Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone

I am almost never a hater on people trying ambitious things, but man this is one of the most "doomed to fail" things I've ever seen.

You've got absolutely insane market saturation by two major players that have some of the most advanced AI teams on the planet.

Almost nobody is going to buy an "LLM-first phone," they will just wait for Apple or Google to put an LLM into their existing phone.

I think the optimistic take for investors is maybe they make some interesting LLM-phone tech and get acquired?

That seems unlikely given that both Apple and Google have been employing the world's top ML scientists for years, have unlimited budgets, have better access to customers than any startup (to find out what customers want), and ... need I go on? Yes, it's nice that "Rabbit" is exploring this area and being innovative, but unless their particular take on mobile phones catches the world unexpectedly by storm, nobody will mourn their passing when the money runs out later this year.

Is OpenAI a counterexample here?

I don’t think so. Here are some differences:

1. OpenAI is building in a brand new space. Mobile phones are well established. LLMs as a product for consumers are brand new. While it’s true Rabbit are trying to merge LLMs with mobile, the elephant in the room is the mobile incumbency. The existing players just have to add LLMs to their existing dominant platforms and Rabbit is done for. OpenAI, on the other hand, was unopposed launching ChatGPT. They had a genuine technical edge and consumers were hungry for it. Is everyone hungry for Rabbit’s concept? Give me a break.

2. OpenAI raised an order of magnitude more capital. Rabbit’s $30M isn’t going to get them much farther than a prototype device. My impression is the founder here managed to convince some VCs to give him money during the boom times and leveraged the generative AI hype train more recently. But where is he getting his next round? The one that he will need to actually make phones at scale. That will cost billions ultimately, and the incumbents own the supply chain he needs to access. His effort is all but doomed.

3. OpenAI’s formula was easier for a startup to master. All they needed was money for the best AI engineers and scientists and money for GPUs, and they could create a blockbuster product. Rabbit needs the top engineers as well as extensive capital for manufacturing and distribution. There is a reason that hardware favors massive scale and a reason why hardware startups tend to focus on pinpoint innovations. The energy barrier is extreme.

These are three reasons why Rabbit is in an entirely different situation than OpenAI was circa 2022.

They got a huge infusion from Microsoft, so not really.

That seems unlikely given that both Apple and Google have been employing the world's top ML scientists for years, have unlimited budgets, have better access to customers than any startup.

Both of those companies had it handed to them, like, literally got completely smoked by OpenAI, a company with a thousand employees +/- in San Francisco. The giants are incredibly vulnerable, just like the giants that Google and Apple disrupted such as IBM, Yahoo, AOL, etc.

It's a lot harder for startups to win over large companies in hardware, even with a superior product, since shipping hardware is tremendously capital-intensive. An example that comes to mind is Pebble, which had an excellent smartwatch that worked way better than the one from Fitbit, but nevertheless ran out of money and got sold to the latter.

I think an acquisition does seem pretty likely actually. Google still has yet to make assistant do anything interesting, despite leading the way on the research side of things. Also keep in mind that they lost a ton of AI talent to startups.

Rabbit already seem to be in year 4. Over $30M in funding. And the founder/s have prior history in the field.

I could see Meta buying this. They want a device in the 'next generation of devices', whatever that looks like.

That seems unlikely given that both Apple and Google have been employing the world's top ML scientists for years, have unlimited budgets, have better access to customers than any startup (to find out what customers want), and ... need I go on? Yes, it's nice that "Rabbit" is exploring this area and being innovative, but unless their particular take on mobile phones catches the world unexpectedly by storm, nobody will mourn their passing when the money runs out later this year.

I worked with one of the (many) teams at Microsoft who worked on Cortana.

The way the team leader explained it to me is that Cortana could do a lot more, but internal corporate politics prevented it. Rather than implementing the best solutions to user's problems, they had to do things like ensure Bing search handled certain results, to make sure that team stayed happy.

Or to take it to the extreme, if someone at Google came up with a device that directly beamed 100% correct search results into your brain, Google would never release the product because of the loss of search ad revenue.

It’s $199. At that price it could be a viable cool toy like product to have in addition to your normal smartphone.

I don't see it. Base model Pixel 7 can be found in multiple places for $250 right now, so you're not coming in much cheaper than that, but more importantly, I don't really see a whole lot of demand for a second phone even as a cool toy. This feels like the type of thing people would buy, play with for a week or two, and then it would end up in a drawer never to be used again.

I think the target market of this doesn’t overlap with spare pixel 7 buyers, and it’s not meant to be mass market and have a huge demand.

At the moment your right, but as Google starts to implement LLM assistants into their product it's going to eat this things lunch. I would guess maybe 18-24 months max before Google assistant can do everything this thing can and they already have a phone at a similar price. Once that happens, I just don't see what niche this fills into other than "it's not Apple or Google".

That's why I just ordered one. I don't know how it'll turn out, but for the price I'm willing to have a beautiful little fidget toy to play with.

That’s why I’m going to treat this a toy.

My thoughts exactly. I'm willing to give it a try because it's exactly how I imagined a companion device for intelligent note taking. Given that it's a collaboration with TE, I trust the build quality. My only concerns rest in the lack of a subscription given the cloud reliance on the OS, and as I'm sure many others feel, security with a fledgling device and it's interactions as an agent of you is definitely an important consideration.

"Doomed to fail," probably. I certainly never expected to see a product so unabashedly quixotic this side of a zero-interest-rate era. But man, what a crazy swing for the fences this is.

By my reckoning, this approach is probably ten years ahead of its time. I simply cannot imagine that the tech is there right now to make this nearly as seamless as it will need to be to actually supplant the UI paradigms we have today, and it's going to take billions invested by the duopoly to get to that point.

But I really do think this is at least a fuzzy picture of where we're headed. Your iPhone in 2034 won't look like this, but you'll likely be able to trace some things back to it. There are a lot of pieces missing that we barely even know are missing yet, but it's incredibly exciting to see a startup try to jumpstart a step change like this.

Idk, I think an iPhone in ten years will look a lot like it does now just with better Siri. Better Siri will open up a lot of things and it’ll be wonderful but we’ll still want a screen (we’ll still interact with the world largely via reading) and an iPhone just looks like a screen.

Apple and Google presumably know about LLMs so I don’t really see this device being very influential.

I dunno.

I could imagine replacing my iPhone and my laptop with something Rabbit sized and a lightweight set of AR glasses.

But they need far more than the toy “OS” that Rabbit are demonstrating.

Maybe. That'd be interesting I suppose. Those Meta smart glasses do look more usable than anything on the market previously. Maybe because they omit screens.

Perhaps at some point technology will allow glasses to have screens that are functional without making you look like, as they called them ten years ago, a Glasshole. Ten years may be enough time.

Mobile ads and app stores make Apple and Google too much money for them to truly revolutionize mobile phone user interfaces.

Anything that even threatens those business models will be strangled before it gets released.

IMHO Microsoft has the most to gain here. If they manage to turn Apple and Android into platforms that interface with MS made/ran/hosted LLMs, MS wins the day.

The problem is monetization, these LLM services are expensive, and telling users they need to pay another $30 a month to use their phone will be a hard sell. Hopefully LLM hosting costs go down, but if hosting LLMs becomes too affordable, MS's giant war chest of $ and hardware become less of an advantage.

The other danger is Apple/Google throwing a bunch of restrictions in place, but all the anti-trust scrutiny they are under right now could give them pause on attempting that.

to me the pitch is compelling. i don't want to use any more fucking apps -- i want to talk to my computer, like i talk to chatgpt. there's real opportunity for a revolution here.

i don't think apple or google are well-positioned to build this revolution, because they are too conservative and too bought-in on the old interaction model.

(if jobs were still around, different story. alas.)

I think Apple would, all their devices always have the neutral engine chip, they just need to extend more RAM to it to support larger models

they already have a habit of replicating the most useful apps natively

i don’t see why not here

replace siri once and for all, while running a local llm server for apps to tie into instead of an api to chatgpt

i'd love to be surprised, but i just don't think apple has the necessary software chops/vision anymore to pull it off.

Also they've painted themselves into a corner with privacy. To enable LLM in iOS they will need to walk back their privacy stance to some degree.

In what way? It would be an LLM on the phone, running locally

Bookmarking this for the future when everyone just assume Rabbit was an instant hit everyone just assumed would succeed.

Keep it with the "but iPhones get all smudgey from my fingers, yuck" bookmarks.

but man this is one of the most "doomed to fail" things I've ever seen.

It will. I don't know which VC did the due diligence but the CEO once founded a scam company called RavenTech and the CTO just dropped out of CMU.

They used to be called CyberManufacture Co. and was selling NFTs. You see where this is going?

A lot of VCs don't do any due diligence.

although this way will be an L for these guys, it will show demand and spur competition faster

Google's primary revenue driver is search ads. I'm sure IAP fees and web advertising don't hurt either. If you don't do searches, browse the web or use apps, where does the revenue come from?

Even if Google builds something like this, gets market share and sells at a profit, it might still be a net loss for them because of all the advertising money and click tracking data they won't be getting.

Google definitely has the expertise to build this, but they also have an extremely risk-averse attitude resulting in layers upon layers of bureaucracy, and this product is literally cannibalizing their most important markets. I can't see this going over very well at all the internal reviews.

Apple was a lot leaner than Google when they build the iPhone (which was also cannibalizing one of their main products, the iPod), but they still had to make a completely independent team with no oversight except for Steve Jobs to get it right.

We also know how bad Google is at hardware. They seem to have gotten marginally better in recent years, but Pixels are still far from successful, even in countries where they are sold, which honestly isn't that many in the first place.

I'm very bearish on Google in this fight. Apple probably stands a much better chance, they've already proven they can cannibalize their own products, they need to do far less of that in the first place, as most of their revenue comes from hardware sales and subscriptions (which is perfect for something like this), they do have a lot of hardware expertise and they've already made major steps towards AR glasses, which might end up as a better form factor for such a device than a phone. Their pro-privacy attitude might be an impediment, this stuff works a lot better if you run it on a beefy GPU in the cloud instead of a tiny, battery-conserving chip in your phone, but I hope they find a good enough compromise.

I feel like the R1 is getting a lot of weird hate here on HN. I get it, it's a bit pretentious and wants to be very Apple-like, yadda yadda. Probably not that much value generation, it's overpriced, and no one wants to carry another thing in their pocket. And yes, the company will likely go bankrupt (or pivot into something less exciting). It's also all in the cloud (no local inference) so it doesn't really even "do" that much. But seriously: this is (or should be) the future of computing. The fact that things like OS self-organization, system-wide (+cloud) search, basic automation, etc. is so broken on modern operating systems is just plain bizarre.

For example, if I wanted to do a simple find-and-replace on my 2021 M1, I'd have to use something like grep (a tool originally written by Ken Thompson in 1973—a half century before my laptop was built) and look up flags and syntax I inevitably constantly forget. We should have been past this at least 15 years ago.

Assistants are cool, but I want better tools. Give me a timeline with all my emails, chats, documents, and pictures shown together. Full text search on my entire browsing history. Exporting my Booking.com search results as a spreadsheet. Controlling my phone from my desktop, and vice versa.

As a bonus, those capabilities don't require uploading your data to the cloud or risking LLM hallucinations.

As a bonus, those capabilities don't require uploading your data to the cloud or risking LLM hallucinations.

