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Why Would I Buy This Useless, Evil Thing?
- pg5 3y agoMy question is what happens when you veer off the happy path for a given task? Like if your hotel cancels, or thinks you didn't pay and you did? Seems like disasters waiting to happen.
- mike-cardwell 3y agoI wouldn't even trust that it had booked the hotel on the correct date, or with my breakfast or room preferences. I'd need to go double check everything it did anyway, so what's the point.
- visarga 3y agoAI can do anything (eventually) but it will never take responsibility for it. Irresponsible like a genie in the lamp.
- _dark_matter_ 3y agoTo be fair - I work with humans who I feel the same way about. We will be able to use these devices when we've seen they work over and over. Trust is only ever earned.
- TehCorwiz 3y agoThe accuracy problems will eventually be solved. The point is to remove you from the decision making process of spending your money and delegate that to the institutions who want your money. Sure, the itinerary looks good, but since you haven't actually planned it yourself you don't know what the tradeoffs are. This is the end-goal of capitalism, extract the most value from people and resources as possible, and launder all of the anti-competitive and scam-adjacent behaviors through "the algorithm!" Just like how the police launder racist policies through statistics and terrible facial recognition or predictive policing software.
- PointyFluff 3y ago[dead]
- i80and 3y agoI'm actually pretty interested in the hardware and form factor, and absolutely un-interested in the corpo backend services. I wonder if it's possible to homebrew this odd little square.
- ilikehurdles 3y agoI bet. Small Pi enclosure with a mic, battery, wifi, speaker, and a basic OpenAI API client and you’re golden. It’s a matter of time.
- zecg 3y agoI don't even think it's properly monetizable, it needs a lot of juice in the backend.
- i80and 3y agoThat's what I don't get here that worries me. It feels either like a ticking time-bomb to deprecation, and/or a privacy nightmare if they're somehow selling data they mine from their users.
- idkyall 3y agoIt'd be neat if the software was opensource and you could point this device at your own LLM, then at least you'd have some assurance it won't be e-waste if the company shuts down. But I don't see a world where you can feasibly support the required infra of providing LLMs for your users with only hardware sales as a revenue stream. Their website specifically calls out that there is no subscription fee, so either they'll introduce one later or something else will need to be the other source of revenue.
- thinkingemote 3y agoTeenage Engineering does interesting and good work. Similar to Kano, they have very good modern design ideas and they produce actual devices. That's the best thing about this useless evil thing. It exists in the world and can provide inspiration for others to work on. Another positive-ish thing to say would be is that this device is likely going to increase in value. Not because its popular but because it is going to be rare.
- jkestner 3y agoHope they can inspire someone to make a left-handed version. I admire your dedication to finding positive things, but if this particular cloud-dependent chunk of plastic appreciates in value I’ll eat my Audrey.
- bruce511 3y agoThe author seems to be on the fence regarding this device, although there are some subtle clues in there that he may be _leaning_ towards not liking it. They're hard to spot though. It does beg the question of why it's implemented in hardware though, and not just an app on your phone.
- TomMasz 3y agoTheir Pocket Operators are great although, as the article points out, the rest of their audio products are incredibly expensive for what you get.
- speps 3y agoThe PO are still expensive for the hardware they have and the UX leaves a lot to be desired...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gumby 3y agoThis is an imperfect glance at the future. The apple watch is another: my gf interacts with hers mostly by voice, and uses it instead of her phone for most things. With the limited bandwidth of voice, your interaction with the phone will be tiktokified: some algos will decide what’s spam, what’s legit, what you should see right now. Unless you can afford a flagship phone, your phone will be as worthless as google search.
- asylteltine 3y agoOkay…then don’t buy it. Have a nice day
- SavageBeast 3y agoIt seems to me the author of this article is going to have a tough time in the coming brave new world. I do love the writing style and wit though and Im even inclined to agree. Still, AI-ALL-THE-THINGS is coming. Imagine a Siri/Alexa that actually DOES STUFF.
- ycombinete 3y agoI try not to be negative online, but did enjoy the Something Awful-esque hyperbolic acidity.
- giantg2 3y agoIs AI going to make the important decisions like who the person should vote for and actually cast that vote too? Seems like a risk when the next generation will grow up outsourcing most of their decisions to AI and then need to figure out how to make the important ones on a reduced experience base. Definitely need to be brave for what is likely to come.
