5 ms·

Rabbit R1 It's a Scam

71 points by mtgr18977 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
etaioinshrdlu 2y ago
Although tools like ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and other stochastic parrots are useful in specific contexts, AI still has nothing of "I"; on the contrary, what they really do is generate text that makes sense (grammatical text, as opposed to ungrammatical texts), which was already possible with Prolog in 2011. If you think LLMs are no more capable than Prolog, I'm not sure if you'll ever be impressed by anything.
- baq 2y ago
  I too think oranges are more capable than apples
- manojlds 2y ago
  Probably impressed with themselves
- homefree 2y ago
  There are so many things bad about this contentless article. - It's not a scam, I paid $199 for the device and I have one - The hardware is nicely designed and fun to use, the UI for interacting with the LLM is better than other options (my grandma could play with it easily) The action model idea for training UI usage as a mechanism is an interesting idea. The author is just so incredibly wrong about the shift in capability from prolog and GOFAI to now it's almost a caricature.
  - PodgieTar 2y ago
    I mean, it is a bit of a scam though right? I can pay for an NFT, 'own' the NFT, and still have been scammed. In the case of this device, it told users it has functionality that, plainly, it does not have. It marketed itself based on these features. That is a scam.
    - stoniejohnson 2y ago
      they said they have a large action model, but allegedly they just have playwright scripts that break as rideshare apps update they said they are faster than chatgpt, but allegedly they are a chatgpt wrapper
      - viscanti 2y ago
        They say it's going to be free forever with no subscription, but they have to pay for chatgpt API calls. Even if you forgive them for overhyping their chatgpt wrapper, they're still a ponzi scheme.
    - Lerc 2y ago
      I still think of NFTs like the art market. If you bought the thing and you are happy with just owning what you got then there isn't a problem. On the other hand if you bought with the expectation to sell in the future for a profit, you are trading on the perceived value. Scams rely on making you believe that the future accepted value will be much higher than what it will actually be. That would be analogous to creating the expectation of absent functionality in the Rabbit. In both cases the fraud is not in the item being sold but in the misrepresentations about it. I think why this matters is because these days it feels like everything is misrepresented. I can buy a graphics card and be happy with its performance even though it is almost guaranteed to be well below the manufacturers promised level. What is the returns policy for the Rabbit? Can people get a refund if they don't like it?
  - bowsamic 2y ago
    Just because the device exists and appears to work doesn't mean it isn't a scam. For example, if someone sells you a machine that they claim is powered by magic but actually there is a hidden physical mechanism, you can claim the machine still performs the function, but they have misled you about the workings in a way that has huge implications on the capabilities of the product. That is what is going on here. Look at MKBHD's review, the main potential he pointed out was the LAM functionality and the possible future uses of that. It turns out that entire thing was faked, and the "magic" that was the LAM is a "hidden physical mechanism" of duct tape'd together manual automations
    - the_snooze 2y ago
      You're looking for the Juicero: a real tangible (over)engineered product that certainly did a thing, but nowhere near what the manufacturers said it aimed to do.
      - bowsamic 2y ago
        Juicero might be an example, though I'm not sure if they made any specific large claim that was totally false, unlike in this case. Perhaps if explicitly Juicero claimed that some special magic was going on during the squeezing process, but I don't think they did
        ziml77 2y ago
        They claimed that you needed the large amounts of force from their machine to squeeze the juice from their packets. People found that you can open them up and squeeze the juice out by hand because the machine isn't actually doing any sort of fresh juice squeezing.
    - homefree 2y ago
      When I watched the keynote/preordered it seemed obvious the LAM UI training was work-in-progress. The core of the device was a new UI for interacting with an LLM via voice in a way that's better than the phone. It does this. I think the people calling it a scam are the same group that just complains about anything. The author drawing an equivalence between prolog and LLMs is a lot of evidence in favor of this sort of bullshit, I just have a really low tolerance for this kind of argument and person. I'm not delusional - I think the Humane device is extremely disappointing (and their marketing was way more misleading imo), but I'm glad they built and shipped something/tried something in this space. I don't believe the rabbit complaints are earnest it's just cool to hate new stuff for some people. It's the same batch that hated the iphone in 2007, just tedious and uninteresting.