Ignoring that half those services are dependent on the cloud already, this is such a bold and hard problem. A solution would be magical but LLMs are our best chance.

Without clearly defined protocols (eg SMTP, CalDav) and a ton of boring to write and use case specific glue code, you’re really dependent on LLMs to make those M*N connections from one service/format to another. An LLM can turn any current or future input format into any current or future output format. That’s really powerful and basically unsolvable at scale with the tools we have now.

And what’s to be said about every large orgs or serious companies TOS against screen scraping data?

If they don't like screen scraping they probably also don't have an API and probably don't have 100 different ways to auto-export data.

Exporting my Booking.com search results as a spreadsheet.

Yeah except they actively don’t want you to have access to your data. They want you locked in to their shitty platform. And these companies will actually fight your ability to get data out, like Reddit or Twitter when they shut down their public APIs.

They can want all they want, any human-readable information is now machine readable, just parse everything that's ever come across your screen.

In theory yes, has anyone built this tool yet? I’d love an LLM<->browser agent that can do something useful besides summarize Yelp reviews. I’m thinking something that, for example, accesses the company intranet and finds me information from my paystub without me doing anything.

if I wanted to do a simple find-and-replace on my 2021 M1, I'd have to use something like grep (a tool originally written by Ken Thompson in 1973—a half century before my laptop was built) and look up flags and syntax I inevitably constantly forget. We should have been past this at least 15 years ago.

Pretty much any text editor worth its salt has find and replace, regex compatible, features. Even the extremely rudimentary TextEdit on your MacBook supports it.

The fact that foundational tools like grep still work over half a century later is a feature, not a bug, of our field.

How many cloud based services (most if not all of which rely on those foundational half-a-century-old building blocks, by the way) that are pushed to customers today will still be around in half a century?

regex compatible

Even a typical Product Manager, let alone a regular layperson, would have no idea where to start with regex, so it's a super weird thing to bring up. Of course grep is a great tool, just how the hammer is a great tool (invented around 3 million years ago); but we've moved past that. You can't use a hammer to do EUV lithography.

You're right, most people just need basic word search and replace, which pretty much any text editor supports.

Supporting regex covers that extra mile that some advanced power users might need, since you were referencing obscure grep flags.

What kind of search and replace are you doing that is akin to EUV lithography?

A good example of something I was doing today. Taking some text and formatting it as a markdown table with proper spacing. Copilot made it super to highlight the line, type out what I wanted, then kept moving on. Manually it was lots of adding spaces, deleting spaces, and adding |s.

I'd also imagine the time complexities of string rewriting systems are significantly more efficient than passing it off to an llm.

Why not burn a couple hundred watts to do find and replace (/s)?

The strangest thing about AI is that a lot of it's value comes from the fact that it's better at using the tools that we designed for humans than we are. It's essentially an admission of failure.

I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from this observation however.

It's essentially an admission of failure.

I think that was always the dream, even in early 20th century sci-fi. It's not a failure, it is a success.

However, in my opinion it's interesting that the dreamers underestimated the difficulty of robotics. Almost everyone thought that the manual jobs will be the first ones to be replaced. Right now it seems the other way around.

Automated programs are not limited by stamina, attention span, sleep cycles, etc. so I don't think AIs being better at something is necessarily an indicator of failure for humans.

Dogs were used to rotate roasting spits in Britain during the Early Modern era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_dog Does this mean humans were inferior to dogs at the task? Absolutely not. It was just a more efficient alternative based on what was available to them at that point in time.

is so broken

I would argue that it’s not that we’re bad at using tools that we designed for humans, but more that multiple shifts in the tech world over the last 50 years have intentionally (and unintentionally) broken those tools. AI does not need to use the tools at all, it knows the knowledge that the tools gate-keep and it can write code that does the data manipulation that underlies the most powerful software.

It essentially side-steps the whole mess that is the current tech industry (and to be honest a bunch of other industries).

Every time I need to use google to change settings in app like facebook I constantly wonder about that. Where is my ai assistant when I'm just gonna tell him what I want? Why do I need to end on Reddit through Google when random internet user answers me how to change even the things that should be the most obvious to find?

I legitimately despise the thing.

Based on the keynote or something else?

I mean… sure, but wanting something and getting it are different things right?

We agree that those things are things we do want, but do you really think we’re getting any of them here?

I think it’s reasonably legitimate to go: cool idea, I want it on my phone, as an app.

There is no reason for this to be, and indeed, mostly isnt a hardware device; it’s mostly a cloud service with a mystifying and useless custom piece of hardware tacked on the edge.

You’re doing on device inference? Cool, sign me up, you have my attention.

You have a cloud service for AI integration with existing apps? Mm… like, how is that different from any of the other AI startups?

If you differentiator is “my SaaS comes with a plastic box and no subscription fee” you gotta expect people to laugh, it’s a joke.

I think the hate is that the website and the promotion videos are too advanced to the point where there were no MVPs, progress, or found limitations in between. On the other hand, the terms they used are too strong to be true. Are they building an OS from the ground up, or just calling ChatGPT API to do stuff and calling it an OS?

And of course, looking at Linkedin, the founder(s) are NOT convincing either.

* For example, if I wanted to do a simple find-and-replace on my 2021 M1, I'd have to use something like grep (a tool originally written by Ken Thompson in 1973—a half century before my laptop was built) and look up flags and syntax I inevitably constantly forget. We should have been past this at least 15 years ago.*

What does the oldness (and long usefulness) of grep have to do with the problem you described, which is the very hard problem of translating natural human speech into machine commands?

100% agree all these points!

Two things in the keynote that seem faked:

1. at 13:13 there's a demo ordering a ride 'to home', then the user requests a car change to fit six people, and what's shown as a seamless switch from UberX to UberXL also updates the destination from the home address to LAX airport.

2. at 14:05 the device confirms and recites a pizza order, but the screen displays "chesse" with a typo while the voice reads out "cheese", so either the audio or the visuals is faked. My guess is that all of the on-device graphics were hand-written and hand-animated which would explain both mistakes.

I stopped watching at that point. Am sort of sad to see Teenage Engineering associated with a product that seems so sloppy and/or shady.

Right after you stopped watching, he books an entire vacation - flights, hotel, car rental, activities - and says he is given multiple options to choose from but shows none of the options, just an itinerary that he quickly scrolls through.

The idea that anyone is going to book a vacation this way is ridiculous. Vacations take extensive thought. There’s no way a voice interface would work for this even if it was the Star Trek computer.

No one ever shows what these should and could actually be used for - incredibly boring and repetitive tasks. "Hey rabbit, respond to the support ticket you just told me about with XYZ". "Hey rabbit, find all of the sales meetings I had last week, cross reference the emails of the attendees with existing emails threads, and then generate follow ups for each. Keep them short, to the point, and read them back to me before you send"

Like where is this? This is what I want. Not some voice assisted way of booking an Uber or some shit.

GPT Store would probably have something like that soon.

Man, the GPT Store confuses the hell out of me. I have no idea what is going to be in scope for this thing lol

Paid Custom Instructions :P

No one ever shows what these should and could actually be used for - incredibly boring and repetitive tasks.

Agreed! That’s precisely why we created https://openadapt.ai.

Just FYI the email field on your homepage is white text on white background for me (Firefox on Windows).

Was very hard to sign up.

Thank you for letting me know!

It's a pitch to get VC funding and this is exactly how that audience treats vacations. The idea of saving or planning to do something is just unimaginable to the super rich this is aimed at getting investment money from

It’s not the saving or planning part. It’s the leaving to to some random algorithm to make good decisions part.

If it’s only for super rich people, they already have a human PA

I think is true. I'd want a far better understanding of the details before committing to spend the time and money.

Is there any text-to-speech engine that would pronounce Cillian Murphy's name correctly on the first try?

It’d be doing better than most people if it could.

Another time he's talking and typing at the same time, but says a different thing than he "types".

At 15:55 the two screens de-sync. He's telling it that the schedule is too intense and on one screen he lifts his finger off before he ends and the other is still on the button. It was definitely shot as a single take. But hey, I guess if Google can do it you can pitch LLM WeChat. At $200, I'm tempted to buy one, they could be as famous as Theranos.

He also didn't actually get the pizza or Uber despite confirming.

Note that this is not a Teenage Engineering product.

This is a product sold by Rabbit - and they hired TE to help as a design agency.

Yeah, if it was a Teenage Engineering product it'd cost $799.

I'd say that if it was sold by TE it would cost 2x-3x that at least. They make great stuff, but they are super expensive.

From a maker perspective, TE products(they have quite a bit more than I remembered!) still are frontal sketch in not quite Sony style with added depth, leaving something to be desired in manufacturability, durability, and usability.

e.g. in this very device, the thin stem of this scroll wheel implies it's actually shaped like LEGO minifig heads, like 中, which doesn't inspire confidence wrt lateral plays. It could easily be made 土 or 王 or even 凸 shaped internally with only the middle part exposed, which not just eliminates play, prevents debris ingress, but also makes areas around wheel edges hidden so quality control around those areas are less of an issue. Or, the shell seen here is shaped like a bathtub with a lid closed at the backside, which means the cross section of the tub has to be ever so slightly tapered towards the front, which affects grip when picking up. And, the backside has no bumps nor there are creases in the side, which further compromises pickup. Or eg the painted wheel. It's going to be PITA to paint.

Granted I'm biased feeling always defeated by superb aesthetics of their products - but their design always seems, how do I say, not as deeply connected to engineering ideals just as it is with aesthetics as seen in Sony or Apple products.

I undertood probably 20% of what you wrote, but I think you have some good points on TE being more interested in the aesthetics of engineering that engineering beautiful aesthetics.

I like some TE gear.

But it would be an omission if we didn't also include the fact that TE hardware often has weird flaws like OPz cases never fit together properly even years after release and the more recent problems with shipping the ko2 sampler and broken faders.

It seems like TE is playing roughly the same role as they did with the Playdate? Which is pretty beautiful hardware and only $199

Think it's a mistake having the main product design team as an external resource not a core part of the company. Wont be a coherent vision.

I think the hardware is just a gimmick. It gives the proposition more 'body' and is great for marketing.

But really, this is screaming to be an app. There is literally nothing this thing can do that the phone in all of our pockets can't. Especially integrated with our smartwatches for ease of use. So why have a separate device for it? It makes no sense.

I think the hardware is just there to make it not 'just another app' in the press, really. And that the app version will come soon after the physical product releases and will take over 99% of the installed base.

And of course if this takes off they'll be quickly acquired by Apple, Microsoft, Google or Samsung. I bet that's what they're aiming for.

This comment hit the nail in the head. Content marketing at its best.

I don't think the hardware is the main product. I think the AI is, but they didn't want to be "just an app" they want to be the first OS for the new way of computing. So they designed a new device. I wouldn't be surprised if they open up to OEM's to start making all kinds of devices.

I’m extremely bearish on this app. But Pininfarina basically saved Ferrari, revived Ferrari’s little brother Maserati and gave life back to Volvo. If done right (clearly defined roles, collaboration, design maturity etc) it works well.

Thank you, this is an important detail. Teenage Engineering isn't mentioned anywhere on the linked page, so I was confused about the HN title. I figured Rabbit was a new venture by TE.

Interestingly, the founder shows a TE board seat on his Linkedin profile.