- SavageBeast 3y ago"Is AI going to make the important decisions like who the person should vote for and actually cast that vote too?" - Funny you mention that use case - I know for a fact that its being worked on right now (at least the "who to vote for" portion). The younger generation has allowed TikTok to talk them into seeing how many laundry pods they can eat ... so yeah things are going to get increasingly stupid most likely. To your point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power
- from-nibly 3y agoI'm sorry but this has been going on since the very first time people were allowed to vote on something. AI is not making this new. The new generation is not the _one_ being influenced (it's everyone). Everyone everywhere is being fed nonsense from all sides (I mean metaphorically not politically), all the time. AI is making it cheaper, but it's not making it more possible.
- mlekoszek 3y agoI'm not so aligned with this article. I think this product shows a great deal of vision and creative risk. Even if it ends up as a failed experiment, I think it's still a worthwhile effort, and I'll be happy to see where they go with it.
- 127361 3y agoThe market will decide. If nobody likes it then it will flop. If it takes off, then well done to them. Good to see some form of innovation. Maybe they will create a new category of device, as dozens of Chinese imitators come up with clones? Either way this is all positive. A device like this with the battery capacity and processing power for running local AI would be very good for privacy. I could see some people buying it, if someone advertised it as totally private, with no logs or sensitive data stored on even the device itself (i.e. in RAM and gone on power off). So you can ask it anything, it will answer, and there is no trace at all once it's switched off.
- PaulHoule 3y agoa "cool SUV"... Sorry I can't do that Dave. (Besides, to an American who doesn't live in NYC or WDC, it feels like a lot more of a vacation to ride the train.)
- beretguy 3y agoI’ll let rich people test this thing out for me. Looking forward to all the news, articles, blog posts etc. of people’s experience (good or bad) using this thing. Wish I could get some kind of RSS feed about successes/failures of this thing.
- kotaKat 3y agoI'm not even here for the "AI creation" horseshit. I just want a better general assistant that's smarter than Siri that can handle task-keeping, calendaring, and reminders better. And I like that it's "push to talk". It listens on my command, not on the whims of a voice query in mid-air. I'll give this a crack because I'm part of the weird population that likes "stand-alone" appliances for things. It's got a certain charm to it that the workflow just would work better for me and my brain that an app alone just can't touch.
- rocketbop 3y agoI use push to talk on the action button on iPhone on the rare occasions I try to make Siri do something for me. I refuse to say 'Hey Siri' like a twit.
- deinonychus 3y agoWhy the action button? You know the power/lock button does that, right?
- tmikaeld 3y agoIf the "Rabbit OS" cloud service could be self-hosted, then I'd be all for it.
- endisneigh 3y agoWhy hate? Just don’t buy. The author is a child. Just more ragebait as usual. I do love how people complain about clickbait yet ragebait appears in the front page regularly. There you go - that’s why clickbait is a thing. Techies are not immune
- i80and 3y agoWhy hate? Just don't read. Obviously people will sometimes express their opinions on societal trends and products, especially in their blogs.
- endisneigh 3y agoI don’t hate the article, actually. It’s a good summary on the device if you’re unfamiliar.
- DanHulton 3y agoHahahah, you beat me to it. +1
- DanHulton 3y agoWhy hate? Just don't read.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoCool viral advertising, bro.
- foobarian 3y agoSo far with every TE product that showed up here it was pretty obvious what its purpose was. Until now. What does this do? :-)
- homefree 3y agoCynical pessimism is easy and lame - it doesn’t make you sound smart, I like to see people try new things. Every new thing has these sorts of articles written about it, they’re best to just ignore.
- amanj41 3y agoThe idea is fine, but the inevitable outcome here is that Apple and Google do the same thing in their respective smartphones and this device (if it's even good at all) is obviated.
- colechristensen 3y agoGood. It’s disappointing how bad Siri is. I don’t need it to be an LLM trained to know everything in the encyclopedia galactica… I just need Siri to understand basic sentence structure so i don’t have to reword something five times before giving up because i don’t know the magic word order.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoIt's a funding/VC grab. I'll look forward to the "Our incredible journey" post a couple of years from now. I would be astounded, astonished, and amazed if Apple doesn't have Siri++ in development to do exactly this, but with more guardrails.
