The Rabbit R1

• Rabbit demonstrates the AI agent that it should have launched

  Screenshot: Rabbit

  The Humane AI Pin has collapsed, but Rabbit is still kicking. The company published a
  
  Today, a blog post and video showed off a “generalist Android Agent” slowly controlling apps on an Android tablet in the same way Rabbit claimed their R1 device could do over a year earlier. It couldn’t and can’t. The work is based on LAM Playground – a “generalist Web Agent” Rabbit
  
  Launched last year

  For the demonstration, the engineers don’t even use the Rabbit R1. Instead, they type in their requests into a prompt on a laptop which then translates them into actions on an Android Tablet. It is given tasks like finding a YouTube recipe or locating one in a cocktail application, gathering ingredients, and adding them to Google Keep grocery lists. They ask it at one point to download the puzzle games 2048 to figure out how to play them, which it does, although slowly.

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• Rabbit now lets you teach the R1 to perform tasks for you

  Photo: David Pierce / The Verge

  Rabbit is
  
  The company is rolling out a “teach” mode to its R1 devices that allows you to create an AI assistant that can perform tasks on your behalf. The feature “learns” a task that you demonstrate, like retrieving updates from content creators you follow or helping you create a social media post.

  You can
  
  Log in to the Rabbithole web interface, which is used to manage an R1 device. You can create a “lesson”, by describing the task you want to perform and recording yourself doing it. After you’ve shown the AI agent what to do, it can be asked to recall the information it has learned and complete the task. Rabbit admits that teaching mode is experimental, and the results may not be what you expect.

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• The Rabbit R1 now lets you remake its whole interface

  Photo: David Pierce / The Verge

• Correction: Only 5,000 people are using the Rabbit R1 at any given time, not in a day.

  That’s straight from Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu, who took great exception to our story from September 25th, which was sourced to
  
  Fast Company published an article about his comments made at one of their events. Jesse told me that the number of daily users was approximately 20,000. This increased to 34,000 on the day that the new LAM Playgrounds launched. His actual comment was that only 5,000 people were using Rabbits at any one time. Jesse told me Rabbit had sold 100,000 R1s to date. Fast Company

  has updated its story and we have also updated ours. You can listen to the entire conversation on Decode.

• Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn’t thinking too far ahead

  Photo illustration by The Verge / Photo: Rabbit

  Today, I’m talking with Jesse Lyu, the founder and CEO of Rabbit. The startup company makes the adorable r1 AI gadget — a little handheld designed by superstar design firm Teenage Engineering. It’s meant to be how you talk to an AI agent, which then goes off onto the internet and does things for you, from playing music on Spotify and ordering an Uber to even buying things on Amazon.

  Rabbit launched with a lot of hype at CES and a big party in New York, but early reviews of the device were universally bad. Our own David Pierce gave it a 3 out of 10 in May, saying that most of the features don’t work or don’t even exist. And the core feature that didn’t seem to exist was the most important of all: Rabbit’s large action model, or LAM, which is meant to allow the system to open a web browser in the cloud and browse for you. The LAM is supposed to intelligently understand what it’s looking at on a website and literally click around to accomplish tasks on your behalf.

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• Only 5,000 people are using the Rabbit R1 at any given time

  Photo: David Pierce / The Verge

  Around 5,000 people of the 100,000 who bought the Rabbit R1 are using the device at any given moment, five months after the device launched. That’s straight from the mouth of Rabbit founder Jesse Lyu, who
  
  Fast Company was given the number and explained that the device needed to be launched before it was fully ready to beat the big tech companies.

  That is a huge drop from the hype that AI gadgets had earlier this year. The R1 was a huge hit after its CES debut and Humane’s AI pin was shrouded in mystery before its unveiling. Both products arrived without the futuristic grandeur promised. David Pierce, The Verge’sreviewer, wrote that “the entire thing just feels broken” in his review of R1. Maybe this is why so few people are using R1s or why Humane took back more AI Pins last month than it sold.

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• “The object you are holding appears to be a tomato, not something intended for consumption.”

  You know, I think I’m coming around on the Rabbit R1.

• “You’re holding a taco!”

  If you’ve already read our review of the Rabbit R1 but haven’t gotten around to watching the video version of it, what better time than now?

• Battle of the AI gadgets.

• An OpenAI outage briefly broke push-to-talk requests on all Rabbit R1 devices.

  As pointed out on Threads
  
  It looks like the problem was caused by @zebulon.vance (19459415).
  
  OpenAI’s outage on Thursday evening was resolved about 45 minutes after it occurred.

  Even after paying $200 for Rabbit R1 AI Hardware, you still have to rely on other AI companies to keep things running 24/7.

  Screenshot: Discord (rabbit)

• Take a look inside the Rabbit R1 and the Humane AI Pin.

  I love a good iFixit teardown, and this one is super instructive. You can really see how much more polished and complex the AI Pin is, but both have a lot of tech and design even inside their cases. And if you’re thinking, gosh, there’s a lot of phone-like stuff in here… you’re getting it.

• Rabbit R1 review: nothing to see here

  “You’re holding a taco.”

