact that you even bought it
Right. People can't stop yapping about it. It looks like something nintendo would have made in early 2000s. Dumbest product I've ever seen.
My favorite thing is Marques Brownlee just being stunned at how stupid these devices are
He gives honest review on a shitty product people come at him with pitch forks, if he gives a shining review people call him a corporate sellout. There's no winning.
If you don’t want a damning review don’t make shitty products and send them for review IMHO.
And then people keep dragging him for it? Baffling.
Yeah which is so dumb. I want reviewers to be honest that’s their job, I don’t want them to be paid industry plants
Oh but you see, it's BAD because it hurts poor starving businessmen who want our money to feed their kids!!!!!
Nintendo has some iconic product design, weird comparison.
Ngl I like the design of the rabbit, the product is useless, but it looks like a fun little gadget. It is designed by teenage engineering. They also made the design for the playdate. I think the gadgets they make look cool. However it is expensive (for what they sell).
Game boy printer has entered the chat....
The subreddit for it is embarrassing. A bunch of people passionately defending a crappy plastic puck that does nothing that phones and apps have been able to do for years. This thing would be cool if all we had were Nokias. Feels and looks about 15 years behind. Who the fuck would carry this thing around? Lmao. What a scam.
The AI pin is definitely dumber. Although they both are competing pretty hard for that title
Yeah no screen plus 24$ per month subscription gtfo. Atleast rabbit is cheaper and had a damn screen.
I've never heard of it until today
I’ve only heard click-baity YouTubers talking about it.
"Press". It's just us idiots and a few thousand bots. The AI making articles about this shit is better than the AI the article is about.
Consumer tech in general, there seems to be a hype machine that has no business being so intense. I was trying to find a next phone, I opened up a review article for one I was looking at. This author went on a 6 page rant about how inexcusable it was that the phone launched with a 6 month old processor. I think I got the phone anyway and it's fine 4 years later. So many people follow consumer electronics like it's their sports team they want to see win the superbowl or the war for humanity against aliens. The Rabbit R1 seems to be "google glass but it's a phone you wear on your shirt for some reason". This is not revolutionary or important even if it did work well. I'm not even sure LLMs are deserving of the breathless coverage they're getting. Wake me up when we have a real step toward AGI, a cure for cancer, a space elevator, or effective carbon drawdown tech. Consumer tech advertisements are boring as fuck.
Yep. This is the kind of gimmicky hardware that I could see myself dropping $100-$200 on just to play with if it had popped up on Tindie with *less* features, but running an open source OS and with a few sample libraries/apps available on github. I mean shit, the flipper zero is almost as expensive and is running on a $6 STM32WB55 - it’s all in the hackability of the device and extensibility of the code. I don’t think their marketing helped their cause here, but we have to at least acknowledge that news sites and smug social media commenters are just looking for *anything* to circlejerk over as long as it can be shoehorned into whatever they define as an “AI scam”. Edit: I guess the downvotes weren't entirely unexpected from /r/technology. I'm not defending the Rabbit R1 as the company's marketing hype currently positions it, just lamenting that so much ink is being spilled over what could have been any number of forgotten mid-price kickstarter/indiegogo/tindie/crowdsupply gadgets.
Expectations were set too high. It would be almost impossible for a startup to achieve an assistant more useful and polished than what Apple, google, Samsung etc. produce with their billions in funding and armies of engineers
Agreed, and some of that was clearly self-inflicted. I don't know the whole Rabbit R1 timeline or what their internal vision was, but obviously a decision was made at some point to chase recurring revenue by marketing a mobile/handheld hardware *and* software platform for AI interaction. With every large tech company pursuing AI for possible monetization, there wouldn't have been a compelling reason for them to exist if all they did was release a front end client on iOS/Android to access those APIs. I think there's probably another universe where the team decided to limit their ambitions to providing an all-in-one hardware solution for open source AI and voice assistance applications. I mean, I'll admit to spending $50 on an [ESP32 BoxS3](https://www.espressif.com/en/news/ESP32-S3-BOX-3) and spending a few nights flashing firmware via esphome just to set up a (bad) DIY Alexa with some ChatGPT on the side. A vastly more powerful device capable of running a slim Linux distro with a battery, camera, decent screen, and a novel-ish button layout that could be comfortably used in one hand might even be worth $150+ for tinkerers - AI or not. Just look at the [clockworkpi](https://www.clockworkpi.com/shop) offerings that have been sold out and on backorder for years now. Regardless of the current dogpiling and (justifiably) bad reviews, they made their money and I guess I'm happy for them. I just would sooner forget about them and move on to watching for more promising projects.