- cfr2023 3y agoI dislike and object to the scope of this device as much as the author. It's not a popular view, but I hope Teenage Engineering is acquired by a very large company soon so that they can be relegated to functioning somewhere as a harmless novelty devision. This way they will get a big pay day and be treated like a prize, while their influence to create proprietary devices for the landfill is effectively quashed.
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- Someone 3y ago> I hope Teenage Engineering is acquired by a very large company soon so that they can be relegated to functioning somewhere as a harmless novelty devision. I don’t think that’s a common outcome of being “acquired by a very large company”. Very large companies tend to only run large projects, even if they run them as hobbies. They simply cannot have small divisions. As a simple example, if BigCo made this thing, they’d want to translate it in a gazillion languages, vet it for not stepping on some country’s or minority’s toes, set up support pages, have their IP lawyers go over it, etc.
- cfr2023 3y agoWorthy considerations
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- micromacrofoot 3y agoI don't think this thing is any more evil than a hammer. It's a tool. If it's not useful to you, don't use it. If it's not useful to anyone, it will quickly cease to exist. I don't think it's going to do anything to erode the concept of morality. I don't have to trust it with my money any more I would trust anyone else about my money. This kind of take, which is common with AI, always assumes this odd state of blind trust. As if I can't read and reason about the output like I would anything (or anyone) else's output. Are there people I trust more than AI? of course. Do I trust AI more than some people? also true. Would I blindly trust a person or AI without doing some of my own reasoning at some point in the process? no.
- chewmieser 3y agoThere really isn't anything of substance in this article. Just a low-quality complaint about AI and AI devices with such hot-takes as: > You will notice that many of these tasks are just interacting with the lazy Silicon Valley dipshit treat ecosystem that already exists. Honestly I'm hesitant about AI devices as well but dismissing it entirely is very Luddite-like. Will these smart AI devices succeed? Who knows... It's a risk but I can absolutely see areas where these devices will succeed - like bringing tech to the tech illiterate (or even just illiterate). And Rabbit's price-point puts it in a very competitive position to be the iPhone of AI devices. Worth watching to see how these things continue to develop.
- threetonesun 3y agoI think it's correct to say it is Luddite like to complain about a worse interface to the pocket computers we all already carry. As the article correctly states - what's the point? Why waste resources building these weird little AI gadgets that could be reduced to an app on all the devices we already have. I mean, I get it, someone thinks they're going to be the AI iPhone and become the next Apple. What I think they're missing is many people enjoy using their phones to watch cat videos on Tik Tok, and very few people want to use their communicator badge to sell bitcoin.
- chewmieser 3y agoHave you ever seen anyone struggle to even use an iPhone? I have. These interfaces aren't completely natural enough for everyone to grok. As I stated, I saw a potential use-case with the illiterate - tech or otherwise. I think this is valid reason enough, but not everything has to be some major innovation vs the previous one. This is a startup and tech community. What's the point of Dropbox when "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem"? Just because there's alternatives doesn't mean this product doesn't have a space in the market.
- hooverd 3y ago
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- diydsp 3y agoIt's another "asshole in the middle" device, trying to get in the middle/on-top-layer of all the other things people have put between people and their lives...
- spanktheuser 3y agoFor those of you who argue that a device like this is useless I urge you to visit someone with Parkisons, essential tremors, ALS, rheumatoid arthritis, limb injuries etc as well as very low vision and observe the difficulty they have interacting with the vision + multi-touch interface of their phones.
- ilikehurdles 3y agoI expect iPhones to have better accessibility designs, controls, and accessories for these people than this, and most will already have iPhones. It doesn’t help that it looks like it’s marketed primarily for crypto zoomers.
- dartos 3y agoIPhones have similar voice activated functionality. And where it doesn’t, an app can add these exact features to devices people already own, since the LLM isn’t running on device on the rabbit (it’s far too small) Also this product definitely isn’t being positioned as an accessibility device.
- karaterobot 3y agoNice, you pulled out the "but think about disabled people" tactic, that's usually a conversation ender. Unfortunately, that's not who they are selling this $1000 device that mimics the existing capabilities of a phone to, based on their marketing.
