6 ms·

Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]

103 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

shombaboor 3y ago
is this a rush to market of a half baked product or a product that doesn't need to exist except to show investors "something"? the fact it gets answers wrong and makes you double check its work sorta defeats the purpose.
- jsheard 3y ago
  It's a product class that's racing against the clock of Google and Apple baking basically the same functionality into their operating systems and making these dedicated widgets (even more) pointless. I'm not optimistic that Google and Apples take will be significantly more useful than these half-baked attempts, but at least they won't require you to pay for and then juggle an extra device.
  - mikequinlan 3y ago
    Maybe they are hoping to get purchased by one of the big players (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, …) the way that Apple bought Siri.
    - jsheard 3y ago
      Maybe that is their hope but Siri actually developed things that Apple wanted, their speech recognition was licensed from Nuance but IIRC the natural language parsing and speech synthesis was done in-house. OTOH Rabbit and Humane seem to mostly just be haphazardly gluing third party APIs together to assemble a product that barely works. What exactly would they bring to the table in an acquisition?
      - mikequinlan 3y ago
        Rabbit is promising their Large Action Model (LAM) software, their "rotational eye" and associated software, and maybe an AI trained on actual user conversations.
        dagmx 3y ago
        What use case does the rotational eye give it?
        threeseed 3y ago
        Sure. But they have promised a lot and delivered very little. And from people who have used the Rabbit the LAM concept as they have done it is unusable e.g. it was ordering from DoorDash to the wrong address / incorrect tip and they had no way to change it. User experience is just as important as the technology.
  - shombaboor 3y ago
    that makes sense. maybe they think they can get decent enough to be acquired and folded in? I just don't know anyone who wants one.
  - darepublic 3y ago
    Reminds me of human made software racing against the clock of AI now
  - bhhaskin 3y ago
    Google and Apple already have the same if not better functionality via Google assistant and Siri. The AI pin thingy is totally just a gimmick product to get funding. Just like all the other "wearables" companies out there. And teenage engineering just likes weird quirky products.
    - perryizgr8 3y ago
      No, Google assistant and Siri are barely usable beyond setting a timer or adding a reminder. Even that does not work 100% of the time. They absolutely cannot come close to a proper LLM at all.
      - wferrell 3y ago
        Apple does >1B queries per week on siri. Likely greater than 4B assuming minimal growth since 2016. I would bet >10B. I'm not saying it is equivalent to an LLM. It is getting real, serious usage. I have no dog in the fight.
      - threeseed 3y ago
        Google I/O is 2 weeks away. WWDC is 6 weeks away. Both are expected to release major updates to their assistant including on-device LLM/LAM.
      - bhhaskin 3y ago
        They can do everything (and more) than what was in the video. Sure it they can't compose a email, but at least they will give you accurate information.
    - imiric 3y ago
      The current iteration of wearable tech (beyond smartwatches) might be half-baked and riding on the AI wave, but wearable computing as a field is promising. The technology has only recently reached a point where it could rival traditional mobile computing. Dismissing the entire field based on these early attempts would be a mistake. If anything, current smartphone leaders would be foolish to not jump at the opportunity to introduce standalone devices themselves. They eventually likely will, and will market their versions as the real innovations.
  - wvenable 3y ago
    These devices have no reason to exist. This entire device could be an app on a phone and be 500% more useful and less expensive. I understand this particular product is [edit] designed by Teenage Engineering and it's kinda what they do. But that makes it a niche product. But there is no reason for a serious product to have a screen, a camera, a speaker, and a network connection and not be a smartphone.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - dagmx 3y ago
      This product isn’t from Teenage Engineering. They were contracted to design it.