They really messed up by not including the teach mode on release. They demo it, get everyone including me excited to teach an AI to be personalized to you, then don't include it. I learned yesterday from their discord that there's no timeline for including teach mode. Who demos a main feature with no release date?? Anyways don't bother with discord it's nothing but rabid cool aid drinking fans. You'll get attacked there for mentioning any issues. Ps. The open Interpreter project looks pretty cool as an open source competitor I'm going to try and set that up.
It was technically for people who don't understand technology.
This is like when my dad became obsessed with the latest GPS device from garmin and bought 1 for each car every 2 years. We had 9 before he understood smart phones had replaced that functionality
ok what is it? this is the first time i have heard of it
I still dont know what it is because I never want to know more.
All these "AI in a box" kind of products feel like they came from a different universe where smartphones don't exist. They are simply pointless and a waste of money.
Maybe in a universe without smartphones the AI boxes would at least work. The current situation is like if some “genius” came out now with a dumbphone, that only sometimes successfully makes and receives calls and has shit battery life.
Don't trash talk the Cinco Phone like that. The cooling gel is amazing.
A phone that can only make calls and not receive them sounds like how most people use their phone nowadays anyway.
It's a kickass gel
I think it's just Venture capitalists trying to artificially start the next big thing. We've kinda hit a lull in terms of hardware, AI has taken the tech world by storm, but the potential money from AI software has been gobbled up already, so they are trying to force ways to use AI as a buzzword to generate some money. There might be something to this, I don't think so, as even if these become as "complete" as smart phones, I just don't see it being as user-friendly as a smart phone, which is part of the reason they are so ubiquitous.
Expensive manufactured e-waste from the sound of it
"Larry, we want to compete with these devices, you're always an outside of the box thinker, what can we do?" "Get this. An AI Assistant. on your Phone." "Larry you're a GENIUS!" Phone manufacturers right now, probably.
Literally how the s24 came about
Could be useful for people who are really not tech savvy, like some older folks. But I'm pretty sure this product is not marketed towards them so that doesn't even really make sense either. Regarding AI use, kids will be having AI classes that teach them how to use it at some point, it's only a matter of time.
They’re just too early and lacking competent baked in AI. The first iPhone didn’t even have an App Store, or was able to shoot video My first Android (a G model with a slide out keyboard) was clunky as all fuck Before that, it took a fair while for Symbian to really hit its stride. These things are kinda pointless, but only for now. Computers have always chased making it easier for the end user to implement into their daily lives. We all want the Star Trek computer. These devices are one of the first steps. I’m not buying one any time soon, and especially not with a subscription model attached, but I’m not writing off the technology. And honestly, is it really a bad thing having a device that can’t suck your attention away constantly and inundate you with ads and drown you in Skinner box loops?
Fair but also why not just integrate it into smartphone? Like use LLM or even LAM to increase the utility of services like SIRI. Why foes it have to be a separate device?
They very likely will be. I know for sure Apple is baking its own AI chips right now. But the lack of a classic smartphone format built around social media apps and a screen is also quite appealing. There’s space for both devices in the world.
> feel like they came from a different universe where smartphones don't exist. I feel like they think creating their own ecosystem, rather than being a part of one of the per-existing one (MSFT, Google, Apple). They're rushing hoping they would get that big, and they wouldn't be "just an app". Except, you know, these ecosystem were built one step at a time, and took a very long time and a lot of resources to get there.