- sindriava 3y agoThis device is $199, stop lying.
- Xelynega 3y agoThat's the neat thing about phones. You can program them to interact with you via touch and voice(and even camera in apps like Google lens) without having to purchase a new piece of hardware dedicate to accessibility.
- mikestew 3y ago
- nomilk 3y agoIt doesn't seem to do anything smartphone voice assistants couldn't soon do - i.e. it provides a voice interface to apps that currently require touchscreen. Examples: ordering an uber, playing a song on spotify, ordering a pizza.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago> I resent AI. Not AI itself–that’s just code, despite what tech guys with flashlights under their chins tell you. What this based guy doesn't realize is that recognizing that complex neural networks are "conscious" is precisely the way to stop companies from abusing them for everything. Also, is it just code? Can you show me the code that lets an LLM reason in the way it does? You'd have just as much luck pointing to the neurons that let a human do that. If it WAS just code, it'd be GOFAI (Good Old Fashioned AI) -- a literal algorithm. That's code. And that'd be better since it would be something we could understand and troubleshoot, not a magic black box of brute forced insane computing power that megacorps and nation states can monopolize.
- PedroBatista 3y ago[dead]
- csixty4 3y agoThis is giving me flashbacks to Web 2.0. We won’t need web sites anymore! Everything will be an API and we can have our own custom front-ends to all these services! It sounds great on paper. If I were selling widgets, I might want an API so people have yet another avenue to buy widgets and put money in my pocket. But at that point I’ve lost control of the widget-buying experience and I can’t collect as much data on the audience of widget buyers. Public APIs disappeared as quickly as they showed up and companies focused on partnerships. You can’t ask your voice assistant to order you a pizza from the local joint, but if you say “I want a Pizza Hut pizza” we’ve got you covered. I expect this product to go the same way. People will find a way to block their browser automation and the universe of things it can do will shrink until it’s a glorified timer and to-do list. But if you want a medium stuffed crust and a side of wings, we’ve got you covered.
- gnfargbl 3y ago> (Takes picture of the contents of his fridge.) This is what I have in the fridge, can you make me a nice dish that’s low in calories? (It then pulls up a recipe without citing its source.) That sounds like... something that would make my life slightly better, in a non-essential but desirable way. Can my phone do this already? When will it be able to do it?
- ilikehurdles 3y agoYes. Take a picture with ChatGPT and ask it the same question.
- Xelynega 3y agoWithout a "large recipe model" to be able to vet these recipes that it's likely generating, I'd be worried about the accuracy and palatability of generated recipes. There are websites that have databases of recipes you can sort by ingredient, which is a much better approach to this problem.
- rsynnott 3y agoLLMs are, generally, _not good_ at making up recipes. Like, very not good.
- daeros 3y agoI myself have stated I feel bringing tech to the tech illiterate is usually a mistake because those people are largely a security hazard to any large IT enterprise. Teaching dumbasses to use tech is how exactly how even a DECADE after The iloveu bug emailing malware to huge corporations members and spear phishing them with chained malware was how most companies got hit because its next to impossible to teach John over there in marketing not to at least ask his fellow workers if they really sent that email before downloading every attachment and executing it as well as every Excel spreadsheet that demanded you enable macros and enabling them. For OVER A DECADE, phishing emails with chained malware were how companies got hit because the tech illiterates refused to learn. Like, when you let the morons in, they become a Security Hazard. But if this device, can keep tech illiterates, from using and interfacing with the tech we need to secure, All the better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8s9uzPIqQ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8s9uzPIqQ4 Yuki did nothing wrong.
- daft_pink 3y ago[flagged]
- webdoodle 3y ago> What the people at rabbit are pitching is a device that logs into all your services like Uber and Expedia and then lets you interface with them all at once through an LLM and agents called "rabbits," by way of a little device that does not contain those actual apps. So when A.I. gets hacked, it can start shit-posting on all your accounts? Sounds as useful as lastpass...
- angryasian 3y agoYeah nothing of substance here. I will say that theres nothing with Rabbit that I see impresses me that I can't already do with Google voice assistant.
- joloooo 3y agoDoes it only operate by speaking to it? I don't want to talk to my fisher price calculator in public. As others have suggested, this is novel, and ML in everything will be coming to products soon, but this isn't it.