Rabbit in the headlights
You might have seen Marques Brownlee’s review of the Rabbit R1 but if you haven’t, I’ll break it down:
- On day 1, you can integrate with four apps: Spotify, Uber, DoorDash and Midjourney
- You can ask it questions and get it to describe things around you, but the interaction design problems with engineering prompts I guessed would exist do exist (it’s clunky)
- It runs the battery down super, super quick
- The Large Action Model, though a cool idea, will need tons of training data – therefore tons of users, tons of interactions, and tons of people being OK with it not performing well for a while
It’s not looking good. The week before last, I thought about getting one to play with, but it’d be a waste of $200. I don’t use Spotify, Uber, DoorDash or Midjourney.
And it looks like Siri really will kill it.
The Verge reviewed Apple’s research papers on AI and found a few important details:
- Apple is researching how to compress large language models and use less power-hungry components, making on-device AI more efficient overall
- One paper looked at how an LLM could understand app UIs and whatever else is on your screen, helping you navigate apps and your phone
That’s a win for accessibility and better VoiceOver controls. But here’s where Siri catches the Rabbit in its headlights:
A Siri that can understand what you want, paired with a device that can see and understand everything that’s happening on your display, is a phone that can literally use itself. Apple wouldn’t need deep integrations with everything; it could simply run the apps and tap the right buttons automatically.
If Rabbit has sold 100,000 units of the R1, that pales in comparison to the ~2 billion active iPhone devices and ~3 billion active Android devices globally. How can they begin to compete?
Which brings me to another conclusion for monetising the Rabbit R1: acquisition or deep integration. If Rabbit’s Large Action Model could compete enough with Apple’s Ferret research, they might be in prime position for being acquired.
Surely that’s the goal, I don’t see how can they compete. A Siri you can actually use will run them over, surely?