This $199 AI companion is called the Rabbit R1 and it’s much more than a Tamagotchi on the juice،
January 10, 2024. If you've been keeping tabs on the news in (under)New York and this particular Brooklyn synagogue, you're probably experiencing some thrills right now.
Let’s keep things separate, and instead of “rabbit tunnels,” let’s talk about “rabbit tunnels.”
In the rabbit tunnel there is an AI to find
Even though every year the specifications or features of certain phones impress us, they don't seem to make us lose our minds. Many people say that the phone industry has stagnated and that a major breakthrough, whether in hardware or software, is needed to generate widespread public attention and affection for handsets. A lot of this audience is comfortably stuck with mid-sized products that do the job “very well”… or are simply buying flagship products they're unfamiliar with. Nothing by the way, other than “it’s cool and expensive”. So the need for something new is real. Foldables, high-end cameras or AI: this is what phone manufacturers are obsessed with lately. The last one is probably the most important of all, given that Samsung is bragging 24/7 about the Galaxy S24's alleged AI capabilities and even Bloomberg's Mark Gurman had to criticize Apple for its delay in both on the South Korean giant and on Google. and the Pixel 8 series in this area. A young dreamer named Jesse Lyu goes further and also wants to give you the AI ticket to ride…minus the smartphone experience.
Enter the R1 Rabbit
The edge tells the story of Jesse Lyu, CEO and founder of a AI startup called Rabbit. This company is behind the $199 autonomous AI gadget called R1.
You can call it a Tamagotchi on steroids or a Nintendo on diet pills, but it's so much more: it has a 2.88-inch touchscreen, a rotating camera, a scroll wheel and with a push button on the side. . With AI!
Inside, there's a 2.3GHz MediaTek processor, 4GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a battery that the manufacturers say lasts “all day.”
What tricks can the Rabbit R1 do?
As the report says, the real deal is in the R1's software: it has its own operating system, called Rabbit OS. Instead of the LLM (large language model – ChatGPT-like), the company claims that AI capabilities derive from a “large action model”.
The Large-Scale Action Model, or LAM, was trained by humans interacting with apps like Spotify and Uber, essentially showing the model how they work. The LAM learned what a Settings icon looked like, how to know when a command has been confirmed, and where the search menus are. All of this, Lyu says, can be applied to any application anywhere.
So the Rabbit R1 could potentially be used for many different things, like controlling your music, ordering a car, doing your shopping, sending your messages, searching for maps, making reservations, and much more, “all via a single interface” and give these are voice commands.
And, as CEO Jesse Lyu says, the Rabbit R1 is a “companion” computer, built with the idea of intuitive human-machine interaction at its heart.
Let's see what the future holds for this unique bunny!