  - yowzadave 3y ago
    Why would Google and Apple even want something like this built into the core experience of using their phones? Like MKBHD has shown, they are slow, inaccurate, and of limited utility—the actual “useful” features are all speculative at the moment. So, thank you, Apple and Google, for not rushing something underbaked into your phones!
- mmusc 3y ago
  I think Dave2D zeros in on the why in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMqhE9r5JuI&ab_channel=Dave2D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMqhE9r5JuI&ab_channel=Dave2... These devices should be apps on your phone. Google and Apple will won't open their devices enough for these assistants to useful cause they want to roll their own. So their only hope is to create a stand alone device.. But yeah they're dead in the water.
  - adipid 3y ago
    Another point from Dave2D: they rush to launch the devices now because they might become obsolete after Google's I/O and Apple's WWDC when/if they introduce on-device AI-assistants.
arrakeenrevived 3y ago
His spiel starting at 14 minutes in about how seemingly every tech product these days is a partially-baked, unfinished, barely even usable, yet full-priced product with a vague promise of "it'll receive updates and be better" rings very true, and is frustrating as hell. Marques specifically mentions it happening in video games, cars (Tesla self-driving), smartphones, and these AI things as particular offenders. I've also seen it with SaaS. Even a lot of the things being released by the big cloud providers at their yearly conferences are mostly in some half-baked state. We've taken the concept of a "minimum viable product" and turned it into "minimum hype-able product". It sucks.
- __loam 3y ago
  I think the mindset is like, we've done a bunch of development, let's sell it to deliver some value now rather than wait for it to be perfect. It makes sense from that agile manifesto perspective but I miss the days of buying something like a game boy advance cartridge that ships once and mostly just works.
  - esafak 3y ago
    That only works if you are doing something unique enough to ignore its imperfections, otherwise people will use a full-featured competitor. The alternative to the Rabbit is your phone, I suppose.
  - shostack 3y ago
    The problem is with the lack of transparency and expectation setting. If you sell something with lots of hype and then deliver half of it, you've failed.
  - bane 3y ago
    The product owner in a company should be defining success for the development goals in agile, not beta tested on the paying public.
    - tazu 3y ago
      I agree. I wonder if the AI-aspect muddled things, like engineers saying "we just need more data for <x feature>, let's push for a cheap product and iterate fast"...
huytersd 3y ago
[dead]
budududuroiu 3y ago
Off topic but all these LLM-pin/tool/device keep building around chat. Chat is a genuinely horrible interface for conveying information to users, but it provides a nice layer of polite plausible deniability when the response is total garbage.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
  Likewise, after mastering how to find answers by typing in the correct few keywords, why go backwards and use slow/ambiguous written or spoken conversation as a query language?
  - MattRix 3y ago
    Not sure if I understand this complaint, since you can still use just a few keywords if you want, and it works fine, but you can also now be much more precise and it works even better.
  - throwaway5959 3y ago
    Because frankly Google and the open web is so bogged down by ads that it’s become unusable. Try visiting any news site or a site like Fandom. Some sites I can’t even read because the ads take up the whole page on mobile and I can’t close them. Ads just totally ruin it. Meanwhile, with ChatGPT, I can ask it questions and it just gives me an answer. It’s not perfect, but neither are search results.
- cjk2 3y ago
  Yes the chat interface is terrible. I actually had an LLM try and gaslight me into changing the subject a couple of weeks back. I’m not sure how I managed to get down that hole but it was frustrating. And eventually the information was wrong. If I wanted that experience I’d talk to a human.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  Not only is chat a poor UX, I don't want to talk to shit to use it. In a pinch I'll use Siri to set a timer or alarm but in general I just don't want to talk to things. I also don't really want my things talking to me most of the time. I can read faster than the computer can talk and type/touch faster (and more clearly) than I can talk. Unless the voice output is really finely tuned a lot of stuff I usually search for sounds like gibberish when read back with TTS. I've yet to find even AI TTS that recognizes source code or technical abbreviations and reads them correctly. Then there's of course the privacy aspect, or complete lack of privacy.