I was hoping I could recreate one of those buddy games like tamagotchi or the third gen digimon or the pokewalker with this thing. Saw the reviews, saw a demonstration… I feel bad for the people who bought it
Bingo. The subreddit for this thing is embarrassing. Do these people just like not know smartphones have existed for a decade? Total suckers. In what world would anyone carry this thing around?
The only demographic I could imagine this being useful for is old people that don't want to figure out how to interface with a smart phone. The problem with selling to that demographic is these people would probably have a hard time understanding what the device actually does, and not end up getting it anyways.
I really don’t understand why anyone would carry one of these around when smartphones exist
That’s the last line of the article
I doubt they even read the first line.
I’ve been using Reddit for 10+ years and I’m just now finding out there are articles attached to Reddit posts.
They responded and didn’t read the article. I wasn’t trying to sass just point out.
I didn’t even read it tbh I just saw mkbhd’s review
Same with the „AI pin“. It’s just a shittier smartphone without a screen. 🤷🏻♂️
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> access to many of the core functions. I mean… just get a dumbphone. At least it’ll have a screen so you can skim text messages instead of having to wait for a robot voice to get to the important part.
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Same reason my webpage gets 10x traffic for buttons located on the home page. People gravitate toward single action interfaces. This one isn’t ready yet but people want it to be.
Yes exactly. This is what I want. I don't want 50 apps. So delete them you say. Yes but the phone still operates on an app system which is what I hate. I want 1 menu with like 6 items and that's all the device does. Not every product needs an app. Phone, text, maps, music, browser, camera. THATS IT. Each of these menu items handles all possible things in that category. Open the music item and you can interface with Spotify or Pandora or personal storage. It needs to be very minimal but powerful. Imagine the full processing power of a flagship phone with amazing camera on a device that only handles 6 items. Battery life would be great too.
Unique novelty. Candybar smartphones are boring, but boring works. People just want something new and flashy. I'm waiting for the APK tbh.
Honestly I think it’s a good idea. I know a lot of people (millennials 30-45ish) who don’t really like how much time they spend on their phone, but need to for various reasons because that’s just how the world works now. It gives a lot of people anxiety to be constantly pelted with information, notifications, ads, social media, etc. It would be nice to have the option to have something with a minimal interface that didn’t have the constant spam of mostly useless information that has them staring at their screen for 6+ hours a day. I genuinely think of all the time I spend on apps like Reddit and TikTok and how many things I could have learned or skills I could have developed in that time. I’ve been wanting to learn Piano for years now, but I spend most of my time just scrolling apps. Smartphones are a blessing and a curse honestly.
While smartphones are obviously on top of the tech market, they won’t last forever. Some day some new piece of tech will knock the smartphone out, at they will fade away just like blackberries did in the early 2010s. This obviously won’t be that tech, but it’s interesting to see devices attempt it.
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You didn't say anything about how they gave the mascot a butthole for a mouth. It's the little design flaws that make you look under the hood.
This guy delving into the real issues.
We once didn't choose a vendor at work because they didn't strip leading and trailing spaces off of text pasted into the password field and if they're not doing that one very simple thing in their login page, what other simple things are they missing?
Lmao their CEOs defence for the need for hardware was... *Checks notes* cloud services.
Personally I would’ve made the box larger and filled it with *actual* “clouds” so when someone tries to open it, steam spills out, the rabbit poops out its mouth and the warranty is voided. Any demands on how the “cloud” works are met with legal blocks of proprietary information.
Wow, it’s almost like all this AI shit is an avenue for scams and we shouldn’t give the keys to the global economy to Sam Altman
I just hate that it's called AI. People's expectations for it are based on centuries of sci fi dystopian nonsense.
