wolfe with an e's blog
Chapter 23: “It’s not done.” Fear not, it never will be.
The Rabbit R1 chronicles.
There’s criticism that the Rabbit R1 (and all AI devices released to date for that matter) were released too soon and that if they had just waited a few more months it would have been perfect. Well, that’s pre-AI thinking. Anyone who bought this device for $200 and expected to press the button and unicorn spit to pour out of the speaker was mistakenly optimistic. It’s amazing how many things people swear Jesse promised on launch in the keynote back in January that flat out weren’t.
Rabbit R1 is not just a new device made by a new company. It’s a whole-new product category using two whole-new technologies: AI and the Large Action Model. The speed at which all this is going to move forward will be phenomenal. Updates are planned weekly or every other week and include bug fixes and service connection changes, as well as upgrades to the OS and the LAM. The pace of development is about to accelerate exponentially. And Rabbit is poised to set that pace, complete with growing pains.
There’s also this: The last week of April there were about 400 people using Rabbits to communicate with 400 virtual machines on Rabbit’s servers. Now there are over 10,000. The scale-up is massive. And bandwidth capacity for all the moving pieces will be enormous once we’re dealing with the pre-ordered 100,000 Rabbits in the wild.
Rabbit, the Humane pin, OpenInterpreter Light 01 are all AI devices built on an Android backbone. And even this backbone is updated. Plus the AI services and your Rabbit R1 itself are learning. So they’ll never be done. We can clearly see there are stumbles. But waiting a few months for a smooth path just ain’t gonna happen.
Another thought on not being finished: The question of what apps Rabbit will work with in the future. There’s concern that Rabbit possibly could be blocked out of access to sites or services. After all, LAM (and Teach Mode eventually) depend on connecting to services through web pages and your virtual machine in the Cloud.
This will likely come down to money. I’m betting that most companies that charge fees for their services will welcome Rabbit. The Lyfts and eBays will likely look at the R1 as a new vehicle for sales that won’t even require them to build a new app. But companies that rely on ad revenue may resist and be reluctant to allow these new devices access to their services. After all, they’d lose that ad revenue since Rabbit at this point doesn’t show ads. So what about companies that have devices that use or will use AI, like Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta? Well, the other side of that coin is that they also charge for their services. So ultimately it would seem they want to give users one more way to interact with sales of their physical goods, virtual goods, data, music, etc.
Rabbit’s suddenly appearance put all the virtual assistants on notice. Expect Siri, Alexa and Barney (or whatever Google calls their AI this week) to bring their LLMs up to snuff, as well as figure out how to add web-service actions without violating Rabbit’s LAM patent. Eventually, we’ll going to look back on Rabbit R1 as a bold, first step in eliminating apps that act as middleperson on mobile devices.
[Check out the next article: The Rabbit Test](https://wolfewithane.com/rabbit-r1-chronicles-24-commands ““Link to next article in series”)
I have no affiliation with Rabbit Inc. I’m just an early adopter. If you want to support this journey into the Rabbit, buying me a coffee below helps keep the articles coming.