phmqk76 3y ago
I love how people compare products like this or Apple Vision Pro to the original iPhone to make the point that products with limited appeal can flourish into something incredibly useful. The comparison is bad. The iPhone promised to be three things: a phone, an iPod, and a web browser. And it performed these tasks well! It didn’t oversell what it was, and it was a revelation. I owned the first gen shortly after it came out, and I fell in love. None of these products fit that bill. Hell, Apple Watch still doesn’t, nearly a decade later.
- ninth_ant 3y ago
  The Apple Watch is a useful device. It integrates seamlessly with my phone, has various fitness tracking features including water activities, delivers important notifications without making noise, and gives me access to use voice commands on my phone. Its overnight charging gives me a nightstand alarm clock. It's not a world-changing device, but it's a very useful accessory.
  - cjk2 3y ago
    50/50. I wore one for nearly 4 years. Then one day I took it off because I was travelling somewhere really dangerous. And I never put it back on again. Turned out it was more ritual than utility for me.
    - phmqk76 2y ago
      More or less same with me. I wore mine for years, and upgraded a couple of times. But interacting with it is awkward, and my Apple Watches have easily been the most glitchy Apple products I’ve ever owned. I stopped wearing mine about 6 months ago and I don’t miss it. In fact, I starting buying watches I like - vintage digital watches and mechanical watches, and I’m much happier.
  - water-data-dude 3y ago
    This probably isn’t true for everyone, but being able to pause and rewind audio (podcasts or books on tape) without pulling out my phone is a big quality of life improvement for me.
monkmartinez 3y ago
It should be called the MINECRAPIFICATION of EVERYTHING! Who knows if Notch was the first to herald in this new paradigm of half-finished products? It's the first thing that comes to mind every time I experience, read about or witness a product, service or idea that isn't quite fully baked. I say, "Self, they are just cashing in while they iterate and extend... or not."
- dotnet00 3y ago
  Am I missing something? What does Minecraft have to do with half-baked products? It seems like they went with an approach of having a free alpa/beta release until they had a release ready game, then have spent a decade adding more content to it?
  - recursivecaveat 3y ago
    Minecraft sold over 850,000 copies before even exiting alpha. (though these labels are really kindof arbitrary in the end) I think this was fine for that game: the game was fun, $10, and largely bought on its own merits. Sandbox gameplay + procgen exploration + multiplayer + modding can wring an incredible amount of life out of relatively few assets. It definitely led to a trend of over-promised and commercialized early-access though. When you can get a big chunk of the bag for pre-selling based on a small chunk of the work with minimal risk, the incentives are obvious.
    - dotnet00 3y ago
      Ah I see, I was reading through the wikipedia page and misinterpreted a line about updates being free during alpha/beta to be implying that the game itself was free.
- tazu 3y ago
  I think the difference is that Minecraft alpha/beta was fun and actually promised very little. I paid for the beta (used cracked clients before then, when I was 12) and enjoyed it for what it was, I couldn't have cared less about "future updates". There was never any mention of "future features" in Minecraft (then-guerilla) marketing.
comechao 3y ago
People are developing hardware like "web 2.0" beta software to compete with Google and Apple, but I'm not sure it will work. Yeah, the fear of the walled-guarded world of phones is fair and we can see it.
ein0p 3y ago
When I see such things I immediately ask myself a question, why is this not an app? There’s no good answer to that question in this case. IDK why they even bothered with the hardware side. It’d seem to me that you could do it later if app gets sufficient traction