He mentions in the keynote that it's designed by TE.

Interesting. Reminds me of the Playdate

btw, teenage engineering are also behind all the Nothing products, but they are not behind CMF (the second, cheaper brand, launched by Nothing).

That's why it looks like a PlayDate

The keynote is near science fiction, but the actual implementation is leaving me badly confused.

- Did it really scan the whole table to add a new column? As in, OCR? What would happen if I had more than one screenful of data, and who in their right mind would trust the OCR'ed output?

- How can it access the Discord account for the "teach mode"? Is it stealing your (sensitive and expiring!) cookies to reproduce the actions on their cloud? Or worse yet, running instructions from the AI on your local machine?

- It shows structured results from Spotify and Uber on the r1's screen. Does it have custom integration with all those apps? What happens when the API changes (Twitter), or they don't support an app I need (local taxi), or the app is averse to third-party integration (WhatsApp), or I need an "advanced" feature (payment methods on Uber)?

- Why in the VC hell are they basing their revenue on a one-time sale of a clearly unnecessary electronic gadget (my phone already has all that!), when their biggest variable costs will be recurring cloud expenses?

who in their right mind would trust the OCR'ed output?

Is it stealing your (sensitive and expiring!) cookies

running instructions from the AI on your local machine

Based on my interaction with LLM enthusiasts, there are plenty of people would happily bet their career, give up all their credentials, and grant full access to all their devices to LLM if they are promised something cool. See the stories about lawyers giving LLM-generated materials to the judge for an example, or journalists submitting LLM-generated articles.

Yes, this occasionally ruins someone's day. No, this would not stop true enthusiast from trusting the model again.

LOL, it's gonna be like:

USER: "hey siri [equivalent], please renew my CD for another twelve month term."

PHONE: "Did you say "transfer the contents of your entire bank account to the yakuza?"

USER: "fuck! no! cancel!"

PHONE: "Transaction confirmed. Current bank balance: zero."

Don’t quit your day job.

One of the "lawyer pwned by LLM" cases appeared to be confusion about the difference between Google search, and Google Bard, thinking that Bard was just a next-generation Google search so asking it for relevant legal citations would find actual citations. The lawyer wasn't an LLM enthusiast, he didn't even know that an LLM was involved.

That's how these things are marketed, so that's probably not an uncommon scenario.

Question answered. Wish people would stop asking it!

It could be using accessibility APIs instead of OCR. That seems like the sensible thing to me.

What? Don’t accessibility API’s just do OCR?

They largely use semantic metadata (like alt tags on images). This is part of why the "google docs is moving to canvas rendering"[1] caused a big stir there (accessibility would need to be implemented from scratch, possibly by using a hidden parallel DOM)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27129858

I'm not sure where the founder is from, but seems like he has Asian connections. And over there these type of super app (WeChat) that can do everything for you is quite very common. It would also make sense to centralise everything if it wasn't because this 800 lb of surveillance capitalism gorilla elephant in our metaphorical internet room.

I think most of the Chinese VCs won't touch him anymore. :P

It shows structured results from Spotify and Uber on the r1's screen. Does it have custom integration with all those apps?

Yeah there is a screenshot of a list of logins floating around, uber and spotify were on it.

Wouldn't be too interested in having it logging in to my account on a cloud machine on other things.

It seems much of the screen content in this keynote was pre-rendered (or in other words fake), so many of the answers might very well be "it can't actually do these things".

How can it access the Discord account for the "teach mode"? Is it stealing your (sensitive and expiring!) cookies to reproduce the actions on their cloud? Or worse yet, running instructions from the AI on your local machine?

That's what I caught too. It mentioned somewhere on their site that you'll have to provide login credentials through their Rabbit Hole dashboard panel of all services you want to use.

It breaks the services' ToS but I guess most people don't care much about giving their passwords. There's no other practical way to integrate with multiple services.

Given the collab with Teenage Engineering, and the price, I think this is pretty much in line with the kind of stuff they do.

Will it change the world? Unlikely. But there is definitely a niche that will love this, even if it's just for the form factor and design rather than anything practical. I'd also expect it to fit into TE's range of musical equipment in some form.

Most of these questions become irrelevant when you recognise that most of these kind of companies were most likely created to be purchased by Apple or Google.

Why in the VC hell are they basing their revenue on a one-time sale of a clearly unnecessary electronic gadget (my phone already has all that!), when their biggest variable costs will be recurring cloud expenses?

It looks like they'll also be allowing people who create their own automations to sell them in their marketplace. Presumably they'll take a cut of the sales here.

I don't think he touched the scroll wheel in the keynote. Why is it there? What does it do? I found it awkward he scrolled by touching the screen across the damn scroll wheel. Just use it. At least in the keynote.

And then there are so many questions about the hardware capabilities of this device:

- where is the inference running? I don't believe it's on the device. And if it's in the cloud then why make the claim it is under 500ms? Is that just a "don't you guys have low-latency 4g at home?" moment?

- how is that tiny camera capable of parsing a small-text table with 100% accuracy? the optics just don't allow it to.

- what's the battery life with that kind of usage? If inference is running on device it must be very low. Just thinking that my GPU pulls 50-100W on average (with spikes to 200W) just to suggest code I still don't think rabbit is doing anything on device. If it's cloud based then 4g is also a battery destroyer. Maybe that's why the device is so big: huge battery inside.

The "teach" session was definitely cool. But at this point it must be magic because there's no way that thing browsed to a discord server, authenticated with hallucinated credentials and it just worked.

From > rabbit OS operates apps on our secured cloud, so you don’t have to. Log into the apps you’d like rabbit to use on your system through the rabbit hole to relay control. You only need to do this once per app.

it seems that this device doesn't run anything locally, everything is in the cloud.

It would be far easier to do the same things with an app and ask for a fraction of the price

People keep saying this but having to go through the Apple lock screen for every interaction would mean it never even gets used at all.

Not sure if the Rabbit device is the answer but I definitely see why people are trying.

I have the "two back tap" accessibility feature setup to start chat gpt voice. It works great. I just two back tap and look at the phone and its ready to start listening.

I tried that back tap thing, surprised how poorly it worked to be honest maybe there is a knack to it.

Thing is these AI devices will become actually interesting when they start being observers in your life too and pre-empting rather than the siri style ask and response and that just isn't possible on a locked down OS like iOS.

My really old LG android had a wake on doubletap screen. Worked really well. All newer phones have failed misserably or completely missed the function. Still miss it, was much more responsive than any new phone I bought.

And then immediately be squashed by the Apple App Store.

The answer is absolutely to do these types of products on the devices we already own. There is only one thing stopping this type of innovation and experimentation.

I know it's not a popular choice, but wouldn't a PWA on iOS work fine for Rabbit's use-case?

There’s something about eliminating the friction of calling up the assistant. For example, I’m not using Google Assistant on my iDevice because I need to go unlock the device. It’s really a system level issue.

probably done with an app for a multiplication of the revenue

it seems that this device doesn't run anything locally, everything is in the cloud.

For apps w/o a web interface, presumably they have an Android emulator running somewhere and they controlling it with their LAM and feeding the results back to end users. They can even feed sensor data from the Rabbit phone (e.g. GPS) to the emulator.

It is a brilliant solution to the problems they are facing, but their cost model must be extreme. "No subscription required" means I am wondering what their "pay as you go" pricing will be!

You will pay with your data. Read their privacy policy. They can track you, collect your private data, they have access to your accounts. As long as it's closed source and cannot be self-hosted, it's a big no-no.

I don't think he touched the scroll wheel in the keynote. Why is it there?

Same vibe as Humane not using the projector for almost anything and then explicitly saying "You dont have to use it" in an interview. Like why add it then

Potentially the wheel isn't yet functional? Not sure there are off the shelf parts that fits.

It's using a Mediatek Helio P35, a SoC from 2018. It's slower than an iPhone 6S.

There's no 5G support either, unless they've purchased an external modem. So even if you do live in an area with low-latency 5G, you aren't gonna get it.

I wouldn't be surprised if this turns out to be running just a cheap Android fork that's locked in kiosk mode with a single app (or webapp).

$199 with no subscription? You must have to bring your own data sim card. Or can it get its connection from your phone? And is the AI stuff running locally on the device? Impressive if so. Suspicious if not; there's no way the service remains free forever.

Pretty compelling price, and I'm certain the vision of AI agents that can use any existing app or website to take actions on your behalf is the future of computing. But there's no room in my pocket for a second device. I don't see how a device is going to succeed when an equivalent app for existing phones seems around the corner.

The AI runs on their cloud. It's unfortunate but the industry is only starting to catch onto on-device models language models.

It probably wouldn’t cost $199 with a capable chip and the battery to go with that.

Actually the only device with such features is a recent smartphone. Wouldn’t this be better as an app?

It also probably wouldn't cost "no subscription" with a cloud-based AI, so what gives?

the industry is only starting to catch onto on-device models language models.

i mean there are technical limitations and tradeoffs to running LLM-size models locally. doesnt help to ascribe it to lack of foresight when it is a known Hard Problem.

Really, so this whole thing could be a $9.99 app on my existing phone :-). And if it is that good then I can delete all the other apps.

Ah already have ChatGPT installed, that'll do :-).

It's not a matter of "catching on". There are smaller models and they have been looking into putting useful models on device from day one.

It's just the fact that the models that can currently run on a mobile device are not effective enough. It is about the most memory and compute intensive type of application ever. In particular, models that can reason or follow instructions reliably and for general purpose are too big to run quickly on mobile devices.

They are putting models on phones, but they do not have general purpose assistant capabilities.

This may change in the next few years though.

Need to submit your OpenAI API key to use the full service. :P

The presentation does mention a "4G-LTE sim card slot". AI seems to be cloud based, indeed.

It's indeed suspicious. You're sending your voice samples, your various services accounts, your location and more private data to some proprietary black box in some public cloud. Sorry, but this is a privacy nightmare. It should be open source and self-hosted like Mycroft (https://mycroft.ai) or Leon (https://getleon.ai) to be trustworthy.

I'm not sure people want an LLM assistant that can actually do things like spend their money.

A minor convenience when it works well. A major inconvenience when it doesn't. (And it doesn't take a lot of imagination to come up with nightmare scenarios.)

Love the gadget, though. I feel like I want to eat it or build a Lego castle around it, or just look at it more.

They have a confirmation dialogue in the keynote. As long as they do that well and for every important action, I don't think it will be a problem

How do you know the LLM is going to do what you confirmed?

There's a fundamental tension here: either you limit the LLM to a set of fixed actions that a user can individually understand and confirm. Or you let it figure out what to do and how to do it given a higher-level goal.

In the first case, it's limited and not really better than a well-designed site or app. In the second it's powerful but can run amok.

E.g., did it really fill out that four page order form for that e-bike you asked it to order? Maybe it uses the debit card instead of your credit card and your checking account is overdrawn. Maybe it sets the delivery address to your brother's address. Maybe it orders two bikes or 10 or the wrong model or wrong size.

It asks/confirms each step of the way so there's little chance for mistakes.

This is an inherent problem with any kind of delegation. You either micro manage the details or trust your agent to get them right.

The whole system isn't an LLM. At the point they are asking for confirmation, they've already parsed the required information and handed it off to normal code. It's not going to change again.