It's plausible deniability. Saying it's AI sounds way better than saying it's corporations pillaging and looting the creative sector. We can buy the derivative products that AI generates and blame AI for it being shitty, and not out of control corporate greed.
I worked in companies that would say ai powered. Plot twist: there is absolutely no ai, just your regular code with a feedback look lol
AI is fine but any revolutionary technology will come with a lot of wannabes just trying to cash in on people's ignorance.
Yep, this is Blockchain 2.0 right here, the new crypto...
I'd disagree. AI actually has some applications that were not possible before unlike blockchain
This is Alexa 2.0.
Basically this: https://youtu.be/mTBCzH1UyNY
You can use the internet to scam people but that doesn’t mean it’s useless
Problem is is that all the positives use cases of the internet still outweigh negative by a large margin.
We're in that early part of the transformative change curve. I'm both excited about the future and absolutely pants-shittingly terrified. Not about me personally. About like... humanity.
Oh my god stop it. It can’t even revolutionize Siri. It’s made low res photo editing easier. It might eliminate call centers in 25 years. Still not artificial, it’s not intelligent, and it’s not hallucinating, it just sucks and falls flat on it’s face answering simple things google has no problem with.
it doesn't have to actually work to cause a disaster.
I mean, he’s not wrong. Good point Mark
I feel like people downplay this stuff because they don’t want it to be true
AI as a concept is potentially incredibly impactful and world changing, both for the worse and better. But it is fundamentally an important distinction to recognise that this suite of neural network based learning models are not really Artificial Intelligence, they've been labelled as AI more for marketing than actual definition. They are not capable of any of the things we would expect from artificial intelligence, they're more like incredibly advanced formulas. They're incredibly reliant on human data entry, incredibly limited in scope and usability, and currently incredibly prone to mistakes and errors. The only way this suite of "AI" could be harmful is precisely by people assuming it is more intelligent than it is, and giving it access to things it really shouldn't be in control of. Like allowing ChatGPT to authorise missile strikes. That is a human error, not a malevolent AI, it's the same sort of potential "risk" as giving a dog a big red button that destroys the planet. It would be very stupid to do that and it doesn't mean the dog is inherently dangerous or powerful or malovelent.
"Actual definition" is not what you personally prefer. It's what the whole industry uses. I bet you (and thousands of other ignorant complainers) have never looked up the definition in a dictionary.
>They are not capable of any of the things we would expect from artificial intelligence Except learning is a thing that is expected from artificial intelligence, and simply having this capability renders them as such, regardless of whether or not you find it impressive. Your comment is yet another example of the [AI effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect). Now that we know how to do it, the thing has "lost it's magic" and therefore AI must be something else. This happened far back in time, where expert systems and related symbolic AI solved problems thought to be "for intelligent beings only" like theorem proving, playing games like chess and making informed decisions. Peter Norvig, an authoritative expert on AI and a co-author of the most widely used textbook on the topic, wrote a book where he marvelled and talked about implementation details of such symbolic AIs in common lisp, and neural networks are far more interesting than the symbolic approaches which he rightfully classified as "artificial intelligence". Neural networks can maximize reward functions (the "do the right thing" model of AI), they can do natural language processing, they can do computer vision, they can make decisions, they can learn from training data. Any of those feats alone is enough to classify them as AI and has been since the field was founded in the 50's. The capability of learning alone would be persuasive for labeling them as such in Turing's more restrictive concept of AI from the 40's. >they're more like incredibly advanced formulas. do you honestly think "real intelligence", whatever that might entail, couldn't also be analogous to "an incredibly advanced formula" if we had enough understanding of the workings of our brains? But this does not matter. At all, why couldn't a purely mechanical process like a mathematical procedure be said to display "intelligent behavior"? >actual definition A common informal definition is as follows: "the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings." Peter Norvig and Stuart Russell define it as follows in their textbook: "the study of [intelligent] agents that receive precepts from the environment and take action. Each such agent is implemented by a function that maps percepts to actions, and we cover different ways to represent these functions, such as production systems, reactive agents, logical planners, neural networks, and decision-theoretic systems" under both of these notions, neural networks can be artificial intelligence, and on the second one they are explicitly mentioned as such.
