Though I’ve never been a fan of Bill Gates, the man certainly is psychic. Many years ago he predicted that future software would be in the cloud and we’d lease it. At the time, software was still delivered on physical discs, you had to buy each update, people were still using 56K, land-line modems and there was no “cloud”, so it just didn’t seem imaginable. Well here we are: We don’t even have slots on our computers to put a disc in anymore. We download our software and lease through a subscription from companies like Microsoft. So when I saw two of Bill’s latest predictions they really caught my eye.
Chapter 13: Do you want your AI to be a Gameboy, techno brooche or giant Mento?
The validity of the dedicated AI device just became more obvious with the introduction of a third noted player: Open Interpreter 01 Light. For a quick backstory, Open Interpreter AI developer Killian Lucas saw the Rabbbit R1 demo and Xed: we could make an open-source vers of this pretty quick with a Raspberry Pi + Open Interpreter…who wants to help? Six weeks later, Killian has a functional prototype and is taking preorders at $109. It shows how blurringly fast things are moving for everyone in this space.
Rabbit is built on a mobile operating system called AOSP, Android Open Source Project. Oh, so it’s Android? Not really. Think of AOSP as the skeleton of the OS and not the live, functioning body. Rabbit OS will be a much-customized and extended version of AOSP.
Since Rabbit is built on someone else’s OS, what about security? That’s a major issue for a device connected to a cloud-based virtual machine that you’re entrusting financial interactions to. iPhone still rules when it comes to mobile security, but then it’s always been a closed system with Apple controlling software, hardware, sales of apps, even down to producing every Lightning plug made. It’s been so secure that NSO’s Pegasus spyware charged $1 million to hack into an iPhone. It’s kind of a rare perfect-world scenario, but that may have changed with the EU forcing Apple to open up the iOS system: switch to a USB-C connection, allow sideloading and third-party app stores. Effects remains to be seen.
Is the Rabbit R1, too cute? Well, that’s likely to be what may make it a big success.
Rabbit recently did an ex-space discussion called Future of AI Hardware with titans of AI: Aravind Srinivas of Perplexity, Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, Bobak Tavangar of Brilliant Labs and journalist Robert Scoble. A lot was packed into that hour and half. But what I walked away with was Jesse Lyu’s explanation of how Rabbit R1 got its form factor. He equipped each of his crew a few devices, including a walkie-talkie. That concept is critical to Rabbit: You push a button to talk and someone on the other end of the device communicates back, essentially telling you what you want to know or confirming they’ve done something. The someone on the either end of Rabbit—just happens to be AI.
Rabbit will bring about a big shift in how we communicate with technology. The previous model was that humans had to communicate with computers like the technology wanted. First you had to learn to type. Then you had to name files a certain way. Then you had to follow a file structure to organize things. You even had to use strange characters to tell the computer what to do. The change with Rabbit is that you can communicate in human language. That’s a leap over our current digital assistants that don’t quite understand what we’re saying, know what we really want them to do or even have the capability to do something.
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