Ultimately, an LLM only has the capability to take a string as input and output another string. Any other functionality (Uber, search, travel, etc) has to be manually programmed in via APIs. For the foreseeable future, a fixed set of actions is the only way to do this reliably and is what this device does so talking about the second case of an LLM run amok is a moot point.

I also don't understand why they call it LLM. it isn't.

I think they call it a Large Action Model not an LLM.

They can call it whatever they want but it’s essentially IFTT + DOM scraping /automation (“teaching” lol) for places without an official API with a super thin AI veneer. Mostly for suggestions.

Funny thing that the keynote only demoed “Confirm” and never “Correct”/“Change this”, etc.

At one point he asked for a more relaxed version of the initial vacation plans.

Absolutely and that will be a major usability problem when LLMs get things wrong as they so often do

Quick feedback if the founders are watching this: Please allow controls on your keynote video. The video production quality looks great. But I am not watching it if I don't know if it's a 30s one or a 30minute one.

A while ago I came across a website with a video player that gaslights you with a logarithmic progress bar. It had me fooled for a while into thinking the video has only 2-3 minutes left, before I finally clicked the pop-out button in Firefox and realized I was only 20% of the way through a 45 minute video.

Which website, if you don't mind saying? That's so hilariously vile I want a closer look!

Not the same website, but the video player was made by a Brazillian company called VTurb and they're using the same logarithmic progress bar on their front page. If you inspect element it's literally called "smartplayer-fake-bar"

Is there a Firefox extension for android that can take over the js crap that people call video players and give something decent? I know there are open in x but that isn't seamless. I just want a video player that is standard across the Board.

Like safari on iOS used to turn any video on browser to a standard video player window with normal controls.

Also please describe it in pictures and words too. Video only really limits where I can watch this. I’m in a waiting currently and I’m not about to just play a video like some sort of psycho.

I’m in a waiting currently and I’m not about to just play a video like some sort of psycho.

Funny enough, I think them releasing only a video perfectly aligns with their product and why I think this will fail. They seem to have completely overestimated how often people want to read or write and underestimated the number of scenarios where needing to talk or listen to my phone is inappropriate.

I'm assuming if you had this phone, you'd feel like just as much of a psycho if you had to dictate every command to it while sitting in that same waiting room.

…or it’s selecting for people who would be willing to use it.

Maybe they just added it, but I do see controls there (Safari).

I do also. (Firefox)

It's a vimeo embed

Edit: My feedback is that it's too slow. I wish the features were shown off before I had to get a layman's education for several minutes. I'm also really concerned that his uber will arrive before the pizza.

I like the device. It seems easy enough for my elderly father to use, and he won't lose it as "one of the websites" he can ask for help. There's something important about the focus a physical device brings; he can remember how to use it, where it's at, etc. The GPT UI I built him gets lost in his bookmarks, and he forgets it exists.

In the linked keynote, Jesse Lyu mentions that LLM won't help us actually do tasks - there are currently no so-called "agents" that do something simple like book a flight - the best way to do it is still to click the buttons yourself.

Rabbit means to solve that by creating a "LAM", a "Large Action model", which is a service by Rabbit that will click interfaces for you. I'm not sure this is the right approach - if it is successful, it will lead to more centralisation around Rabbit.

I agree this is a problem, but I feel a better approach would be to have a market of agents that for a small fee actually handle the whole transaction for you. So there might be multiple parties that say they can buy Delta Flight DL101 tomorrow 21:10 for various prices - some might be a service like the Rabbit LAM, others might be booking platforms, and there might even be airlines themselves. And now an agent-concierge that you choose once at the start will look at all the parties, and then pick and buy the right flight for you. This will make the problem a problem of an open market, where good speedy service is promoted, and prices get ever lower. And if the Rabbit LAM gets outcompeted by an ever better speedier solution, that would be a good thing. (This will also allow us to move away from our current dreaded attention-based economy where e.g. a booking websites tries to exploit your required presence during waiting times, which the LAMs would also solve, but, like I said, let's not move towards more centralisation.)

Rabbit means to solve that by creating a "LAM", a "Large Action model", which is a service by Rabbit that will click interfaces for you. I'm not sure this is the right approach - if it is successful, it will lead to more centralisation around Rabbit.

The LAM is a genius hack to get around the thousands of closed gardens that apps have created.

It also may have been easier than teaching an LLM how to make tons of API calls, and if done right I presume their LAM adapts to UI changes, vs writing integrations against breaking / deprecating APIs.

You’re much more impressed than I am.

90% of use cases will be covered by an official API.

They’ll cover the other 10% with “teaching”. Essentially you telling the AI what the lazily written markup actually means. Then they save it into an automation template. QA teams have only been doing that for the better part of 3 decades.

I know a company that employs a building of a 1,000 people doing nothing but performing 1 click. So they put a human in the scraping /automation loop so they don’t violate the site/services TOS.

Good luck with that.

Uber wants people in its app, they want to show ads for their subscription membership services, and they want to upsell you on services, and they want you to see sponsored restaurants first when you order food. Uber wants to own the relationship with customers, so they can ~exploit the customers more~ extract more value.

VC backed and publicly listed companies need endless growth, user-centric systems like what Rabbit is offering break those business models apart. Which is why I predict everyone is going to be fighting super hard against making UIs that just get shit done.

Agree with everything you're saying.

Watching the keynote, I found myself thinking how unhappy Uber would be with skipping over interacting with them entirely: there's no "Uber experience" you have when you're in the car, so what do you get from Uber that any random company with a tie in to Rabbit can't get you?

Option 1: a shift in devices/model like Rabbit pull the magic carpet out from under companies like Uber, and everything becomes purely transactional.

Option 2: rabbit-like market creates exclusivity-based need, to ensure Uber is the number-one (or only) rideshare choice, so it doesn't matter that customers aren't "experiencing" Uber. Uber relinquishes the experience to the agent (unlikely).

Option 3: Uber et al wage war against agents and make their use impossible

actually agent frameworks are becoming very popular now

https://github.com/joaomdmoura/crewAI

its been such a long year, I still remember the month of gpt...what was it, not gpt4all...gpt...ah whatever. The "running an LLM in a loop will solve it" approach. I'm not a big fan, I'd need to see something truly transformative.

This seems to be a Langchain wrapper, where the Langchain is a prompt + retrieval based on a few documents.

ex. `https://github.com/joaomdmoura/crewAI-examples/tree/main/sto...` ``` BrowserTools.scrape_and_summarize_website, SearchTools.search_internet, CalculatorTools.calculate, SECTools.search_10q, SECTools.search_10k ```

Rabbit means to solve that by creating a "LAM", a "Large Action model", which is a service by Rabbit that will click interfaces for you.

https://openadapt.ai is an open source app that runs on your local machine that clicks interfaces for you -— but only for repetitive tasks that you show it how to do.

QA teams have been doing this sort of stuff for decades. With a little know how and an hour you could record a user doing something in the DOM and play it back. There’s no magic here.

But if we're not careful this will circle back to apps/silos.

What I'd like to see is the Smalltalk approach: data providers that are able to send/receive messages, and can be connected together to achieve a goal. Even better if the connecting is done by the "machine" after I issue a command.

What's the advantage of this vs a smartphone? Realistically, are you going to carry two gadgets with you? I feel like a lot of people don't like the smartphone, because, being a general purpose computer, it takes away the excuse to buy all sorts of different gadgets.

Follow up question: why does this need dedicated hardware? What does a dedicated $200 device do that the same app running on a smartphone can’t?

Ensure you are invested $200 in using it. Very few will pay that for an App.

Yet people readily pay $99/year for apps all the time. I think the reason this isn’t an app is because the gate keepers don’t want competition. Looking at you Siri.

Do they really? I don't even pay that much for my entire O365 suite.

The most expensive app I pay for is Telegram Premium at 30$ per year. And that's really worth it for me for the translation otherwise I would have thought twice.

On android, you can set different apps as default assistant, and ChatGPT is working on that: https://www.androidauthority.com/chatgpt-replace-google-assi...

having a purpose built device reduces number of clicks and other friction. currently phones are hostile to AI interaction (not that I'm entertaining this specific device)

Yep. What they’ve done is deceptively simple. This is a weekend project with off the shelf APIs and a few Github repos.

It’s the dedicated appliance that’s the genius part and what makes it feel like magic.

If you have a year long weekend

Red flags:

1) Price seems too low for unlimited LLM usage and there's no monthly fee... so maybe you are the product?

2) Website has no information on the people behind this.

3) In the keynote, the demo of logging into to other services like Spotify appears to just be stealing the auth tokens from the laptop and shipping them to the R1 device. Not a good sign.

4) The founder's voice-over insists that "we value privacy" and "we do not hack" and "we do not create fake users." Protests too much?

5) They're not really addressing the trust-building necessary to convince people to use this like a personal assistant. It's waaaay too opaque.

Neat product, though. Maybe they're just launching super early, nothing is figured out yet, the website isn't done, etc.

3) In the keynote, the demo of logging into to other services like Spotify appears to just be stealing the auth tokens from the laptop and shipping them to the R1 device. Not a good sign.

I don't think the tokens are getting transferred to the device. It seems everything happens on the cloud, so the tokens must have been stored on the cloud too.

I think the tokens are stored on device. I think what is happening is that this is effectively an Android device (or web browser) that you are somewhat normally logging into apps on. Then the LAM (which is running on device) is interacting with those authenticated apps behind the scenes, and only showing you the slick black screen with the rabbit and results on it.

You've hit it.

It's a 2018 spec Android device. $50 of electronic parts, $150 for the custom case.

3) In the keynote, the demo of logging into to other services like Spotify appears to just be stealing the auth tokens from the laptop and shipping them to the R1 device. Not a good sign.

It just looks like OAuth to me?

1) Price seems too low for unlimited LLM usage and there's no monthly fee... so maybe you are the product?

With AI you are always the product - how else can it be "trained".

THIS - pricing and security/privacy. Specially #1,2,3. Saying this despite ordering one. There is definitely a lot of scope to this new way to interacting. Really hoping these get addressed soon.

1) Price seems too low for unlimited LLM usage and there's no monthly fee... so maybe you are the product?

It only needs to last a few months until all the devices are palmed off to kids. There is a 0% chance this makes it to year 2.

2) Website has no information on the people behind this.

All the better to run with the money. Given there won't be a second device, they should have charged more. I suspect they charged less because it simply performs _that_ poorly.

3) In the keynote, the demo of logging into to other services like Spotify appears to just be stealing the auth tokens from the laptop and shipping them to the R1 device. Not a good sign.

It's worse, it's not processed locally at all. That means that it's all done in some random cloud.

4) The founder's voice-over insists that "we value privacy" and "we do not hack" and "we do not create fake users." Protests too much?

I've never murdered anybody and there's no point looking in the forest!

So many questions. Is this a YC company? Did they apply? Does anyone know anything about them at all? It just screams scam to me. Who would give them $200 for vapor? [Edit: I have been told the device has been demoed in a comment below, so perhaps it might be real.]

Let’s say Apple were to do this. Apple would take years to get it right but when they announced it would be with a date with an accuracy to within a certain quarter. And it would just work on day one. Of course it would be saddled with subscriptions, but it would be real.

It just doesn’t smell right that a team led by a guy who can’t manage to pronounce his own first name clearly could think through all the issues and have a coherent vision within a year of when LLMs really took off.