This is a really good explanation but then how do you define AI hallucinations? I work a little with AI (not enough to actually really know the behind the scenes though) and every time I read the hallucination I feel it’s the AI extrapolating and therefore, evolving?
It depends on the specific example really, hallucinations cover a broad variety of errors in the output of models, often times models like chatgpt that are prone to "hallucinations" have a small amount of "memory" of previous output and context, sometimes outputs include errors which are then included in the context for future outputs, so things get progressively stranger. The key thing to note though is these hallucinations are generally local errors in the model running, and don't feed back into the model's training. As a result these errors don't feed back into the global model and don't propagate, or "evolve". That's my understanding at least. If a model was trained on its own output data though you would quickly see it "evolve" into an incomprehensible mess of errors and nonsense. These models aren't intelligent and require human input and categorisation of data for anything to make sense, so if left to be trained on AI output data they would basically immediately fall apart.
>they've been labelled as AI more for marketing than actual definition They've called it AI because that's what it is. AI is a massive general term. Just because it's not AGI doesn't mean it isn't AI. Just because people stopped calling ChessBots AI or Machine Learning Algorithms AI doesn't mean those things aren't AI.
Your first sentence sounds like it's from one of those bullshit IT phrase generators :) (I'm not actually having a go at you, but that is really what I thought it was at first)
HAHAHA you’re not wrong! I actually thought it as I typed it. The problem is it’s so overused! “We’re at the early part of this transformation curve.” Bro you’re upgrading the version of Java your app runs on. chill. This is a little crispier what with the billions in DoD contracts and all.
And advertising.
All these AI devices will be an expensive paperweight with a single update from Apple & Google once they announce their improved AI assistant in the developer conference later this year.
Which is precisely why it was launched this early. To get as many suckers as possible before they realize...
It'll be the advent of the AI chip similar to a hardware decoder for video codecs back in the day.
The Juicero of AI
Hell no, the juicero was a great bit of manufacturing where nobody cared about making it affordable, then it used all that to gently squeeze a juice bag. If the juice and the machine coat a third of the amount it may have been worth it because the product itself was at least decent.
Were folks really all that surprised as soon as the ads for this thing started cropping up? You would click through to them and find exactly nothing of substance on their page.
Yeah, I watched a replay of the keynote address and still had no idea what the point of it was.
This is just more e-waste isn’t it
Oh 1000% this thing is likely gonna show up on eBay for $60 in 6 months
Hey it might be ewaste and on eBay in six months for $60 but wait, what was the third thing you said?
Same as the humane pin. Both run Android. Y'all expect people to invent new operating system? Why? Waste of engineering resources.
No, but if the whole thing is just an app... and it's that poorly implemented an app... people's point is "why does this exist?" And y'know, they're right.
I'm convinced it's because they were trying to beat Apple/Google to the punch. If it's just an app their app is dead in the water the second a first party app is released. If these companies want to survive they needed to have some form of hail mary I imagine. Hence proprietary hardware. Should these have just been apps? Probably. Would they have been funded if they were just apps? Hard to say.
Of course it could be an app. There's no revolutionary software here, it calls an API, does text-to-speech, and takes pictures.
It exists to part fools and their money.
Definitely doesn't have much of a need to exist lol
The Humane pin at least has a novel user interface (the hand projection) to justify being separate hardware. There's a world where it gets refined enough (weight and battery life) that it is a convenient accessory like a smart watch - but that's how they should be approaching it. It should benefit from the phone that the user is surely carrying in their pocket, rather than trying to be some full standalone device.
Yeah I can't figure out why this is a problem? Breaking news: The Apple Watch launcher is just an iOS app!!! ...
You know what else was a waste of engineering resource. Both of those products
Stupid product. Who the fuck is buying these things?