- tazu 3y ago
  I enjoyed this Youtube review: https://x.com/concept_central/status/1784701228829835546 https://x.com/concept_central/status/1784701228829835546
- kevinkeller 3y ago
  These AI assistants (Rabbit R1, Humane AI Pin), as they exist now, probably can be replaced by apps. However, if you give them the benefit of the doubt and think about what they're supposed to be (or eventually will be), owning the platform is a must. An example: Google/Apple doesn't allow third-party apps access to call audio. So you couldn't implement live translation/transcription, by just being an app. Google/Apple will jealously guard their turf in their ecosystems (to make space for their own AI assistants probably), so this level of third-party access is unlikely to be forthcoming.
  - tazu 3y ago
    I agree as someone who's wanted to develop an iOS app for years but can't get over the App Store monopoly risk. But, from a business sense, doesn't it seem like they're doing it backwards? Why not make a best-in-class AI assistant app, build a big userbase, and take the money to research hardware and harass Apple concurrently? Why start with hardware first?
- bonestamp2 3y ago
  Ya, my hope is that this device pushes Apple and Google to bake some of these features into our phones. For example, I should be able to tell my phone to email or text the photo I'm looking at to <a list of people> and it just does it.
- cjk2 3y ago
chaosprint 3y ago
Rabbit's UX use cases are not novel enough. AI Pin seems to be a little less complete, but at least the innovation in the direction of combining software and hardware is worthy of recognition. As for Rabbit, it completely imitates the ideas of Google Assistant and Lens. From an industrial perspective, look at Apple's headset, even if the experience is not there yet, the entire industrial design and integration level are very amazing. But Rabbit, which looks like a college student's graduation project, is actually very easy to complete with ESP32 at its core. If this esp32 is combined with groq, maybe the experience will be even better. I think this project itself has a lot to do with teenage engineering. The success of TE (low tech, high marketing) gave them inspiration. In terms of musicality, TE is far behind, for example, Elektron, which is also from Sweden, not to mention the master of analog sound by companies such as Moog. TE may only have a very impressive hardware innovation in TP7 (which is not so popular). As for other popular pocket operators, KO2, and OP1, there are too few hardcore innovations, and hype and trend culture have the upper hand. With that being said, looking at the sales of Moog and the outcome of its acquisition, it must be admitted that marketing is still very important. But musical instruments are different from mass-market commodities. After all, the former can be collected and one does not have to consider their practicality too much. Now the easy access of AI service at the backend will obviously lead to more and more low tech, which is normal and just a phenomenon. But I will give more praise to hard-core innovation. If there is hard-core innovation and excellent UX use cases, it will be icing on the cake.
fooker 3y ago
There are two things about this I am looking forward do. Generative UI, and teach mode as mentioned in this video. If they manage to get these to work, I believe a future iteration of this product can seriously challenge smartphones. I doubt the science is there yet though. It's easy to over promise here.
- abrichr 3y ago
  > teach mode We're building this over at https://github.com/OpenAdaptAI/OpenAdapt https://github.com/OpenAdaptAI/OpenAdapt. OpenAdapt learns to automate tasks in desktop apps by observing human demonstrations. Early demo: https://twitter.com/abrichr/status/1784307190062342237 https://twitter.com/abrichr/status/1784307190062342237 Contributions and feedback are welcome and encouraged :)
pabe 3y ago
Q: Why is this not just an app? A: Because people wouldn't pay $200 for an app. Because there is ChatGPT as an app. Because people love buying tangible stuff. Because VC see this as "a new category" they want to dominate.
steveharman 3y ago
Today, after many years, I unsubscribed and unfollowed MKBHD. I'm just bored and fed up with his smart-alec "hey this is a bad new thing" videos to catch eyeballs and feed the algo. Seems as though unless you're a big-bucks big-tech that's going to give him a discount on a fancy electric car then you're nothing.