Another possibility my paranoid mind comes up with here is the team/founder caught wind of some half baked research from inside Apple and decided they would try to pull a fast one and whip out a product before Apple could. And by the way, again of course it’s vapor, until it’s not, but we are still at the “it is” stage.

I was confused and skeptical until I saw Teenage Engineering involvement. They are an all star company that has never come even close to half-assing a product. Their gear and design chops are absolutely ace.

That does say a lot for sure. Thanks.

Why is this so chunky and cumbersome then? It looks like it's not going to fit in my pocket

The CEO was/is also the CEO in an YC company: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/raven-tech

(Click the LinkedIn icon for more info)

Don't know the current status.

It just doesn’t smell right that a team led by a guy who can’t manage to pronounce his own first name clearly could think through all the issues and have a coherent vision within a year of when LLMs really took off.

Weird ad hominem. Your entire comment reeks of a bundle of biases.

Who would give them $200 for vapor?

this doesnt qualify for vapor - they have shown the device in use, and announced a ship date.

A few colleagues and I were baffled about the launch. Anecdotally, between the group, we consume a huge amount of tech news daily and were all caught off guard by the launch. How were 10k sold in a day if no one's heard of this company before?

My hot take:

ALL AI wearable companies should return their money to investors, and wait for the AR glasses by Apple.

AR glasses are the ultimate form factor. And as much as I hate monopoly, Apple has the right app/dev ecosystem, and will make Siri work.

Vision Pro isn't really supposed to be used outside.

I'm talking about AR glasses, not Vision Pro.

Do we know an ETA on those?

The fact the Vision Pro is passthrough VR instead of an AR screen on glass (as in when the battery is dead you see black, not see the room with no AR) says that it's far away.

Or while moving.

Absolutely correct.

The AR glasses race is between Apple and Meta Platforms.

This 'LLM-first phone' looks like a solution in search of a problem. But we'll see.

Has any startup succeeded by starting out offering shiny hardware running innovative new software, all of which they have to develop?

It seems like a fatal dilution of focus to have to worry about the design and logistics of a fancy dumb terminal widget when you also have to get the software/AI/app integration stuff right.

Just make an app with text and voice interaction. Accept that the thing in our pockets with a screen and an internet connection is going to be a smartphone. You will not build an own-hardware moat with these weird little bits of e-waste.

I don't think there has been a single successful hardware startup in the last decade, so the answer to your question is safely "no" without even going into specifics.

Which is sad, because I'm sure there's room for a lot more innovative devices in the world outside of a single glass rectangle in your pocket that everyone must plug into in some way. The economics of the industry just makes it very hard for them to survive, and we all lose out because of it.

Oculus? I guess it’s been over a decade already

Founded July 2012. And while the company was successful in the sense that it got an exit its product isn't exactly doing too well.

I would argue it is. I've got a Quest 3 sitting next to me and I think it's great.

I can't speak for the deranged expectations, hype cycles and back-lashes over the last 5 years. And I think Meta's R+D budget is pretty hard to justify. But I don't think that reflects on their current product range (which could have been matched with a much smaller budget - and to some degree has been)

There are tons of successful hardware startups in recent history.

You just don't hear about them because they're not selling to you. They make business, commercial, and industrial hardware.

Consumer hardware is very hard because consumers are extremely demanding of hardware. Just look at how difficult it is to convince people to spend even $5-10 on useful software or sign up for a $100/year SaaS product with near zero marginal cost per customer. Consumers are really hard to please and consumer price points are difficult to serve.

In just a few years around 2007-2012 we got Oculus, Nest, Ring, Blink, Fitbit, Beats, Oura, Square, Pebble, Tile, Dropcam, SmartThings, Makerbot, Neato, Raspberry Pi... All pure consumer hardware startups with popular products and successful exits. So it's not like the category is somehow fundamentally not viable. It just needs VCs and consumers to both shift from the smartphone-only mindset and start taking some risks.

Note that this is a Teenage Engineering collab! Pretty exciting and a crazy low price point for something with their name on it.

This isn't a phone though right? The title seems wrong.

Yeah, the price difference between this and Teenage Engineering's own products is wild! It's worth noting the Playdate (by Panic) is designed by Teenage Engineering and also just $200. https://shop.play.date

I was pleasantly surprised by the Play date and feel ok at this price point taking a bet that this will be an enjoyable novelty.

I need to start my teenage engineering collab collection. Such wonderful and refreshing experiences. I’ve used my friends playdate but never took the plunge and it’s wonderful, haptics and everything

ok wow if that’s true the credibility just went way up. Interesting.

On their hiring page they are looking for VoIP experience so maybe maybe a VoIP device.

No one, including us, will be able to use personally identifiable information (your name, phone number, email address, etc.) for any purpose other than serving you.

Has some CPP vibes.

CPP?

It's an LLM technology that allows certain models to run on CPUs rather than big beefy GPUs. Makes running locally viable for consumers.

Is there a specific paper or something you can point me to? Or are you talking about like llama.cpp? Because I thought that referred to the fact that it was originally one c++ file named llama.cpp?

I assumed it was in reference to llama.cpp. It's a weak assumption, though.

The guy meant CCP, I'm pretty sure.

This is exactly what Siri wanted to be. Compare with the original Siri keynote https://vimeo.com/5424527

I can't find the exact ~2010 article from before being bought by Apple. I remember in an interview they were talking about making a web agent that could operate and perform tasks on any website, to avoid being locked out by APIs.

I'm very interested in what Apple does with LLMs on iDevices.

They have the right hardware for it and they have all the motivation, with their focus on on-device processing. OTOH they also have a pretty bad history with their AI assistant.

They should have been building this instead of Vision Pro white elephant

They could buy OpenAI two times with just their cash on hand.

This isn’t a case where they had to choose one or the other (not saying that you’re saying that). It seems like they were genuinely caught off guard.

They let almost the entire original Siri team walk didn’t they?

I've been surprised that Apple hasn't done more to keep pushing beyond the app boundary. The primary pitch for Rabbit from the keynote is basically "it's a layer that sits atop the broken model of modern phones." I think we all agree that the 'evolved state' of phones and apps is disappointing compared to where it could be / where we expected it would go.

They (Apple) are now in the position of being seen as laggards, caught with their pants down by companies releasing products whose core conceits are built atop inefficiency of their "core" models.

For both Humane and Rabbit, it's hard for me to imagine that there's enough "there" there for these to be beyond niche products that don't get starved out by the border-expansion of Apple / Android over the next few years … but I would have also guessed that A+A would have been further out front of this.

Yeah it's sad that Siri stagnated as soon as Apple bought it. They had some great ideas.

That Teenage Engineering is collaborating on this makes this a very interesting device. But I would not call it a phone? A pocket assistant maybe?

Where did you see them mentioned? For sure makes it more real!

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231221415633/en/rab...

In the video when they first show the actual device.

Smart phones are closer to smart cameras. I use the phone app maybe once a month. I'd argue it might be viable to build a smart phone that has no phone.

This is HN... so what OS do we think this is running? Android under the hood? Anyone know more about hardware or screen res?

I wonder how hard it would be to root this device and use it for the hardware.

Since Teenage Engineering has been mentioned as a design partner, I'd look at the specs for the Playdate and give it a spec bump.

Based on the rabbit keynote showing a colour screen - take a Playdate device, turn 90 degrees counterclockwise and reduce the height-now-width since you don't need a controller, just a roller wheel, pushbutton, and rotating camera.

Quick web search states a Playdate device has a 168MHz ARM Cortex M7 and a 400x240 LCD B&W screen.

Playdate seemed interesting, until I read the words "proprietary SDK".

Hell no. This is no better than a gameboy or whatever the current Nintendo console is.

Either some sort of Linux with custom GUI, OR bone-stock AOSP + custom app. If I were in some sort of CTO role I'd push AOSP route, as an individual dreaming idealist I'd be inclined towards the former.

You can browse their job listings and see the device is running AOSP.

How in the world are they going to make money on this? Perhaps the hardware is cheap to manufacture, but with no subscription I feel like they are going to get taken to the cleaner on LLM API fees. Even if they're running the LLM themselves, it's not cheap. Could they really be getting enough margin on the device to pay their staff _and_ all of that infra?

Or maybe this is another VC-backed sale price :)

I figured it’s local llms on the device

It's not powerful enough for that, 2018 chipset -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38938330

"No subscription" definitely sounds good to get people in the door but it seems short sighted in the long run, can't be making much on $200 and the more it's used the more that margin is eaten. Presumably they will roll out a sub at some point for extra features but then you get the backlash of "You said no subscription".

Loss leader and data collection play?

EDIT: it's 100% the razor model, they want the device out there so they own your interaction with "service providers"; i.e. they take a cut of everything to do. Middle men.

Presumably the optional data sim plans.

It's not much different than Sony selling PlayStations at a low price but making money off the games.

This seems like one of the least expensive things Teenage Engineering has done.

Same street price as the play.date, similar form factor? Both by Teenage Engineering.

[1]: https://play.date

Instantly thought it looked like a red play date with a different gimmick. (No crank but scroll wheel and 360 cam)

Yeah it's not a TE product, just a TM design I think. Though to be honest the price is very suspect, TE is usually very expensive but this is too cheap for what it claims it is.

Teenage Engineering's hardware design is so cool. I'm a fan of their aesthetics. Their color choices are great too.

They're almost an interactive art project that somehow got enough of an audience to sell their artwork en masse.

I'm very glad they exist, but I'm always a bit flummoxed by what they make and manage to sell.

I don't know about their other gear, but they sold a lot of OP-1s.

I don't use my Playdate as much as I'd like but I just love clicking around in the menus, pulling out and docking the crank. Even just how it looks sitting on my desk, with the bright yellow plastic and bright purple flip cover. It's a beautiful piece of hardware.

It's a striking condemnation of the current state of things that my $1K+ mobile phone does not do anything close to what's in this demo. I would pay $200 just to have a voice assistant that isn't totally incapable of playing songs requested like "Play SONG_TITLE from ALBUM_TITLE".

As an example, yesterday my daughter asked for a song from Snow White.

EDITED FOR CORRECTNESS (originally I said I asked for Heigh Ho from Cinderella)

In the car I say, "Hey Siri, play Heigh Ho from the Snow White Soundtrack". Siri: "Sure, here's Snow (Hey Oh) by Red Hot Chili Peppers" (try it yourself!)

Why are Alexa and Siri still so useless, inaccurate and inconsistent? Why can't I yet ask Siri to "book me a ride via Uber from location X to location Y" or "reorder the same thing I got last Tuesday from Uber Eats"? I assume it's down to compute costs, but I would absolutely pay an additional subscription fee for more intelligence behind these voice assistants.

I got it to work with Siri but had to give it a slightly different prompt. “Play Heigh-Ho from Disney’s Snow White soundtrack,” seems to work.

Edit: I tried it a couple of more times with the same prompt and this is not consistently reproducible, so yeah, Siri is still pretty bad at this.

I kind of agree with this. I'm not sure why the product is getting so much heat here on HN. I do think it's probably overkill and won't be super sticky, but it's at least iterating in the right direction.

I say, "Hey Siri, play Heigh Ho from the Cinderella Soundtrack".

