- Rabbit R1 AI box is actually an Android app in a limited $200 box, running on AOSP without Google Play.
- Rabbit Inc. is unhappy about details of its tech stack being public, threatening action against unauthorized emulators.
- AOSP is a logical choice for mobile hardware as it provides essential functionalities without the need for Google Play.
It’s so weird how they’re just insisting it isn’t an android app even though people have proven it is. Who do they expect to believe them?
The same question was asked a million times during the crypto boom. “They’re insisting that [some-crypto-project] is a safe passive income when people have proven that it’s a ponzi scheme. Who do they expect to believe them?” And the answer is, zealots who made crypto (or in this case, AI) the basis of their entire personality.
It’s the Juicero strategy.
“You can’t squeeze our juice packs! Only our special machine can properly squeeze our juice packs for optimal taste!”
Ahh, the good ol’ days, before we knew how batshit AvE was.
I’m assuming you’re talking about the YouTuber; It’s been since before the pandemic that I’ve watched AvE, what did he do?
Leaned hard into anti-vax and sympathizing with the Canadian trucker protests, and made it a fairly prominent part of his videos. Not entirely surprising that he held some of the views, but he got high on his own LIBERTARIAN!!! supply and started thinking that if he thought it, his audience must want to hear it.
Ah, what a shame, he had some good stuff.
Reviewer proceeds to squeeze more juice out with their hands than the machine managed.
Investors who don’t bother reading past the letters A and I in the prospectus.
They have thought of a specific design for the device using its own interaction modality and created a product that is more than just software.
Therefore don’t get why people refer to it being just an app? Does it make it worth less, because it runs on Android? Many devices, e.g. e-readers are just Android Apps as well. If it works it works.
In this case it doesn’t, so why not focus on that?
The point being, they are charging 200 bucks for hardware that is superfluous and low end for an incomplete software experience that could be delivered without that on an app. The question is, are you going to give up your smartphone for this new device? Are you going to carry both? Probably not.
“It can do 10% of the shit your phone can do, only slower, on a smaller screen, with its own data connection, and inaccurately because you have to hope that our “AI” is sufficiently advanced to understand a command, take action on that command, and respond in a short amount of time. And that’s not to even speak about the horrible privacy concerns or that it’s a brick without connection!”
Everything about this project seems lackluster at best, other than maybe the aesthetic design from teenage engineering, but even then, their design work seems a bit repetitive. But that may be due to how the company is asking for the work. “We wanna be like Nothing and Playdate!!” “I gotchu fam!”
To address your point about e-readers, they have specific use cases. Long battery lives, large, efficient e-ink displays, and the convenience of having all your books, or a large subset, available to you offline! But when those things aren’t a concern, yea, an app will do.
Like with most contemporary product launches, I simply find myself asking, “Who is this for?”
They’ve said they are working on integration with other apps, and have said the ultimate goal is the AI could create its own interface for any app. I dunno if that’s gonna happen but if it did it would be closer to an actual assistant, imagine “rabbit, log onto my work schedule app and check my vacation hours” or “rabbit, compare prices for a SanDisk 256 gig memory card on Amazon, eBay, and Newegg”.
More than likely it’ll just fuck it all up but that’s the dream I think.
It’s an experimental device and by buying it you invest into r&d. It’s not meant to replace a smartphone as of now, but similar ones eventually will.
My point stands, because they are offering a completely new (but obv lacking) experience with novel design solutions. What they made is a toy, which is not really unusual for teenage engineering. But if they do as they did with other devices in the past this thing might actually rock in the future. They are not inexperienced and usually over super long support for their devices.
TE is way older than Nothing and Playdate btw…
It’s an experimental device and by buying it you invest into r&d.
This is laughably untrue. By buying this you’ve proven to them that their marketing oriented approach to product development is correct, and that customers will throw away good money on half-designed, disposable shit.
By the looks of this shitty project, they spent most of their money on design idiots that think they’re the next coming of Steve Jobs, and blathering marketing morons that think if they say AI and “the future” enough that it doesn’t matter that the products they actually deliver are half-done, also-ran, clout-chasing garbage with hardware from the clearance section of Alibaba.
Why even try to sell me another device though?
Anything and everything this square does, my phone can do better already and has the added benefit of already being in my pocket and not a pain in the ass to use.
Because, you know, technological development? Someone has to fund R&D, because it’s not cheap. And in 10 years everyone will have similar ai-enhanced devices. No one thought smartphones will make it back in the days as well. And I’m already looking forward to the time when I don’t have to look down anymore to get information
And in 10 years everyone will have similar ai-enhanced devices.
In 10 years (or actually 0 years because it’s already kinda true) people will have an AI enhanced device… And it’ll be their phone.