103 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

is this a rush to market of a half baked product or a product that doesn't need to exist except to show investors "something"? the fact it gets answers wrong and makes you double check its work sorta defeats the purpose.

jsheard 3y ago
It's a product class that's racing against the clock of Google and Apple baking basically the same functionality into their operating systems and making these dedicated widgets (even more) pointless. I'm not optimistic that Google and Apples take will be significantly more useful than these half-baked attempts, but at least they won't require you to pay for and then juggle an extra device.
- mikequinlan 3y ago
  Maybe they are hoping to get purchased by one of the big players (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, …) the way that Apple bought Siri.
  - jsheard 3y ago
    Maybe that is their hope but Siri actually developed things that Apple wanted, their speech recognition was licensed from Nuance but IIRC the natural language parsing and speech synthesis was done in-house. OTOH Rabbit and Humane seem to mostly just be haphazardly gluing third party APIs together to assemble a product that barely works. What exactly would they bring to the table in an acquisition?
    - mikequinlan 3y ago
      Rabbit is promising their Large Action Model (LAM) software, their "rotational eye" and associated software, and maybe an AI trained on actual user conversations.
      - dagmx 3y ago
        What use case does the rotational eye give it?
      - threeseed 3y ago
        Sure. But they have promised a lot and delivered very little. And from people who have used the Rabbit the LAM concept as they have done it is unusable e.g. it was ordering from DoorDash to the wrong address / incorrect tip and they had no way to change it. User experience is just as important as the technology.
- shombaboor 3y ago
  that makes sense. maybe they think they can get decent enough to be acquired and folded in? I just don't know anyone who wants one.
- darepublic 3y ago
  Reminds me of human made software racing against the clock of AI now
- bhhaskin 3y ago
  Google and Apple already have the same if not better functionality via Google assistant and Siri. The AI pin thingy is totally just a gimmick product to get funding. Just like all the other "wearables" companies out there. And teenage engineering just likes weird quirky products.
  - perryizgr8 3y ago
    No, Google assistant and Siri are barely usable beyond setting a timer or adding a reminder. Even that does not work 100% of the time. They absolutely cannot come close to a proper LLM at all.
    - wferrell 3y ago
      Apple does >1B queries per week on siri. Likely greater than 4B assuming minimal growth since 2016. I would bet >10B. I'm not saying it is equivalent to an LLM. It is getting real, serious usage. I have no dog in the fight.
    - threeseed 3y ago
      Google I/O is 2 weeks away. WWDC is 6 weeks away. Both are expected to release major updates to their assistant including on-device LLM/LAM.
    - bhhaskin 3y ago
      They can do everything (and more) than what was in the video. Sure it they can't compose a email, but at least they will give you accurate information.
  - imiric 3y ago
    The current iteration of wearable tech (beyond smartwatches) might be half-baked and riding on the AI wave, but wearable computing as a field is promising. The technology has only recently reached a point where it could rival traditional mobile computing. Dismissing the entire field based on these early attempts would be a mistake. If anything, current smartphone leaders would be foolish to not jump at the opportunity to introduce standalone devices themselves. They eventually likely will, and will market their versions as the real innovations.
- wvenable 3y ago
  These devices have no reason to exist. This entire device could be an app on a phone and be 500% more useful and less expensive. I understand this particular product is [edit] designed by Teenage Engineering and it's kinda what they do. But that makes it a niche product. But there is no reason for a serious product to have a screen, a camera, a speaker, and a network connection and not be a smartphone.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - dagmx 3y ago
    This product isn’t from Teenage Engineering. They were contracted to design it.
- yowzadave 3y ago
  Why would Google and Apple even want something like this built into the core experience of using their phones? Like MKBHD has shown, they are slow, inaccurate, and of limited utility—the actual “useful” features are all speculative at the moment. So, thank you, Apple and Google, for not rushing something underbaked into your phones!
mmusc 3y ago
I think Dave2D zeros in on the why in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMqhE9r5JuI&ab_channel=Dave2D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMqhE9r5JuI&ab_channel=Dave2... These devices should be apps on your phone. Google and Apple will won't open their devices enough for these assistants to useful cause they want to roll their own. So their only hope is to create a stand alone device.. But yeah they're dead in the water.
- adipid 3y ago
  Another point from Dave2D: they rush to launch the devices now because they might become obsolete after Google's I/O and Apple's WWDC when/if they introduce on-device AI-assistants.

arrakeenrevived 3y ago

His spiel starting at 14 minutes in about how seemingly every tech product these days is a partially-baked, unfinished, barely even usable, yet full-priced product with a vague promise of "it'll receive updates and be better" rings very true, and is frustrating as hell. Marques specifically mentions it happening in video games, cars (Tesla self-driving), smartphones, and these AI things as particular offenders. I've also seen it with SaaS. Even a lot of the things being released by the big cloud providers at their yearly conferences are mostly in some half-baked state. We've taken the concept of a "minimum viable product" and turned it into "minimum hype-able product". It sucks.

__loam 3y ago
I think the mindset is like, we've done a bunch of development, let's sell it to deliver some value now rather than wait for it to be perfect. It makes sense from that agile manifesto perspective but I miss the days of buying something like a game boy advance cartridge that ships once and mostly just works.
- esafak 3y ago
  That only works if you are doing something unique enough to ignore its imperfections, otherwise people will use a full-featured competitor. The alternative to the Rabbit is your phone, I suppose.
- shostack 3y ago
  The problem is with the lack of transparency and expectation setting. If you sell something with lots of hype and then deliver half of it, you've failed.
- bane 3y ago
  The product owner in a company should be defining success for the development goals in agile, not beta tested on the paying public.
  - tazu 3y ago
    I agree. I wonder if the AI-aspect muddled things, like engineers saying "we just need more data for <x feature>, let's push for a cheap product and iterate fast"...

huytersd 3y ago

[dead]

budududuroiu 3y ago

Off topic but all these LLM-pin/tool/device keep building around chat. Chat is a genuinely horrible interface for conveying information to users, but it provides a nice layer of polite plausible deniability when the response is total garbage.