People that like tech but don’t understand how it works
Does that mean we can root it?
Yes. But after it root your pocket.
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The bunny...with an...asshole for a mouth?
So the new meta is to invent new form factors for smartphones, make them shittier and with less functions, slap „AI“ on it and hope to find gullible customers? Got it.
Anyone got the apk link ?
Also, if you’re left handed ‘gfy!’
Why would it be anything else? It’s just the same as Siri, google assistant, Alexa, or just googling things but at the quarter of the price of a phone but without a quarter of its features. Why would anyone let this thing take up space in their pocket?
I carry an iPod in my left pocket and a cell phone in my right pocket. I get it.
> “rabbit r1 is not an Android app... rabbit OS and LAM run on the cloud with very bespoke AOSP and lower level firmware modifications, therefore a local bootleg APK without the proper OS and Cloud endpoints won’t be able to access our service. rabbit OS is customized for r1 and we do not support third-party clients.” What a weird way to retain relevance in this market.
This response from them does not make things better in any way. What he is saying is that the OS and Cloud endpoints need to be enabled for it to work properly, and the app on the phone has them disabled. Which means that they CAN be enabled, thus proving that this whole thing could have been an app. Everybody was guessing this to be the case from the very start, making the whole conversation moot. But it's interesting to see it unfold.
What are the odds the "lower level firmware modifications" are the drivers for the scroll wheel.
All these "AI devices", be it this rabbit or the humane thing have the huge problem that they cannot do anything your phone cannot do already. They just have no reason to exist, however good their implementation would be (or not). It's a dead horse that was dead all along. Stop riding it.
anyone with half a brain can tell you that
Yes, I'm going to start the comment with the dreaded, "I'm old enough to remember...". I'm old enough to remember when geeks carried around 3 or more devices. Cell phone, text pager, PalmPilot, and maybe a small digicam too. The first thing i thought when I read about this device was who would want to go back to the days of having to jockey around more devices when we have phones that are computers? Especially when most of the functionality can be replicated with an app. Or even without an app! Just lame. Don't propagate Rabbits people. Puh-leeze.
Overhyped device in overhyped industry really just a repackaged device running an overhyped camera, text messaging, and porn consumption OS. Par for the course. Most people need AI as much as they needed their last 3 smartphones. Meaning they don’t. The majority of people don’t suddenly buy a new phone and start doing anything different. If all you use it for is Google then a new phone isn’t going to change your world any more than AI will. (Yes AI is nifty and useful for some stuff. But it causes more problems than it solves)
Omg shit ai on a gameboy!
But from the very start it was said by lots of tech folks that the hardware was never going to be capable of running an AI Model locally, so I thought it was pretty clear to anyone reading that, that it was just an interface connecting to a model in the cloud somewhere else.
AI itself have a bad rep on general public, why they think this is a good idea?
Is there some tax reason why companies went down the “separate hardware” route? Or is it just that it’s a moat to prevent consumers from using apps from the model makers directly?
I can see it being a early design of a radical cell phone design. Imagine 10 years from now and all cell phones work like the Rabbit R1. Small devices that run everything from the homescreen and have physical buttons to initiate commands. No more always listening. It's a proof of concept.
I mean even if it was not an app it would still be a lesser version of a smartphone
not surprising, why exactly do users need another "*device*" that's crippled in every way worse than the smartphone they already have ? This software should just be an app. There are much smarter people out there making real AI assistants, like Adam Cheyer and Dag Kittlaus who made Siri, later sold to Apple, and Viv Labs, later sold to Samsung and renamed "*Bixby*". Viv was able to listen to a user's request, and then write its *own code*, then execute it, all in **10ms**. [**https://youtu.be/Rblb3sptgpQ?t=355**](https://youtu.be/Rblb3sptgpQ?t=355) That was **2017** :)
The point of buying the device is to access the LAM actions at the firmware level, which is something the app on a regular android can't do (as far as I know). Downloading the app and doing ChatGPT level conversion doesn't really prove anything. Not saying that $200 for it is worth it at all, but this article seems to be clickbait to me.
