Feels like this is a natural effect of peak AI hype.
Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
461–470 of 547 posts
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the optimistic take for investors is maybe they make some interesting LLM-phone tech and get acquired?
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…
> 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 mourn their passing when the money runs out later this year.
I worked with one of the (many) teams at Microsoft who worked on Cortana.
The way the team leader explained it to me is that Cortana could do a lot more, but internal corporate politics prevented it. Rather than implementing the best solutions to user's problems, they had to do things like ensure Bing search handled certain results, to make sure that team stayed happy.
Or to take it to the extreme, if someone at Google came up with a device that directly beamed 100% correct search results into your brain, Google would never release the product because of the loss of search ad revenue.
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#463Haven't seen anyone mention just how bad the website design is here. The homepage ran at single-digit FPS on my (pretty powerful) laptop, and I noticed performance hits where there really shouldn't have been. Besides that, there are too many animations where a few sentences or pictures would do. Elsewhere, thick walls of text, sometimes barely indistinguishable in color from the background. The site seems to be an om…
Also, it made me rotate my phone into landscape view. I guess that's one way to not have to deal with responsive design
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#464This was what I had hoped might be possible years ago working on a voice assistant for a browser (Firefox Voice). That was all prototypish and desktop-focused, but the real potential I saw was in remote control of a cloud-based browser. Voice assistants without a way to execute actions are pretty limited. Google/Siri/Alexa built up those actions through sheer effort, creating integrations for everything, carefully ha…
IMHO based on the few screenshots they showed in the background when talking about their LAM, I think they are either using something like the accessibility APIs to interact with the UI tree directly.
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume by selling products to customers.
Its serious question. I am stuck in a loop of taking clients money to bootstrap my startup but i need much more to pay a few other engineers to show companies like these that they produce garbage. Even apple is running in the totally wrong direction. Until now i was under the impression i'd need to hustle more to earn cash & build the prototype. But that won't be fast enough. I can't watch people that just don't get…
The founder launched a product previously, which means he has a track record of leading an engineering team to success.
> But we are not located in the EU, not the US. So i am not sure what i should do.
Keep the team in the EU, founders move to US, become a global remote company, raise funding in the US.
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#466This is HN... so what OS do we think this is running? Android under the hood? Anyone know more about hardware or screen res? I wonder how hard it would be to root this device and use it for the hardware.
You can browse their job listings and see the device is running AOSP.
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#467Red flags: 1) Price seems too low for unlimited LLM usage and there's no monthly fee... so maybe you are the product? 2) Website has no information on the people behind this. 3) In the keynote, the demo of logging into to other services like Spotify appears to just be stealing the auth tokens from the laptop and shipping them to the R1 device. Not a good sign. 4) The founder's voice-over insists that "we value privac…
THIS - pricing and security/privacy. Specially #1,2,3. Saying this despite ordering one. There is definitely a lot of scope to this new way to interacting. Really hoping these get addressed soon.
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#468Haven't seen anyone mention just how bad the website design is here. The homepage ran at single-digit FPS on my (pretty powerful) laptop, and I noticed performance hits where there really shouldn't have been. Besides that, there are too many animations where a few sentences or pictures would do. Elsewhere, thick walls of text, sometimes barely indistinguishable in color from the background. The site seems to be an om…
Also, it made me rotate my phone into landscape view. I guess that's one way to not have to deal with responsive design
I think you mean portrait mode. But yeah that immediately made me not care about whatever this is. If someone is too lazy to make their site responsive, that's fine. But when they go out of their way to make the site unusable, that's another thing entirely.
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
#469How in the world are they going to make money on this? Perhaps the hardware is cheap to manufacture, but with no subscription I feel like they are going to get taken to the cleaner on LLM API fees. Even if they're running the LLM themselves, it's not cheap. Could they really be getting enough margin on the device to pay their staff _and_ all of that infra? Or maybe this is another VC-backed sale price :)
I figured it’s local llms on the device
It's not powerful enough for that, 2018 chipset -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38938330
"No subscription" definitely sounds good to get people in the door but it seems short sighted in the long run, can't be making much on $200 and the more it's used the more that margin is eaten. Presumably they will roll out a sub at some point for extra features but then you get the backlash of "You said no subscription".
Re: Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
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