I genuinely think this tech is really cool for old or disabled people who can all of a sudden interface with their devices with just natural language, that said I legitimately just do not see the appeal for regular users but cool tech nonetheless.
Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
521–530 of 547 posts
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As a bonus, those capabilities don't require uploading your data to the cloud or risking LLM hallucinations. Ignoring that half those services are dependent on the cloud already, this is such a bold and hard problem. A solution would be magical but LLMs are our best chance. Without clearly defined protocols (eg SMTP, CalDav) and a ton of boring to write and use case specific glue code , you’re really dependent on L…
And what’s to be said about every large orgs or serious companies TOS against screen scraping data?
If they don't like screen scraping they probably also don't have an API and probably don't have 100 different ways to auto-export data.
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea that anyone is going to book a vacation this way is ridiculous. Vacations take extensive thought. There’s no way a voice interface would work for this even if it was the Star Trek computer.
It's a pitch to get VC funding and this is exactly how that audience treats vacations. The idea of saving or planning to do something is just unimaginable to the super rich this is aimed at getting investment money from
It’s not the saving or planning part. It’s the leaving to to some random algorithm to make good decisions part.
If it’s only for super rich people, they already have a human PA
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
People keep saying this but having to go through the Apple lock screen for every interaction would mean it never even gets used at all. Not sure if the Rabbit device is the answer but I definitely see why people are trying.
I have the "two back tap" accessibility feature setup to start chat gpt voice. It works great. I just two back tap and look at the phone and its ready to start listening.
I tried that back tap thing, surprised how poorly it worked to be honest maybe there is a knack to it.
Thing is these AI devices will become actually interesting when they start being observers in your life too and pre-empting rather than the siri style ask and response and that just isn't possible on a locked down OS like iOS.
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#525Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
That seems unlikely given that both Apple and Google have been employing the world's top ML scientists for years, have unlimited budgets, have better access to customers than any startup (to find out what customers want), and ... need I go on? Yes, it's nice that "Rabbit" is exploring this area and being innovative, but unless their particular take on mobile phones catches the world unexpectedly by storm, nobody will…
Is OpenAI a counterexample here?
I don’t think so. Here are some differences:
1. OpenAI is building in a brand new space. Mobile phones are well established. LLMs as a product for consumers are brand new. While it’s true Rabbit are trying to merge LLMs with mobile, the elephant in the room is the mobile incumbency. The existing players just have to add LLMs to their existing dominant platforms and Rabbit is done for. OpenAI, on the other hand, was unopposed launching ChatGPT. They had a genuine technical edge and consumers were hungry for it. Is everyone hungry for Rabbit’s concept? Give me a break.
2. OpenAI raised an order of magnitude more capital. Rabbit’s $30M isn’t going to get them much farther than a prototype device. My impression is the founder here managed to convince some VCs to give him money during the boom times and leveraged the generative AI hype train more recently. But where is he getting his next round? The one that he will need to actually make phones at scale. That will cost billions ultimately, and the incumbents own the supply chain he needs to access. His effort is all but doomed.
3. OpenAI’s formula was easier for a startup to master. All they needed was money for the best AI engineers and scientists and money for GPUs, and they could create a blockbuster product. Rabbit needs the top engineers as well as extensive capital for manufacturing and distribution. There is a reason that hardware favors massive scale and a reason why hardware startups tend to focus on pinpoint innovations. The energy barrier is extreme.
These are three reasons why Rabbit is in an entirely different situation than OpenAI was circa 2022.
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
From > rabbit OS operates apps on our secured cloud, so you don’t have to. Log into the apps you’d like rabbit to use on your system through the rabbit hole to relay control. You only need to do this once per app. it seems that this device doesn't run anything locally, everything is in the cloud.
> it seems that this device doesn't run anything locally, everything is in the cloud. For apps w/o a web interface, presumably they have an Android emulator running somewhere and they controlling it with their LAM and feeding the results back to end users. They can even feed sensor data from the Rabbit phone (e.g. GPS) to the emulator. It is a brilliant solution to the problems they are facing, but their cost model m…
You will pay with your data. Read their privacy policy. They can track you, collect your private data, they have access to your accounts. As long as it's closed source and cannot be self-hosted, it's a big no-no.
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#528$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…
It's indeed suspicious. You're sending your voice samples, your various services accounts, your location and more private data to some proprietary black box in some public cloud. Sorry, but this is a privacy nightmare. It should be open source and self-hosted like Mycroft (https://mycroft.ai) or Leon (https://getleon.ai) to be trustworthy.
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#529Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have the "two back tap" accessibility feature setup to start chat gpt voice. It works great. I just two back tap and look at the phone and its ready to start listening.
I tried that back tap thing, surprised how poorly it worked to be honest maybe there is a knack to it. Thing is these AI devices will become actually interesting when they start being observers in your life too and pre-empting rather than the siri style ask and response and that just isn't possible on a locked down OS like iOS.
My really old LG android had a wake on doubletap screen. Worked really well. All newer phones have failed misserably or completely missed the function. Still miss it, was much more responsive than any new phone I bought.
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#530This is exactly what Siri wanted to be. Compare with the original Siri keynote https://vimeo.com/5424527 I can't find the exact ~2010 article from before being bought by Apple. I remember in an interview they were talking about making a web agent that could operate and perform tasks on any website, to avoid being locked out by APIs.
I'm very interested in what Apple does with LLMs on iDevices. They have the right hardware for it and they have all the motivation, with their focus on on-device processing. OTOH they also have a pretty bad history with their AI assistant.
I've been surprised that Apple hasn't done more to keep pushing beyond the app boundary. The primary pitch for Rabbit from the keynote is basically "it's a layer that sits atop the broken model of modern phones." I think we all agree that the 'evolved state' of phones and apps is disappointing compared to where it could be / where we expected it would go.
They (Apple) are now in the position of being seen as laggards, caught with their pants down by companies releasing products whose core conceits are built atop inefficiency of their "core" models.
For both Humane and Rabbit, it's hard for me to imagine that there's enough "there" there for these to be beyond niche products that don't get starved out by the border-expansion of Apple / Android over the next few years … but I would have also guessed that A+A would have been further out front of this.