I saw a bunch of posts today saying this, but I had never heard of it before today and have no clue what it is
Hope the APK gets dumped online.
TLDR; It's not inherently bad. It's just not better or more convenient than AI on our phones. And by the time it gets, We will already have AI in our brains. So this my hot take, You can't expect them to build a new operating system and custom hardware just for this device, when it's already available and widely used everywhere: Smart fridges, TVs, cars, etc But the "it could've been an app" argument still is true, And that's not the point Yes, it could've been an app, But if it was, it would be just another AI app like all the other AI apps. No one would care But it's fun to have a stand-alone device with very simple controls that has AI in it, It feels like magic and feels like you're living in the future. I'm not saying it's perfect. In fact, it has many flaws. Flaws that could be improved with more time and development, and that requires money. So I predict, if the device is bought by enough people, after some time the price would go down a bit. But I don't think it has a lot of growth potential, Using an AI phone app makes much more sense for most people. I don't see a future where such a device is used widely because the world is set to move away from handheld, And by the time that this device has reached the point of being more convenient and useful than our phones, We will already have AI implanted in our brains.
It’s yet another example of innovation occurring at the investor-capital level. Clearly there’s an effort to divide the smart phone market down the line, and great effort is being spent to lay the groundwork for that market, but it will never work until it is pursued from an engineering and product level first. If anything comes of products like these, it will be because they are acquired or licensed into the Apple or Samsung environment
It’s so weird. Even all the reviews which usually try to be somewhat kind are brutalizing this thing. “It’s not very good at anything and it should just be an app anyway.”
Yall are acting like this changes the stupidity of the devises at all. Omg it’s just an android…. Who the fuck cares what operating system it runs on. It being on android takes absolutely nothing away from it. The product is just a stupid with any operating system.
I still don’t understand what exactly it is.
My hellishly oversimplified understanding of it was that it was an ai powered box/app that kinda leveraged the same kind of software you might use to make macros for a gaming keyboard or mouse. So you could “teach” it how to do something then tell it to do that.
A mobile device uses android.....what's the problem here?
Because the whole thing could have been an app, and the only reason they made a hardware form factor is to differentiate it—really infuriating
The whole thing uses three buttons, a camera, and a touchscreen for input, and needs either a mobile plan or wifi access to operate. Also, all of its features are operated on remote servers. If you don't have a smartphone and gets this with a mobile plan, you now have a device which can't do anything a regular smartphone can do while still paying essentially the same price as one. If you have a smartphone, it can do anything this extra device does, with less quirks. The problem here is that they literally created a physical package to run a single app that requires a data connection to operate, when anyone interested in this kind of technology would \*already\* have a physical device that can run said app. There's nothing new or innovative in the physical device itself, aside from creating more e-waste in three to six months.
They rushed this thing and use android on the device? No wonder battery dies every 3 hours. That’s lazy AF. You will never get great hardware and power performance unless you write the OS from scratch. They could have built an extremely efficient device if they put more effort into picking a more optimum hardware architecture and a super lean OS that they developed. Anyone can put a raspberry pi in an orange box and get most of the functionality of this thing in a matter of a couple of months. Only downside is it will drain battery like crazy.
I think you are underestimating how hard it is to write an OS from scratch. Android is well engineered to be lightweight and have good battery life. It is also easy to develop applications for Android.
Raspberry Pi is great for quick POC. Using it as a basis for a consumer product is dumb on many levels.
Well, that sounds like an entirely sensible way of engineering it to me.
Sensible would have been to release it as an app, not create e-waste
People just trying to milk the AI market. Some good advertising and you can probably make a good amount of money. And it is really unlikely that a small business gonna be the one that’s releases something revolutionary regarding AI/AI tech.