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
Likewise, after mastering how to find answers by typing in the correct few keywords, why go backwards and use slow/ambiguous written or spoken conversation as a query language?
- MattRix 3y ago
  Not sure if I understand this complaint, since you can still use just a few keywords if you want, and it works fine, but you can also now be much more precise and it works even better.
- throwaway5959 3y ago
  Because frankly Google and the open web is so bogged down by ads that it’s become unusable. Try visiting any news site or a site like Fandom. Some sites I can’t even read because the ads take up the whole page on mobile and I can’t close them. Ads just totally ruin it. Meanwhile, with ChatGPT, I can ask it questions and it just gives me an answer. It’s not perfect, but neither are search results.
cjk2 3y ago
Yes the chat interface is terrible. I actually had an LLM try and gaslight me into changing the subject a couple of weeks back. I’m not sure how I managed to get down that hole but it was frustrating. And eventually the information was wrong. If I wanted that experience I’d talk to a human.
giantrobot 3y ago
Not only is chat a poor UX, I don't want to talk to shit to use it. In a pinch I'll use Siri to set a timer or alarm but in general I just don't want to talk to things. I also don't really want my things talking to me most of the time. I can read faster than the computer can talk and type/touch faster (and more clearly) than I can talk. Unless the voice output is really finely tuned a lot of stuff I usually search for sounds like gibberish when read back with TTS. I've yet to find even AI TTS that recognizes source code or technical abbreviations and reads them correctly. Then there's of course the privacy aspect, or complete lack of privacy.

phmqk76 3y ago

I love how people compare products like this or Apple Vision Pro to the original iPhone to make the point that products with limited appeal can flourish into something incredibly useful. The comparison is bad. The iPhone promised to be three things: a phone, an iPod, and a web browser. And it performed these tasks well! It didn’t oversell what it was, and it was a revelation. I owned the first gen shortly after it came out, and I fell in love. None of these products fit that bill. Hell, Apple Watch still doesn’t, nearly a decade later.

ninth_ant 3y ago
The Apple Watch is a useful device. It integrates seamlessly with my phone, has various fitness tracking features including water activities, delivers important notifications without making noise, and gives me access to use voice commands on my phone. Its overnight charging gives me a nightstand alarm clock. It's not a world-changing device, but it's a very useful accessory.
- cjk2 3y ago
  50/50. I wore one for nearly 4 years. Then one day I took it off because I was travelling somewhere really dangerous. And I never put it back on again. Turned out it was more ritual than utility for me.
  - phmqk76 2y ago
    More or less same with me. I wore mine for years, and upgraded a couple of times. But interacting with it is awkward, and my Apple Watches have easily been the most glitchy Apple products I’ve ever owned. I stopped wearing mine about 6 months ago and I don’t miss it. In fact, I starting buying watches I like - vintage digital watches and mechanical watches, and I’m much happier.
- water-data-dude 3y ago
  This probably isn’t true for everyone, but being able to pause and rewind audio (podcasts or books on tape) without pulling out my phone is a big quality of life improvement for me.

monkmartinez 3y ago

It should be called the MINECRAPIFICATION of EVERYTHING! Who knows if Notch was the first to herald in this new paradigm of half-finished products? It's the first thing that comes to mind every time I experience, read about or witness a product, service or idea that isn't quite fully baked. I say, "Self, they are just cashing in while they iterate and extend... or not."

dotnet00 3y ago
Am I missing something? What does Minecraft have to do with half-baked products? It seems like they went with an approach of having a free alpa/beta release until they had a release ready game, then have spent a decade adding more content to it?
- recursivecaveat 3y ago
  Minecraft sold over 850,000 copies before even exiting alpha. (though these labels are really kindof arbitrary in the end) I think this was fine for that game: the game was fun, $10, and largely bought on its own merits. Sandbox gameplay + procgen exploration + multiplayer + modding can wring an incredible amount of life out of relatively few assets. It definitely led to a trend of over-promised and commercialized early-access though. When you can get a big chunk of the bag for pre-selling based on a small chunk of the work with minimal risk, the incentives are obvious.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    Ah I see, I was reading through the wikipedia page and misinterpreted a line about updates being free during alpha/beta to be implying that the game itself was free.
tazu 3y ago
I think the difference is that Minecraft alpha/beta was fun and actually promised very little. I paid for the beta (used cracked clients before then, when I was 12) and enjoyed it for what it was, I couldn't have cared less about "future updates". There was never any mention of "future features" in Minecraft (then-guerilla) marketing.

