Remember all the excitement about the Rabbit R1, and how this was supposed to signal the demise of the appstore and the onset of Large Action Models? Where we were no longer going to be held hostage by app providers refusing to open up their APIs or be forced to work through the dysfunction and poor integration of many painful subscriptions?
Remember the promises that all we had to do was talk to this little orange thing and it would execute pretty much anything we wanted? And all we had to do was drop $199 on the device to experience an AI-driven change to our lives where these effortless experiences would change everything for the better…
Rabbit.tech caused such a stir at the 2024 CES event, with Founder Jesse Lyu claiming his firm Rabbit could totally disrupt the app store in a similar fashion to how ChatGPT is disrupting web search. Even Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has described the Rabbit’s launch of its R1 hardware as the most impressive since Jobs’ historic iPhone launch in 2007.
Source: YouTube, 2024
Well, after making us wait almost six months, the little red devices have finally arrived for a $199 price tag.
The reality is the device only supports only supports Spotify, Apple Music, Midjourney, Suno, Uber, and DoorDash. Do I really need to listen to music on this orange thing and order a pizza with it? What about sending emails, texts, whatsapps, calendar invites, or anything remotely useful? This is the response I received from Rabbit customer support:
The Bottom-line: Beware of AI snake oil, as some of it is very slippery indeed. Rabbit promised us freedom from app lock-in and all we got was more lock-out
I am sure there are may reasons why I now have a useless orange device taking up space on my desk and $200 missing from my bank account, but the delta between the device Jesse was selling and what I ended up with is scandalous. I can warn you about salesmen selling you AI dreams that appear too good to be true, but I know you are already probably very very wary!
Posted in : Artificial Intelligence, GenAI, Uncategorized
