I scrolled the webste twice but I cannot figure out what this object is for?
You have to watch a 30 minute keynote to find out, which is bizarre. No thanks..
Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
281–290 of 547 posts
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#282$199 with no subscription? You must have to bring your own data sim card. Or can it get its connection from your phone? And is the AI stuff running locally on the device? Impressive if so. Suspicious if not; there's no way the service remains free forever. Pretty compelling price, and I'm certain the vision of AI agents that can use any existing app or website to take actions on your behalf is the future of computing…
The AI runs on their cloud. It's unfortunate but the industry is only starting to catch onto on-device models language models.
It probably wouldn’t cost $199 with a capable chip and the battery to go with that.
Actually the only device with such features is a recent smartphone. Wouldn’t this be better as an app?
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#283This is pretty much what everyone saw coming when LLM became a reality: that is, eliminating the usual human-machine interface because now the machine can understand what we say and instructing it through keypresses and clicks becomes unnecessary.
In a few years everyone will carry a device like this one, and "call Jim, the one I met the other day, not my brother" or "start writing an email to all my associates" etc. will become a reality, and visual interfaces will be relegated to contexts where we actually want visual interaction, such as photos, movies, games, etc.
All cool, but unfortunately there's a catch: a device that can run AI locally and connect to the Internet without depending on a proprietary cloud, as of today can't fit in a pocket and can't cost $199, therefore it will depend on services that will have a cost in money and privacy.
Also, since this is looks like nothing more than an audio/video interface to a remote cloud AI, everything it does can be replicated on a smartphone app.
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#284I'm not sure people want an LLM assistant that can actually do things like spend their money. A minor convenience when it works well. A major inconvenience when it doesn't. (And it doesn't take a lot of imagination to come up with nightmare scenarios.) Love the gadget, though. I feel like I want to eat it or build a Lego castle around it, or just look at it more.
They have a confirmation dialogue in the keynote. As long as they do that well and for every important action, I don't think it will be a problem
Funny thing that the keynote only demoed “Confirm” and never “Correct”/“Change this”, etc.
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#285I think the interesting bit here is actually the teachable mode (19:30 in the vid): https://youtu.be/22wlLy7hKP4?t=1174
there are tools that exist that teach agents what to do, but the ability to have them on command and return a nice little summary in a neat UI is actually kind of compelling. It also feeds the company routine information to fine tune agents and maybe results in a dev ecosystem of some kind? need to learn more about how the system prevents some of the concerns hear like taking undesirable actions on your behalf
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#286If Siri worked like this, it would have fulfilled its intended purpose.
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#287I feel like the R1 is getting a lot of weird hate here on HN. I get it, it's a bit pretentious and wants to be very Apple-like, yadda yadda. Probably not that much value generation, it's overpriced, and no one wants to carry another thing in their pocket. And yes, the company will likely go bankrupt (or pivot into something less exciting). It's also all in the cloud (no local inference) so it doesn't really even "do" that much. But seriously: this is (or should be) the future of computing. The fact that things like OS self-organization, system-wide (+cloud) search, basic automation, etc. is so broken on modern operating systems is just plain bizarre.
For example, if I wanted to do a simple find-and-replace on my 2021 M1, I'd have to use something like grep (a tool originally written by Ken Thompson in 1973—a half century before my laptop was built) and look up flags and syntax I inevitably constantly forget. We should have been past this at least 15 years ago.
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#288This is pretty much what everyone saw coming when LLM became a reality: that is, eliminating the usual human-machine interface because now the machine can understand what we say and instructing it through keypresses and clicks becomes unnecessary. In a few years everyone will carry a device like this one, and "call Jim, the one I met the other day, not my brother" or "start writing an email to all my associates" etc.…
> In a few years everyone will carry a device like this one, and ...
Yes, but that device is a smartphone. I can't see a future in which standalone devices that are simply ChatGPT API shells are actually viable, unless they add some significant capabilities that a phone app or built-in phone assistant doesn't have.
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#289Has any startup succeeded by starting out offering shiny hardware running innovative new software, all of which they have to develop? It seems like a fatal dilution of focus to have to worry about the design and logistics of a fancy dumb terminal widget when you also have to get the software/AI/app integration stuff right. Just make an app with text and voice interaction. Accept that the thing in our pockets with a s…
I don't think there has been a single successful hardware startup in the last decade, so the answer to your question is safely "no" without even going into specifics. Which is sad, because I'm sure there's room for a lot more innovative devices in the world outside of a single glass rectangle in your pocket that everyone must plug into in some way. The economics of the industry just makes it very hard for them to sur…
There are tons of successful hardware startups in recent history.
You just don't hear about them because they're not selling to you. They make business, commercial, and industrial hardware.
Consumer hardware is very hard because consumers are extremely demanding of hardware. Just look at how difficult it is to convince people to spend even $5-10 on useful software or sign up for a $100/year SaaS product with near zero marginal cost per customer. Consumers are really hard to please and consumer price points are difficult to serve.
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#290Two things in the keynote that seem faked: 1. at 13:13 there's a demo ordering a ride 'to home', then the user requests a car change to fit six people, and what's shown as a seamless switch from UberX to UberXL also updates the destination from the home address to LAX airport. 2. at 14:05 the device confirms and recites a pizza order, but the screen displays "chesse" with a typo while the voice reads out "cheese", so…
Right after you stopped watching, he books an entire vacation - flights, hotel, car rental, activities - and says he is given multiple options to choose from but shows none of the options, just an itinerary that he quickly scrolls through.