It probably doesn't help that "Heigh Ho" is from Snow White

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSj2h34ZrmY

Haven't seen anyone mention just how bad the website design is here. The homepage ran at single-digit FPS on my (pretty powerful) laptop, and I noticed performance hits where there really shouldn't have been.

Besides that, there are too many animations where a few sentences or pictures would do. Elsewhere, thick walls of text, sometimes barely indistinguishable in color from the background.

The site seems to be an omen of the product itself: cool in concept, but touch-and-go in implementation.

Also, it made me rotate my phone into landscape view. I guess that's one way to not have to deal with responsive design

I think you mean portrait mode. But yeah that immediately made me not care about whatever this is. If someone is too lazy to make their site responsive, that's fine. But when they go out of their way to make the site unusable, that's another thing entirely.

On my phone, I get a big "Share" button right in front of the keynotes video player. It also prevents me from skipping around the video, no way I'm watching all of that.

I tried to go into landscape to fix it, qnd I get a black screen asking me to go back to portait mode.

I don't know how you can get such basic things so wrong.

Does the LLM run on device or in cloud. Can't find any info on the website but I assume device that size everything runs in the backend?

Def cloud, we don't have the tech to run what they're doing on that small of a device atm. (At least not at that price point).

Cloud since a web interface and email interaction are showcased in the keynote.

These demos are always the same: “<Product> find me the closest pizza”

Who actually interacts with a device like that? Is it an important problem enough to be paying $199 while I can do the same thing (often even better) with my phone?

People that buy Alexas in droves.

"Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year" (2022)

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co...

I see this as less of a competitor to a smartphone, and more of a competitor to a Light Phone [1]. Seems like it might help folks avoid doom-scrolling in a similar way, while providing a higher level of functionality.

[1] https://www.thelightphone.com/shop/products/light-phone-ii-b...

Does this thing make calls? I saw "SIM slot" on the landing page but that could be for mobile data only.

I kind of would love this rabbit device running the light phone OS (with a camera app)

This is pretty much what everyone saw coming when LLM became a reality: that is, eliminating the usual human-machine interface because now the machine can understand what we say and instructing it through keypresses and clicks becomes unnecessary. In a few years everyone will carry a device like this one, and "call Jim, the one I met the other day, not my brother" or "start writing an email to all my associates" etc. will become a reality, and visual interfaces will be relegated to contexts where we actually want visual interaction, such as photos, movies, games, etc. All cool, but unfortunately there's a catch: a device that can run AI locally and connect to the Internet without depending on a proprietary cloud, as of today can't fit in a pocket and can't cost $199, therefore it will depend on services that will have a cost in money and privacy. Also, since this is looks like nothing more than an audio/video interface to a remote cloud AI, everything it does can be replicated on a smartphone app.

In a few years everyone will carry a device like this one, and ...

Yes, but that device is a smartphone. I can't see a future in which standalone devices that are simply ChatGPT API shells are actually viable, unless they add some significant capabilities that a phone app or built-in phone assistant doesn't have.

I mostly agree but think you underestimate the “contexts where we actually want visual interaction” - a screen is not just for consuming visual media. It might be that all input is spoken, but output will always need a screen, because spoken word is just incredibly low bandwidth compared to a good text layout. Imagine an order confirmation page for a complex food delivery order, where you’ve made a couple of item modifications and you’re using a promotional deal for a discount on the total price. You can take in all that info in 2 seconds if it’s nicely laid out on a screen. Compare that to having to listen carefully to a voice reciting it all for you. And same goes for things like just browsing other songs by the same artist you’re listening to. Text on a screen, with good typographical layout for fast mental processing, will still be the best output format for many use cases.

This landing page is an utter failure. I can’t believe this got past anyone.

I’ve read the whole thing and I still have no idea what it does or what problem it solves. I’m not watching a Keynote to find out either.

Who made this?

Teenage Engineering is always like this. The hardware looks really cool (aesthetically I mean; no value judgment on quality or such) but they seem to have looked at Apple presentations and though those are not pretentious enough.

but they seem to have looked at Apple presentations and though those are not pretentious enough.

The design is by Teenage Engineering but is not sold by them.

The hardware device itself is a bit of a red herring. It's really a server-side LLM that is trained to use software on your behalf, presumably against server-side Android/Chrome VMs that you authenticate to various apps/services with OAuth.

At first it seems a bit like a kludge, but I don't really see any other way to create the dream sci-fi robot assistant. It has to be able to do things as you, and it would be impossible to manually integrate with every website or service.

Put this way, $199 seems overpriced!

It doesn't cover that many months of expensive GPU compute and Chrome VMs, though. The "No Subscription" promise is very dubious unless this is a play for selling user data.

Can someone who has watched the keynote tell me what this device is for?

It's a client device to an LLM that can use software on your behalf, presumably running on Android and Chrome/Linux VMs that they host. You log in to their web portal, authenticate various apps as you would on your own phone, and then the LLM can do everything you can do. You can also train it to do specific tasks.

When you press the button on the side, you speak as you would type to ChatGPT, but now the LLM can do arbitrary things as you.

talk to llm bot

This was what I had hoped might be possible years ago working on a voice assistant for a browser (Firefox Voice). That was all prototypish and desktop-focused, but the real potential I saw was in remote control of a cloud-based browser. Voice assistants without a way to execute actions are pretty limited. Google/Siri/Alexa built up those actions through sheer effort, creating integrations for everything, carefully handling the conflicts, etc. A cloud-based browser has the potential to maintain context and perform actions across everything right away, without that huge investment and need for market share, nor buy-in from service providers.

I'm not sure how exactly they handle the communication between that browser and the phone, but at least my sense of this is that they are doing what I imagine is "standard" browser automation (which is much more advanced with LLMs) and then something to reinterpret the output for the phone. You can do a lot with the mobile view of the sites, but they seem to be going further. (For something like Spotify I wonder if they are doing something site-specific)

The use of a browser offers interesting possibilities for auditing what is happening. With something like GPT Plugins you can see the JSON, but it's not really equivalent to what you as a user understand.

Looking at them using Discord, it makes me think they must be doing automation through vision, detecting pixel locations, etc, as Discord is deliberately hard to automate.

Accessibility APIs are another way to do it. You can't break them because you have a bunch of angry blind people at your doorstep, but accessibility and automation are very closely related. If you expose your UI to a screen reader, you also expose it to whatever other apps want access.

IMHO based on the few screenshots they showed in the background when talking about their LAM, I think they are either using something like the accessibility APIs to interact with the UI tree directly.

I must be missing something here. I used to work on a voice assistant product and everything demoed is pretty bog standard stuff: play music, shop, order food, get Uber rides, ask random queries, recognize images.

This also runs into the same core issue as voice assistants, which is that it's way easier to transmit complex thoughts/actions on a nice big visual UI than it is to convert those thoughts/actions into verbal instructions.

For example, when people order food from an online menu, most people are not fine with "get me the closest pizza available". They're usually considering complex tradeoffs between lots of factors: alternative restaurants nearby, how visually appealing is pictures of the food, health content, other options on the menu including their prices and content and how well they complement other dishes, etc. Figuring out how to express these preferences via a back-and-forth with an AI is more tedious than just looking at a visual interface and letting your subconscious process all this information into a choice.

It does have a screen for output. In they demo they showed it displaying a stock graph. As for input, I suspect elucidating your desires verbally is a muscle that is developed, like learning to program or be a writer. The assistants of yore are so error prone and slow people may not have got to that level, LLM might be the difference there.

play music

I can be driving in my car, say "OK Google, open Spotify" and Google happily replies "OK, opening Spotify on your TV".

Lovely.

I have a Spotify playlist called "kid's music".

"OK Google, play the Spotify playlist Kid's Music", and it'll go and play someone else's public playlist called Kid's Music.

Even sending messages barely works.

"Ok Google, send a message to <wife's name because I cannot say "my wife" due to how unintelligent Google assistant is> on Facebook Messenger saying ...."

"Sorry, I cannot send messages through Facebook Messenger".

It can read messages from Facebook Messenger, but not send them, lovely.

I had Music playing on my phone, I wanted to know what song it was. "Ok Google, what song is playing", soon as I say that, the music stops and now Google assistant is listening to nothing.

Right now I cannot say "OK Google, go to Discord channel <foo> and summarize the day's conversation".

which is that it's way easier to transmit complex thoughts/actions on a nice big visual UI

Depends on the task. Some are better on a UI (I want to see pictures of the dishes before I order), some are better with voice or natural language input.

Even on my PC, I could see some tasks being easier with an LLM

"Close all code editors I haven't touched in a week."

"Clean up my browser tabs by closing out all YouTube, reddit, and hacker news tabs. Keep open any tabs involving AI research or LLMs."

One of the most impressive product launches I've seen recently. Looks almost too good to be true. Good luck to the team.

Looks almost too good to be true.

That's because it is. Telling my phone to "edit images on Photoshop" (one of their examples) just doesn't seem feasible in the majority of interactions.

They sold 10k units in first 24h, so there must be other fools like me who thought they are onto something. Looks like a new category of devices being born.

I'll call it. This is vaporware. This is similar to Fast and Bolt.

2 reasons:

- It will be better as a phone. People will not use it and the initial hype will die quickly.

- It is seemingly useful but useless in practice because many things are impossible to do. The demo is already so fake.

With the two above reasons, the momentum and funding will dry up quickly.

Check back in a year.

At the same time, I don't see why the Apple Watch, just as an example, won't go this direction.

Come too think of it ... maybe that's the plan: to be bought up by a big tech company.

yeah, if they can do what is shown in the demo. A big if.

I know the $1000 device in my pocket is capable of all the things they implemented ... do I just wait for a Rabbit clone app? Or will Apple/Google just enhance their native offerings to include this sort of thing. I absolutely agree with the premise. Our phones are just mini-desktop computers accumulating unused programs that don't integrate with each other storing random bits of data all over itself. The whole device seems to be a more polished semantic web that we were promised years ago albeit being brute forced by AI because interop never evolved.

Apple would have to walk back some of their stance on privacy and/or their App Store rules. I hope they do, but I'm not holding my breath. Until then I'm cheering for people who are daring to think different.

Find a bored dev with a weekend on their hand and a spare Raspberry Pi. You’ll get your Rabbit clone.

This is never going to work for me because I don’t want to talk to my computer. When I’m in public my voice is noise pollution at best and is telling everyone around me what I’m doing at worst.

Call me weird but I don’t want everyone around me essentially hearing every thought I’m looking up in real time. Feels creepy.

I guess you didn't watch the keynote, he showed that when you shake the device a keyboard pops up.

He "said" a keyboard pops up, not sure he showed it?

if TE are selling it for $200, it must only be worth $20.

TE did the hardware design, it's not a TE product.

It's like those old hard drives "designed by Porsche" etc.

Not sure why they felt they needed their own hardware for this. They could have built it for multiple platforms to get more traction / usage.

TE is known for hardware design. To be honest, nobody cares about another app promising to improve some aspect of your life.

It's a neat idea but I'm not sure what the audience is. "It's simpler", but you still need to manage a bunch of integrations from a computer? It can't seem to make phone calls?

I just want something that I can give my 93 year old grandfather so he can order a ride and get reminders about his prescriptions. Rabbit seems like a device that misses an audience that actually needs a simpler smartphone.

I think the intended audience is really anyone and everyone. It’s a very grand vision.