Also, you’re arguing something I’m going to name the inevitability fallacy (for my own amusement). It’s not inevitable that everyone will have one of these particular type of devices in the same way it wasn’t inevitable that everyone would start watching 3d TV in their houses.
This is just another in a long line of things that supply side economics driven companies are trying to sell us. There’s next to no need or demand for this thing, and there’s no guarantee that there will be.
my honda is just android software, if thats the only part you look at too.
This is more like someone offering a “brand new method of personal travel” to replace your car, but it turns out that it’s just an old Honda with only one seat, a fuel tank that only holds 10L, and a custom navigation app. There’s nothing it does that your Honda can’t do better, and you won’t want to replace your Honda with this.
true but we all have tons of successful devices that are secretly like this, smart doorbells and flood lights and watches etc. we also have all seen terrible ones. its the implementation that isn’t magical.
No it’s not. Your Honda has several different computers in it, only on of which is likely to be running Android.
‘Android’ is a certification with requirements in installed Google apps and homscreen links, so there’s that.
The AI boom in a nutshell. Repackaged software and content with a shiny AI coat of paint. Even the AI itself is often just repackaged chatgpt.
Why are there AI boxes popping up everywhere? They are useless. How many times do we need to repeat that LLMs are trained to give convincing answers but not correct ones. I’ve gained nothing from asking this glorified e-waste something, pulling out my phone and verifying it.
What I don’t get is why anyone would like to buy a new gadget for some AI features. Just develop a nice app and let people run it on their phones.
That’s why though. Because they can monetize hardware. They can’t monetize something a free app does.
I have now heard of my first “ai box”. I’m on Lemmy most days. Not sure how it’s an epidemic…
I haven’t seen much of them here, but I use other media too. E.g, not long ago there was a lot of coverage about the “Humane AI Pin”, which was utter garbage and even more expensive.
I think it’s a delayed development reaction to Amazon Alexa from 4 years ago. Alexa came out, voice assistants were everywhere. Someone wanted to cash in on the hype but consumer product development takes a really long time.
So product is finally finished (mobile Alexa) and they label it AI to hype it as well as make it work without the hard work of parsing wikipedia for good answers.
Alexa is a fundamentally different architecture from the LLMs of today. There is no way that anyone with even a basic understanding of modern computing would say something like this.
Alexa is a fundamentally different architecture from the LLMs of today.
Which is why I explicitly said they used AI (LLM) instead of the harder to implement but more accurate Alexa method.
Maybe actually read the entire post before being an ass.
I just started diving into the space from a localized point yesterday. And I can say that there are definitely problems with garbage spewing, but some of these models are getting really really good at really specific things.
A biomedical model I saw seemed lauded for it’s consistency in pulling relevant data from medical notes for the sake of patient care instructions, important risk factors, fall risk level etc.
So although I agree they’re still giving well phrased garbage for big general cases (and GPT4 seems to be much more ‘savvy’), the specific use cases are getting much better and I’m stoked to see how that continues.
I just used ChatGPT to write a 500-line Python application that syncs IP addresses from asset management tools to our vulnerability management stack. This took about 4 hours using AutoGen Studio. The code just passed QA and is moving into production next week.
https://github.com/blainemartin/R7_Shodan_Cloudflare_IP_Sync_Tool
Tell me again how LLMs are useless?
To be honest… that doesn’t sound like a heavy lift at all.
Dream of tech bosses everywhere. Pay an intermediate dev for average level senior output.
It’s a shortcut for experience, but you lose a lot of the tools you get with experience. If I were early in my career I’d be very hesitant relying on it as its a fragile ecosystem right now that might disappear, in the same way that you want to avoid tying your skills to a single companies product. In my workflow it slows me down because the answers I get are often average or wrong, it’s never “I’d never thought of doing it that way!” levels of amazing.
You used the right tool for the job, saved you from hours of work. General AI is still a very long ways off and people expecting the current models to behave like one are foolish.
Are they useless? For writing code, no. Most other tasks yes, or worse as they will be confiently wrong about what you ask them.
Are they useless?
Only if you believe most Lemmy commenters. They are convinced you can only use them to write highly shitty and broken code and nothing else.
This is my expirence with LLMs, I have gotten it to write me code that can at best be used as a scaffold. I personally do not find much use for them as you functionally have to proofread everything they do. All it does change the work load from a creative process to a review process.
I don’t agree. Just a couple of days ago I went to write a function to do something sort of confusing to think about. By the name of the function, copilot suggested the entire contents of the function and it worked fine. I consider this removing a bit of drudgery from my day, as this function was a small part of the problem I needed to solve. It actually allowed me to stay more focused on the bigger picture, which I consider the creative part. If I were a painter and my brush suddenly did certain techniques better, I’d feel more able to be creative, not less.
Who’s going to tell them that “QA” just ran the code through the same AI model and it came back “Looks Good”.