comechao 3y ago

People are developing hardware like "web 2.0" beta software to compete with Google and Apple, but I'm not sure it will work. Yeah, the fear of the walled-guarded world of phones is fair and we can see it.

ein0p 3y ago

When I see such things I immediately ask myself a question, why is this not an app? There’s no good answer to that question in this case. IDK why they even bothered with the hardware side. It’d seem to me that you could do it later if app gets sufficient traction

tazu 3y ago
I enjoyed this Youtube review: https://x.com/concept_central/status/1784701228829835546 https://x.com/concept_central/status/1784701228829835546
kevinkeller 3y ago
These AI assistants (Rabbit R1, Humane AI Pin), as they exist now, probably can be replaced by apps. However, if you give them the benefit of the doubt and think about what they're supposed to be (or eventually will be), owning the platform is a must. An example: Google/Apple doesn't allow third-party apps access to call audio. So you couldn't implement live translation/transcription, by just being an app. Google/Apple will jealously guard their turf in their ecosystems (to make space for their own AI assistants probably), so this level of third-party access is unlikely to be forthcoming.
- tazu 3y ago
  I agree as someone who's wanted to develop an iOS app for years but can't get over the App Store monopoly risk. But, from a business sense, doesn't it seem like they're doing it backwards? Why not make a best-in-class AI assistant app, build a big userbase, and take the money to research hardware and harass Apple concurrently? Why start with hardware first?
bonestamp2 3y ago
Ya, my hope is that this device pushes Apple and Google to bake some of these features into our phones. For example, I should be able to tell my phone to email or text the photo I'm looking at to <a list of people> and it just does it.
cjk2 3y ago

chaosprint 3y ago

Rabbit's UX use cases are not novel enough. AI Pin seems to be a little less complete, but at least the innovation in the direction of combining software and hardware is worthy of recognition. As for Rabbit, it completely imitates the ideas of Google Assistant and Lens. From an industrial perspective, look at Apple's headset, even if the experience is not there yet, the entire industrial design and integration level are very amazing. But Rabbit, which looks like a college student's graduation project, is actually very easy to complete with ESP32 at its core. If this esp32 is combined with groq, maybe the experience will be even better. I think this project itself has a lot to do with teenage engineering. The success of TE (low tech, high marketing) gave them inspiration. In terms of musicality, TE is far behind, for example, Elektron, which is also from Sweden, not to mention the master of analog sound by companies such as Moog. TE may only have a very impressive hardware innovation in TP7 (which is not so popular). As for other popular pocket operators, KO2, and OP1, there are too few hardcore innovations, and hype and trend culture have the upper hand. With that being said, looking at the sales of Moog and the outcome of its acquisition, it must be admitted that marketing is still very important. But musical instruments are different from mass-market commodities. After all, the former can be collected and one does not have to consider their practicality too much. Now the easy access of AI service at the backend will obviously lead to more and more low tech, which is normal and just a phenomenon. But I will give more praise to hard-core innovation. If there is hard-core innovation and excellent UX use cases, it will be icing on the cake.

fooker 3y ago

There are two things about this I am looking forward do. Generative UI, and teach mode as mentioned in this video. If they manage to get these to work, I believe a future iteration of this product can seriously challenge smartphones. I doubt the science is there yet though. It's easy to over promise here.

abrichr 3y ago
> teach mode We're building this over at https://github.com/OpenAdaptAI/OpenAdapt https://github.com/OpenAdaptAI/OpenAdapt. OpenAdapt learns to automate tasks in desktop apps by observing human demonstrations. Early demo: https://twitter.com/abrichr/status/1784307190062342237 https://twitter.com/abrichr/status/1784307190062342237 Contributions and feedback are welcome and encouraged :)

pabe 3y ago

Q: Why is this not just an app? A: Because people wouldn't pay $200 for an app. Because there is ChatGPT as an app. Because people love buying tangible stuff. Because VC see this as "a new category" they want to dominate.

steveharman 3y ago

Today, after many years, I unsubscribed and unfollowed MKBHD. I'm just bored and fed up with his smart-alec "hey this is a bad new thing" videos to catch eyeballs and feed the algo. Seems as though unless you're a big-bucks big-tech that's going to give him a discount on a fancy electric car then you're nothing.