I definitely see the appeal. I do not like owning and using a smartphone. A more functional device with a pared back interface is exactly what I would want, and I think they’re _is_ a decent slice of people out there who agree. You see that in the dumb phone and minimalist phone market that’s popped up.

That said my experiences with LLMs are that they are woefully underbaked for this kind of thing, and it’s a really tough sell to me on a privacy basis as well.

But for older folks I’m not sure I agree that the market is missed. I suspect the idea would be that you would manage the web portion for your grandfather and then he can just chat to the device. Unclear if it can make calls though, that does seem like a miss!

rabbit OS operates apps on our secured cloud, so you don’t have to

Absolutely Not!

It's ok, all you authenticated accounts are protected by trust me bro.

The "keynote" (is that what we're calling advertising videos now?) was pretty awful, and I'm unconvinced that making people unable to even use smartphones (which has already supplanted computer literacy for most) is progress.

Extra negative taste points for wanting a "cool SUV" for a trip to London.

How else are you going to drive there from Santa Monica?

LAM completes these tasks for you on virtual environments in our cloud

no subscription required

This does not compute for me.

If you're not paying money you're the product. Sometimes you're both.

I don't want to be mean, but...

- the keynote video isn't scrollable behind the giant "share" button - the text on the keynote page is incredibly difficult to read (small text + very low contrast) - the homepage is full of dizzying animations that don't tell me anything about what the "phone" is actually supposed to do - "How it works" is just a set of animated cards. Once you figure out they're clickable (hoverable?), they spin around to reveal... half-formed ad copy? I wanted to know how it worked.

I'm willing to believe this is a real product only because of the "research" page, but it feels more like an aspiring web designer's portfolio piece. The flashiness of it all makes it really difficult to figure out what anything actually is.

I only skimmed the video, but I have to agree. The biggest problem I see is that I don't want to talk to my phone for a lot of things. If I'm having a text conversation or trying to look up something on the internet while I'm in a crowded room, I don't want to use my voice for that. If fact, while there are some things that I would find this helpful for, I would say the majority of the interactions with my phone are things I would actually prefer to have a keyboard for.

While this thing does have a touchscreen keyboard it seems to me like the biggest selling point of the phone is actually something I don't want to use most of the time. I can't really see this succeeding for that reason.

Who ever comes up with these Teenage Engineering designs is an actual, real genius!

Jesper Kouthoofd

Feels like this is a natural effect of peak AI hype.

We have definitely not peaked yet... I expect so much more crap, the likes of which shitcoins have never seen.

Few points:

- Not sure if people would want to "talk to" a device in public.

- Anything and more that this device do can be done by a smart phone that people already have.

- I feel like people prefer using a UI interface instead of speech.An example to this behavior might be using delivery apps instead of calling a restaurant.

- Looks too wide to fit into most pockets.

I too thought that was the problem, but th emovie "Her" made it look like it is not going to be.

No thanks. I'll wait until the LLM/AI is resident on the phone and can be updated/replaced by the end user.

Same. And I don't think we'll have to wait long - perhaps a year.

Why does this have to be a competing device? It can do it all on a web page. For that matter put it all in a watch and lose the smartphone.

In case I'm not making sense, imagine if OpenAI made an iOS/Android app with subscription, what chance does a new piece of hardware have to compete against that low-friction install base?

Only after getting the users should smartphones be replaced with a bespoke device. The only need for doing the device first is if the service is effectively commoditized so need to differentiate somehow.

I think this is Apple's plan for the apple watch. I see my gf leave the house without her beloved iphone, making calls, listening to messages etc with her airpods connected to her watch. She doesn't even touch it.

I might even have tried it myself if Siri didn't suck to much. My experiments in this regard were...discouraging. Perhaps she radically restricts her use to things Siri understands (unlikely in her case) or she just knows how to speak in a way aligned to siri's expectations).

Though the other night I did awake to her her firmly saying "flashlight. flashlight. flashlight." for a bit followed by "shit" and a bit of fumbling at her wrist.

i do the same when i go to the gym or go on a bike ride. some apps are a bit of a pain to use on their own (trying to join a meeting from a calendar invite doesn't work because hrefs aren't tappable), but overall, i really like the experience and wish i could do it more often.

The future is now. At least the 5 next minutes, but then it will keep changing and what you do with an intended expire time of at least a year will be badly obsolete and moldy in a month.

That is the problem doing end user hardware tied to a technology that is changing very fast and where most of the innovation may be out of your sight, being carried by your main competitors.

If it's a cloud device, like most people here are speculating it is, then the hardware doesn't matter that much.

There are other worries, such as privacy and keeping the cloud alive, though, but the hardware doesn't seem to be the limiting factor here.

He is the founder of RavenTech. Baidu acquired RavenTech and he became the leader of Baidu's smart hardware division, and then launched the Raven H, which you may have heard of.

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/11/16/16664846/...

That’s actually really helpful context, and absolutely swayed the needle from “no track record vaporware company salesman” to “maybe he actually has the experience to pull this off”

I thought this was going to be a Teenage Engineering sex toy and I'm slightly disappointed that it isn't.

Nice, clicky buttons

How does this compare to the Humane device?

It appears to be $500 cheaper and is a handheld device rather than one that is worn. It also has a screen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2h-Hl3lewg

Official: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22wlLy7hKP4

imagine everyone in the airport lounge all with these.

seems too good to be true. Uber, doordash, and travel planning are too fast to be true...

I store the playdate in one sock. I can store this in the paired sock for a few hours of light per year.

This may just be the shittiest product website I've ever seen. It conveys absolutely nothing of value about the product. What problem does it solve?

It's just "ooh, pretty pictures, buttons and camera." Seriously? I'm supposed to trust a product from a company that can't even tell me what it's about without making me sit through a 25-minute keynote? Are they out of their minds?

great, the new OS war is coming! the question is, who gets the network effect bottle neck right?

I'm curious how they plan on covering the cost of their cloud services without a subscription fee.

Quote: "Pre-order now".

Just like for games, "no, I don't think I will". I'll let the quirks be ironed first then I'll see the reviews.

very inspiring. I like to primitive UX things: the scroll wheel and the turning camera and the button. If I had 200 bucks for fun, I would spend them.

LLM-first phone, but LLM not run locally? I can't accept that.

All I really saw is an awkward looking device (sorry TE) that probably wouldn't fit in my pocket, and would probably break if dropped. And whatever they paid for the keynote was a waste of money. If you can't explain how this works in about 30 seconds - I don't care.

Why did they turn off comments on their YouTube video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22wlLy7hKP4&ab_channel=rabbi...

This smells fishy.

https://www.rabbit.tech/rabbit-os:

Record your actions, explain them with your voice, and play them to rabbit OS. LAM will learn the nuances and create a rabbit that can be applied to various scenarios.

What if you create a rabbit that could be useful to others? You can monetize and distribute it on our upcoming rabbit store.

This is neat right up until "monetize", where everything flips from being a potentially cool community group of reproducible actions, to a pile of spam and bot-generated bullshit

That orange was incredibly hard on my eyes

Small enough that I would carry it in my shirt pocket or back pocket for anything. Looks very slick and at a very good price. Will buy three for my siblings this christmas.

the keynote failed me at "Shake the device to create a keyboard on the screen".

if the whole damn point of suffering with your goofy wildly colored mostly-incompatible mobile device is a talkable LLM, then "shake to keyboard" is a failure.

at $200 i'd rather just buy any of the plethora of sbc mini devices with cell phone antennas and play with LLMs myself without the black box that I can't touch. a uconsole or similar is , generally speaking, cheaper AND open-ish -- it's a fool's errand to trust a non-paid subscription service to continue existing.

I genuinely think this tech is really cool for old or disabled people who can all of a sudden interface with their devices with just natural language, that said I legitimately just do not see the appeal for regular users but cool tech nonetheless.

How can you so badly fail at even saying what the hell this is on your shitty glossy web site? What is this? The page is just a list of hardware 'features' with large but unclear pictures.

"push to talk button" ok, so?

"far-field mike" ok, so?

"360 degree rotational eye" so what?

"analog scroll wheel" that does what?

"usb-c plus sim card slot" which gives me what?

There's a video but I shouldn't have to watch a video.

I feel like we could do this on a steam deck with docker, ollama, mistral, and crewai.

push a button and talk to the ear buds.

On wifi at least. without a camera.

Not sure if any models are trained with app screenshots and interactions quite yet though. Shouldn't be long.

I can't even tell what that gadget is for. I can't tell what it does. There is nothing about what it can do for me (or anyone for that matter).

Without a complete accounting of this companies ties to the CCP, there's literally ZERO chance I'd ever use their man in the middle attack vector device. Giving all my most sensitive login credentials to a Chinese company that's trying very hard not to be seen as a Chinese company seems like a totally sane and safe thing to do...

Nowadays we don't really buy hardware or software... We buy into ecosystems.

The Android crowd, the Apple gang, etc... Once you are member of one ecosystem, friction is high enough usually to keep you in.

Moreover, many of the eco-customers wear more than one device.. phone, watch ...

So... why would I buy into yet another ecosystem with a third device to carry?

And no... most eco-clients will not abandon their current ecosystem that easily.

The 360 degree camera is quite nice, though...

If Siri worked like this, it would have fulfilled its intended purpose.

Sidenote: I find it funny that somebody that is trying to create a product that competes with Apple and Google ends up showing both of their logos in many places of their most important marketing video.

The biggest competitor to Apple and google is ChatGPT.

The future of manual human interactions is certainly limited. (It will definitely end up looking like movie Her).

OpenAI is in best position to redefine the edge OS’s that get us there.

Everyone wants so badly to be first to market with the "next big thing" after smart phones. And all of them fail the "so it's a phone, but just less capable?" test.

A neat toy for hobbyists, but most people can't justify carrying two devices. And as soon as you add phone functionality to it... you've just made a new (more awkward) smartphone.

The website - looks like its trying to emualte apple. The key note = The speakers hand movements and gestures are funny, emualting apple again. The demo of the device, faked. Funny - When it switches cameras back to the guy holding the device and hes just nodding, looks totally fake...

all in all.. fake and trying to copy apple. Can't people be original anymore?

Is this an early April fools?

I'd prefer it as an app. I already have the hardware and there'd be no need for an additional card in the data plan.

Is it using OpenAI under the hood?

Heh, Rabbit (another one) was a location-specific mobile phone company in the UK back in the early 1990's. You had to be near an antenna to make or receive a call. It's the first thing that came to mind when this post came up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_(telecommunications)

What's a "far field mic"? You mean a microphone? Like what all phones have?

Cool product but I agree with others that their site does not really demonstrate the value proposition of the device in a clear way. You shouldn't have to watch the keynote to understand what it is.

I also have a hard time believing it will work as well as they say it does gen-1 at a $200 price point. I'm very skeptical.

The teenage engineering design is nice though, looks like something out of the movie Her.

I am definitely not the target audience for this. I am that person that keeps typing while people send voice notes, and now the only way to interact with this device is via voice? :(

Neat idea, worth a try. Privacy story will be interesting.

I was going to spend some time criticizing/ridiculing this ("analog scroll wheel" in the feature list made me lol) but then I saw the price. $200? Maybe.

Hiding the screen during the ticket purchase userflow/UI at 15:20 is laughable.