:-)
It’s no sense trying to explain to people like this. Their eyes glaze over when they hear Autogen, agents, Crew ai, RAG, Opus… To them, generative AI is nothing more than the free version of chatgpt from a year ago, they’ve not kept up with the advancements, so they argue from a point in the distant past. The future will be hitting them upside the head soon enough and they will be the ones complaining that nobody told them what was comming.
I heard someone even leaked the apk LMAO that’s hilarious that your 200 dollar product can be literally pirated
You wouldn’t download a bunny…
I would stew a bunny…
Does the apk have unlimited access to Perplexity AI?
I’m confused by this revelation. What did everybody think the box was?
I think the issue is that people were expecting a custom (enough) OS, software, and firmware to justify asking $200 for a device that’s worse than a $150 phone in most every way.
The Rabbit OS is running server side.
I didn’t know how much work they put into customizing it, but being derived from Android does not mean it isn’t custom. Ubuntu is derived from Debian, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a custom OS. The fact that you can run the apk on other Android devices isn’t a gotcha. You can run Ubuntu .deb files on other Debian distros too. An OS is more of a curated collection of tools, you should not be going out of your way to make applications for a derivative os incompatible with other OSes derived from the same base distro.
Most of the processing is done server side though.
Same. As soon as I saw the list of apps they support, it was clear to me that they’re running Android. That’s the only way to provide that feature.
Isn’t Lemmy supposed to be tech savvy? What do people think the vast majority of Linux OSs are? They’re derivatives of a base distribution. Often they’re even derivatives of a derivative.
Did people think a startup was going to build an entire OS from scratch? What would even be the benefit of that? Deriving Android is the right choice here. This R1 is dumb, but this is not why.
I don’t even understand what the point is of this product. Seems like e-waste at first glance.
It’s just marketing to be like “look at how capable our AI is with just one button”. I mean if you want to be charitable it’s an interesting design exercise, but wasteful and frivolous when everyone is already carrying devices that are far more capable supersets of this.
It’s just a hype app and the hardware is a fancy licence key
This is why I cringe at cell phone manufacturers selling cloud and AI features based on phone models because wtf you’re not running that cloud on that handset so why do you gatekeep the product behind that model? It can’t require that many resources, it’s a cloud app!
It is to make you spend more to buy the better model. If you really want that AI you won’t mind spending a bit more
I know what you’re getting at and this isn’t directed at you and I know this is why it’s done, but the capabilities of the phone don’t have any bearing on the use of the AI so why gatekeep it? It’s a dumb way to make a profit.
It’s a dumb way to make a profit.
If it works, is it dumb?
When VHS was still around, DVDs were priced higher even though they were much cheaper to produce. If people are willing to pay more, producers/distributors will charge more. Yay capitalism.
I know. It’s dumb as hell. Just like everything being priced at 4.99 instead of 5.00. people are just stupid and it seems to wprk out for the companies.
Should’ve named the company Snake Oil Inc.
their page to link accounts to it was not a real webapp, it was a novnc page that would connect to an ubuntu vm that runs chrome with no sandboxing and basic password store under fluxbox wm
someone dumped the home directory from it
Well that’s horrific.
I wish I knew what any of this meant…
It basically implies that they cobbled together some standard technology but they didn’t even put it together very well.
It’s like a solution that’s held in place with chewing gum and Band-Aids.
This is the business equivalent of throwing a tantrum.
The issue isn’t even with what it runs on, albeit selling it as specialized hardware is really bizarre, when it’s just a glorified embedded platform with a scroll wheel
The company is known for making quirky hardware, usually niche musical instruments with creatively chosen knobs, switches, cute UIs and such.
They figured they could ride the AI hype wave based on their expensive niche audience but it’s blowing up in their face.
You should see the rest of the overpriced toys these guys have marketed as genius over the years.
Is that not custom hardware? I really don’t see any issue with how they built this thing. The issue is what they built.
An app that would require root access to fully operate. It is designed to run and use apps automatically. Large Action Mode, I think. Easiest way to get this out is a standalone device
I may not fully understand the situation, but AOSP offers an API called Accessability that allows an app to hook and modify how the user interacts with the UI. the best example is probably Talkback.
•Rabbit Inc. is unhappy about details of its tech stack being public, threatening action against unauthorized emulators.
All android devices are “emulators” like their hardware isn’t special
I mean, isn’t all software just an app that runs on hardware?
Next you’re going to tell me that lemmy is one of these dirty dirty apps
Nahhh, not as dirty as Reddit.
lmao threatening action against their own imminent irrelevance, more like
Not cool guys, not cool at all
And get serious - fuck your “proprietary” details, fuck lying/misrepresentation for money, and fuck you for trying a stunt like this.
Call me when you actually put the genie in the bottle!