  My
  
  Rabbit R1 (#19459415) told me this the other day. I was sitting in a cafe near the National Mall, Washington, DC. I had just picked this $199 orange rectangle gadget up and pointed it towards the food I held. The R1 was absolutely certain that it was a taco.

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• Turns out the Rabbit R1 was just an Android app all along

• The Rabbit R1’s first software update addresses its dismal battery life

  Just a week after its initial launch, the Rabbit R1’s
  
  The first software updateis here — and it’s not a minute too soon. The OTA update includes “up to five times” improved idle battery performance. This is a major improvement for early R1 users. It’s great news for me specifically because my R1 is always out of power.

  The update consists two parts: a direct OTA update for R1 devices, and a cloud-based update for Rabbit OS. Other highlights include an improved music player UI, improved Bluetooth reliability and a fix for compatibility issues when the device is connected to a car that has a faulty USB port.
  
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  Seems to have bricked one R1 .

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• “What are we doing here?”

  Marques Brownlee asks, incredulously,
  
  About 14 minutes into ‘s brutal review of Rabbit R1, he goes over the device features (or lack thereof).

  This question segues into an rant about the miserable trends of new hardware, video games, cars, and “borderline nonfunctional” AI gadgets released half-broken with promises of better things down the road.

• Can Rabbit’s R1 outsmart the smartphone assistants? Let’s find out!

  Welcome to another episode of the fantastic new game show where we quiz virtual assistants! Say it with me, folks: “Are you smarter than just googling it?” Let’s welcome our contestants.

  You probably know our first two contestants from such hits as “Set a timer for me” and “How much time is left on my timer?”: Siri and Google Assistant! Big round of applause for these hard-working smartphone assistants. Next up is a newcomer — it’s sleek, it’s orange, it’s the Rabbit R1!

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• “This should be an app.”

  Dave2D aims directly at the heart of the existential problem of AI gadgets with his casual redesign of the Rabbit R1. That is, anything meaningful they do can be boiled down to an app on the smartphone that’s already in your pocket.

• The Rabbit R1 was faster than expected at one thing.

  One owner apparently plugged his into his car after recieving it at the swanky NYC event a few days back and it promptly bricked itself.

  They said that Rabbit was quick to replace it, but not before they snapped a pic of what looks like an Android debugging UI.

• A morning with the Rabbit R1: a fun, funky, unfinished AI gadget

  There were times I wasn’t sure the Rabbit R1 was even a real thing. The AI-powered, Teenage Engineering-designed device came out of nowhere to become one of the biggest stories at CES, promising a level of fun and whimsy that felt much better than some of the more self-serious AI companies out there. CEO Jesse Lyu practically promised the world in this $199 device.

  Well, say this for Rabbit: it’s real. Last night, I went to the swanky TWA Hotel in New York City, along with a few hundred reporters, creators, and particularly enthusiastic R1 buyers. After a couple of hours of photo booths, specialty cocktails, and a rousing keynote and demo from Lyu — in which he made near-constant reference to and fun of the Humane AI Pin — we all got our R1s to take home. I’ve been using mine ever since, and I have some thoughts. And some questions.

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• I got my Rabbit R1.

  And I have so many questions (SO many questions) and so much setup and testing to do. I’ll write some initial thoughts tomorrow, but I’m definitely enjoying the way this thing feels. More a Fun Toy than a Smartphone Killer, you know?

  Let me know if there’s anything you want to know about the Rabbit R1 or have ideas for tests I should do! More soon.

• Hello from the Rabbit R1 launch party!

  I haven’t been to a gadget launch like this in… a long time. We’re at the swanky TWA Hotel in NYC, where a bunch of early Rabbit adopters will get their AI gadgets. There’s a 360 Photo Booth! And a speakeasy! And a whole installation of scroll wheels! AI!

• The Rabbit R1 comes with a “vintage cassette style travel case.”

  In the meantime, here’s what owners can expect to see when opening their Rabbit shipment.

• Welcome to the AI gadget era

  Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge

  I’m just going to call it: we’ll look back on April 2024 as the beginning of a new technological era. That sounds grandiose, I know, but in the next few weeks, a whole new generation of gadgets is poised to hit the market. Humane will launch its voice-controlled AI Pin. Rabbit’s AI-powered R1 will start to ship. Brilliant Labs’ AI-enabled smart glasses are coming out. And Meta is rolling out a new feature to its smart glasses that allow Meta’s AI to see and help you navigate the real world.

  There are many more AI gadgets to come, but the AI hardware revolution is officially beginning. What all these gadgets have in common is that they put artificial intelligence at the front of the experience. When you tap your AI Pin to ask a question, play music, or take a photo, Humane runs your query through a series of language models to figure out what you’re asking for and how best to accomplish it. When you ask your Rabbit R1 or your Meta smart glasses who makes that cool mug you’re looking at, it pings through a series of image recognition and data processing models in order to tell you that’s a Yeti Rambler. AI is not an app or a feature; it’s the whole thing.

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• The Rabbit R1 will start shipping on Easter Sunday (March 31st).

• Checking out the Rabbit R1 note-taking abilities. This short demo from Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu helps to make the case for using the Rabbit R1 AI gadget. It records audio, transcribes it and summarizes it.

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