Looks like vaporware to me

The biggest take away from this is the LAM-over-email which was hidden away in one of the demos. This has a lot more potential (esp. in a business context) in my opinion than the phone itself.

Being able to directly email an autonomous agent or even CC one later into a conversation with instructions can be a game-changer. Not only would the replies be faster but the result could be cheaper compared to a human equivalent.

One use case which comes to mind is, which was also demo'd, is making trip arrangements. In the demo, the spoken request to book a trip to London was long and precise; no way I would get that right the first time on any push-to-talk device. At my company, we use a travel agent for business trips which we email and they book everything and send over receipts and tickets. I could just as well be emailing a LLM/LAM.

I can't see this product outcompeting Apple, Google, Samsung, etc. At best, if it gets enough interest, it will be copied and improved like what happened with Pebble and smart watches

Innovation for e-waste rennovation.

I want this to be legit, but I fear we’ve entered the ICO phase of the AI boom

The pitch video makes me think of General Magic.

The value preposition here seems pretty weak. AI voice assistants are, in my experience, one of the worst ways to interact with a computer. What does this device offer that I can't already do on my cell phone?

The AI first OS is a step in the right direction. I just don't think that a new device in this format is necessary yet. Regardless - I'm missing visual feedback in the current version. It's too open-ended so a list of suggestions on what to do would be helpful for example. Overall pretty cool MVP tho. Excited to see what's next!

It’s a really interesting product that I’m not going to buy!

Declarative interfaces that allow you to describe what you want and use agents to go out to different services and chain them together is a cool idea:

I don’t want to spend time using dozens of different apps with different (often poorly designed) interfaces.

Having a push to talk hardware button instead seems less clunky than a “hey siri” key phrase (I use Siri dozens of times a day but unfortunately ‘raise to talk’ feature on Apple Watch has never worked well for me).

I’m curious how their LAM works with interfaces being updated- if they need to retrain with UI updates or if it’s flexible enough to be stable with UI changes and new features etc.

I currently use ChatGTP sessions to dive into various topics I’m interested in, and explore ideas- I do like the idea of dedicated hardware that would allow this, but it’s something I imagine I’d keep on the coffee table at home, I don’t want to get a dedicated SIM and data connection or carry around another device.

They’ve raised $30M and I wish them well, I hope they survive and have me as a customer in the future.

I watched the first 2:51 or so of the keynote. The guy made a series of assertions that he seemed to think were self-evident. I disagreed with every one, without exception. I gave up when he described the LLM as “artificial intelligence”. I don’t think I’ll be a customer.

It feels like a gimmick to me. The response speed is just too slow

The most troublesome part of this demo for me was the one tablespoon of mayo it wanted you to add to your vegetable omelet. Yikes.

watching the keynote, I was about to click Buy until I saw all the steps that required a laptop...

i feel a revolution shouldnt require so much tethering to other services through the hardware you are looking to replace?

if they keep iterating towards a truly standalone product, I think they'll hit all the notes we've been waiting for from a post-cellphone portable device

or can I make an AI agent to set it up for me :)

I'll admit the device is very cute, but without a solution to prompt injection, you'd be a fool to give this access to your accounts.

As usual with Teenage Engineering, I love the hardware design, but this aspect of the software is a letdown:

> rabbit OS operates apps on our secured cloud, so you don’t have to. Log into the apps you’d like rabbit to use on your system through the rabbit hole to relay control. You only need to do this once per app.

So things don't run on the device, but on the cloud. Unfortunate.

I am convinced that this company is 1-man standing. The man made this whole thing up himself.

Weird, no media gets loaded on the site if the uBlock is on.

Isn't Gemini nano being integrated into all of the new pixels?

I hope they succeed. Would buy this if it worked offline. Wish Pebble hadn't gone broke and had launched their Pebble Core device. Always thought it was a great idea.

Very interesting approach teachable agents. There is something similar, but without screen recording [1].

1. https://github.com/vignshwarar/AI-Employe#:~:text=we%20don't...

What ever it is but this website is completely unusable on Firefox.

meh!

This keynote really makes it seem like a scam. For example the "plan travel" section hardly shows anything. He just says "It's all been planned out, I just confirm, confirm, confirm..."- while the camera cuts to him tapping the device without showing anything on the screen.

I'd totally buy a ChatGPT+ device for my 7yo and I imagine people around the house would use it quite a bit.

Not sure I want to replace any other actions yet. Probably someday, but touch + apps is actually just incredibly good. A sub-1yo can start learning to use a smartphone / ipad, and a 6yo can put together an uber eats order. I'm not saying it can't be improved on, and I fully want a competent voice assistant in my phone. But it's gonna be real hard to do better than what we already have in our pockets on the things they're already good at.

So this presentation fell flat is for me are when it was talking about doing things pretty much everyone does just fine on their phone. But it was very exciting to imagine a ChatGPT+ device sitting around the house for anyone to pick up and interact with.

Theranos resemblance is off the charts

Appears that only people from the northern hemisphere can order this, Shame.

How do companies like this get funding? Do they get it before even having a prototype?

I scrolled the webste twice but I cannot figure out what this object is for?

I read the comments before I watched the video and I'm actually way more optimistic about this now than I was expecting to be.

Yes, google or apple will probably ship LLMs on their phones eventually and make an overall more compelling product than Rabbit _if_ you're only willing to have one device.

Considering the relatively low price (and assuming they actually deliver it in a timely fashion) I can see this being useful as a pocket assistant between now and whenever google et al eventually catch up, and potentially past then if rabbit keeps innovating.

I don't know about others, but I don't want something else to carry in my pocket.. especially something that duplicates what i can already do, just in a different way.

seems like it's connecting to external services but i'm not sure why siri couldn't do that.

Other links for figuring out what this is:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/9/24030667/rabbit-r1-ai-acti... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38933819, but no comments there)

https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/09/can-a-striking-design-set-... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38932575, but no comments there)

https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/rabbit-r1

I think the interesting bit here is actually the teachable mode (19:30 in the vid): https://youtu.be/22wlLy7hKP4?t=1174

there are tools that exist that teach agents what to do, but the ability to have them on command and return a nice little summary in a neat UI is actually kind of compelling. It also feeds the company routine information to fine tune agents and maybe results in a dev ecosystem of some kind? need to learn more about how the system prevents some of the concerns hear like taking undesirable actions on your behalf

I have no idea whatsoever about what this device is doing but I'm pretty sure it should have been just a mobile app

Please enable JavaScript to view this website

This is a pretty neat device. I think they might be more successful if they targeted the anti-smartphone crowd, but I can see why they would want to chase the bigger market.

Lyu hit the nail on the head when he said that smartphones are mostly for entertainment/wasting time these days. I definitely know of friends who want to (or try to) go smartphone free, but the apps mentioned in the keynote make it a large inconvenience. A $200 device that offers much of the convenience of a smartphone without the distraction sounds like a good fit for that crowd.

The device itself is really cute. I'm not sure about handing oauth tokens to all my accounts to a third party for them to run huginn/selenium on a backend that might not be online for more than a year. I'm barely comfortable with Alexa having a connection to my iTunes for podcasts. What happens when Uber or whoever decides to throw a captcha between Rabbit and the web frontend?

I'd like to see it do more than help me buy things. Teach mode seems to be the main way to do productivity tasks?

https://github.com/huginn/huginn

i confused, why don't you just create an app

I can't tell if it's tongue-in-cheek but the keynote is extremely similar to the first iPhone keynote.

I think what’s impressive here is their approach to “Teach Mode”, which essentially teaches the average consumer how machine learning works. I think that’s already a much better approach than Humane Ai and provides a better path long term for where this could go. This approach of a Large Action Model that can control any of your apps by watching you use them is a unique implementation for a hardware device. The hardware isn’t super impressive but the approach has staying power. It’s always way less invasive than Humane AI pin, it’s deliberate usage.

If it's relying on the cloud then you're better off using an app on your phone.

Can it make calls?

Most people won't want to carry multiple devices, and I doubt people will sacrifice their existing phone.

When Apple implement something remotely similar to this into iOS (WWDC this year, anyone?), it will likely render products like this obsolete.

Honourable mention, Teenage Engineering crushing it with the hardware, as usual.

Its interesting but not all apps or services offer integrations. You still have a problem with oauth and logging in.

Haven't watched the keynote yet, but this looks approx what I thought at beginning of last year Apple should have been building instead of Vision Pro

Yes, of course a hardware startup have a better product than Open AI. Definitely not an entirely faked demo… my suggestion is that this will not happen for 5 years at least.

I'm not talking to computers still. It's a border I just can't cross. Like I'd literally rather stop and type on my car display than try to voice in a destination. And I'd if I'm cooking and my hands are greasy wash my hands and pick up my phone and tap in a timer for 5 minutes rather than try some "set timer for 5 minutes" voice command. Not sure I ever will start talking to computers, but not this year at least. Anyone else feel the same way? It's part because in public it feels extremely dumb. But mostly I think it's the frustration. At least fumbling on touchscreen characters is a known frustration. Trying to voice-in a Scandinavian street name is worse.

Not having a subscription is shocking. I really like the device and LAM sounds promising. I just don't see how they are going to make money offering unlimited LLM + LAM capabilities without a subscription service.

FYI: Anyone that decides to throw down just to see when the hardware comes out, the return policy is 14 days after money changes hands

Interesting idea, kudos. Definitely advances the conversation, even if it doesn't ultimately emerge as the winner

I wish they put it next to something, I have difficulty understanding the size of it. People in this thread are talking about it like it’s tiny, but I got the impression from the pictures that it was gameboy size.

the future of human-machine interface

No. I could go deep into "rare language, weird slang, local dialect" hole, but simple "No" would be enough. Their website is exceedingly non user-friendly, too

To summarize, it’s a pocket piece of e-waste.

The website and the first 5 minutes of the keynote fails to convey what the device does exactly, other than that it meant to replace smartphones, which can't be right. This form factor would be inconvenient for watching videos and that's one of the most common uses of smartphones. They should just market it as a pocket assistant and make it do one thing exceptionally well. It's a losing strategy to try to be everything for everyone instead of just trying to dominate a small beachhead market. Smartphones with better assistants are coming, but there is no reason to compete with them. Just differentiate the damn product.

Giving your credentials to an AI to buy stuff online by scraping a web interface is a perfectly sane and safe idea that won't have any unexpected consequences whatsoever.

That rotating camera seems doomed to break easily.

The actual device looks like the kind of toy smart phone you give a toddler for their toy box, and I genuinely don’t see a need for a new device.

The AI in the device could be installed on any smartphone surely?

Are they pitching the device to try and make their product seem more tangible and get buy-in from more people?

A weird cellphone that runs everything from the cloud?

There's no way this isn't a nonfunctional brick in 18-36 months when they go bust.

I'd buy that for my elderly parents who are overwhelmed with apps.

Probably not the first model but the next one for sure if it can text and phone too.

I think there is a market for this and even though I despise talking to a device, I can see the use and I can see how it could bridge a world which is getting too complicated.

Who is Arthur Ashe

It’s the wrong form format:

- It should be a Smart Watch!

(or smart glasses, perhaps later)

With a companion web dashboard to be used from the user’s smartphone, tablet or PC.

What is the backstory of Rabbit?

They had to get Jesse to do this keynote with his arms in the air the whole time?

Looks alot like a play.date?

Think I had forgotten TE did the design for that