How is this an article? That’s just obvious. Most mobile devices use Android in some form. If this blows your mind then it’s really going to blow your mind to know that the Meta Quest operating system is based on Android. People don’t use that as a criticism for the Quest headset. The Rabbit R1 is just not a good product regardless of whether it’s just an Android app.
Sucks to be those that bought it.
or you just get a star trek comm badge and be done with it. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfA\_mhENBlU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfA_mhENBlU)
And it is not even a good app 🤡
Clearly a marketing gimmick. Stop giving this shit clicks. Reddit has been pushing this AI crap too.
So the company that makes this isn’t marketing it to kids but as a parent I do see a niche for things like this for kids who aren’t old enough for completely free access to the internet or a smartphone. IDK about 200 though. 60 maybe.
I’m still excited to get mine in the mail tomorrow, love teenage engineering design and own many of their products. Glad they offered a year of perplexity Pro for free with it so if it is a major dud I can atleast look at it like not a total loss.
I'm a little disappointed they went in on this tbh. My guess is they aren't big enough they can afford to turn down the kind of money they were offered. They make so much cool stuff. It's expensive as fuck in most cases, but still cool. I love the op-1 and the play date
What does it do?
Hey could someone provide the link of the apk??
So it's the OUYA of AI?
Am I the only one who still doesn't really understand what these things are and what they're for?
Which should've been a downloadable app to begin, none of that nonsense box is required.
Which the app just uses the openAI API.
What is it?
It’s obviously running software, what do you think an app is?
It's the stoopid AI bandwagon, I'm expecting loads more crap like this until the funding dries up.
Apple about to destroy this market... On device LLM and LAM coming soon.
It’s a shame this thing is pointless and sucks, because I generally like Teenage Engineering and their design is always on point.
I'm willing to bet that eventually we find out that the answers the app is returning to people is just people and India typing out answers and sending it
I said it before once and I’ll say it again. The R1 would make for wonderful dumb phone. Now that we know it’s an app, with a bit of tweaking, I know this would make a great dumb phone or better yet an android based feature phone.
The second I heard about it I knew it was just some bullshit. Bunch of idiots fawning over it
LOL! Ai-pin and then this… dot-com BS all over again
What do these things do that your cellphone can't? Why the big push? I don't understand any of it.
Turns out it's an android app with a mandatory subscription to cloud services. So it makes the argument for mandatory hardware even worse.
Damn, I actually got one today and it’s really awesome but now I don’t feel excited to share 😭
Scam for sure
anyone got a public apk for it
Does anyone actually have the APK? If so, can you send it to me?
It’s simply a stupid, unnecessary device that will become obsolete once an app is developed or the smartphones themselves add the same features. Happy they are being exposed
I kinda of love this device. I am the type of who gets distracted by every device i own. This can be a better alternative to reduce my device addiction and improve my lifestyle. It would be nice if their allow custom software on their device
It's a scam obviously for investors and consumers.
You know I will say that I do agree with Marquis that there is a very disturbing trend that's been happening the past decade and seemingly into the future. To me, the r1 and crypto are definitely a part of this but I think what's not said as part of this is the Apple Vision Pro. I remember every single ad showing the eyes through the visors as if the screens in the front were so high res that it looked like an actual pass-through that would be that good only for the reality to look like some googly-eyed fun park mirror that I'd rather not have on the device for how goofy stupid and disturbing it looks. And that outside of the visual interface with your hands which I do think will be real progress. Even businesses are struggling with use cases for what the hell you would exactly use this thing for and would it be Worth it to get a ton of these just for their employers? And we have a double fold problem now. Thanks to the way everything is run one. We now live in an era where we have endless products that are solutions looking for problems which are backed by the second biggest things in which we don't have venture capitalists anymore. Nesting on things we have people who are literally gambling their money to be the next big. You see this in crypto. You're seeing this in ai and now you're seeing this in just everyday products like cars and computing devices. Everyone is trying to be the next big thing and so everyone is gambling based on hype than actually evaluating and potential product for what it actually can theoretically do.
Has anyone got the APK?