- snakeyjake 2y ago
  I get where that comment is coming from. As far as I can tell when asked to generate text what all of the popular AI products are doing is the equivalent of smooshing together the first page of google results for the same prompt, xor'ing the shit out of it, then running the soup through a Word grammar checker, and then slowly typing out the results at like 300 baud and everyone is losing their shit over it. Asking AI to do anything that requires "I" has it falling flat on its face in a cruel mockery of the word "I" and I just don't understand the hype. Well, that's a lie I do understand the hype and the mechanism by which piles of cash and gigawatthours of energy are being burned through and it makes me sad. When all of the upcoming virtual brand ambassadors prove to be embarrassing failures maybe a splinter of reality will penetrate the hype-reinforced skulls of all of the "visionaries" funding this nonsense.
  - tombert 2y ago
    I don't know if I completely agree with that summary; ChatGPT (and Claude and Gemini) also has some degree of memory and context as well. It can at least to some degree remember what I and it typed and adjust things based on that. I would consider that some level of "intelligence", even if it's kind of baby intelligence. ETA: I should point out that it doesn't just "smoosh google results together", and it can actually do pretty interesting transformations beyond a simple "Grabbing the first result". If I ask ChatGPT to give me ten unique Java homework assignment problems, it will give me exactly that, and from my experience they actually are unique, at least they don't show up immediately when I search for similar things on Google. I can then ask it to give me those questions in LaTeX so that I can render it into a pretty thing. I guess you could argue that that is just an AST, so fair enough, but I think it's pretty easy to see why people are losing their shit over it. It also has for more than a year hooked into Wolfram Alpha, so it addition to usually correctly parsing your problem, it can then send that parsed problem to a more objective source and get a correct answer. ChatGPT has been an immense timesaver for me. It's been great to generate stuff like homework assignments, or to summarize long text into something more palatable. I don't automatically trust its output obviously, but it's considerably more useful than a Markov chain.
    - tiagod 2y ago
- tiagod 2y ago
  Ironically, the "stochastic parrot" could very likely put together a better argument than this ridiculous comparison with Prolog and 2011 tech. Sure, markov chains are also picking the next token, but so am I when writing this comment. Am I just a "stochastic parrot"? Or is it the author that is parroting other people's opinions without giving them any thought?
  - homefree 2y ago
    I had the same thought, the quality of writing from the LLMs themselves is a lot better than what's written here.
- OJFord 2y ago
  'in 2011' is weirdly recent though isn't it, not even to mention specific? Was there some particular advancement in Prolog based NLP around then that those of us with only a basic introduction to it (and not using it in an NLP course) wouldn't be aware of how capable it is in that regard? Because I agree with you that sounds ridiculous to me, but also my level of Prolog is like parent(a, b). parent(c, b). couple(x, y) :- parent(x, z), parent(y, z). and dimly recalling what a 'cut' is. (I'm exaggerating a bit but I've barely used it since university, not even 100% sure about that syntax) So I'm prepared to believe the state of the art for ChatGPT-like thing done in Prolog is a lot more impressive than I might have expected if someone asked me yesterday.
  - mtgr18977 2y ago
    In fact, when I compared it to Prolog, it was exactly with the view that, back in 2011, it was already possible to define a sentence/text as grammatical or ungrammatical with just a few lines of code. What LLM models like ChatGPT do is generate text based on corpora distributed across the web, grouped, tokenized and trained with a general purpose, but, in the end, they still need the same rules as Prolog to determine whether or not they can regurgitate the text to the user. The problem is that most people can't see that rabbit r1 is a deceptive product, at least. chatGPT (and Gemini, Claude and many others) doesn't do this (it doesn't trick its users into thinking that the product does one thing, but it actually does another).
    - tiagod 2y ago
      I think you have a misconception of how these transformer models work.
      - mtgr18977 2y ago
        I know how they work, and I think it's a really good job. But in the end, they still have to perform a gramatical check (like Prolog sentences) to be sure the text should be sent. As I say, I know i pushed the limits, that's on me.
- chx 2y ago
  Impressed? Here are few things that impressed me in the long decades since I am online. In 1995 we discussed the HP48G calculator on Usenet and Dave Arnett who designed the calculator chimed in. When my uncle left illegally Hungary in 1981 for the US, communication was sparse. We went to my grandmother for Sunday lunch and wrote a letter, together. Answers came in like two months. End of the 1980s phone calls began to happen but supremely expensive and short. By the time my grandfather passed in 2011 at the tender age of 98 he spent easily an hour every day video calling over Skype for free with his son. I wintered out in Israel in 2007. It was almost impossible for me to get around on public transit as I do not read Hebrew. I also spent more than a week at the turn of 2015/2016 in Israel: Tel Hazor, Tel Megiddo, Avdat, Mitzpe Ramon, Eilat. I used public transit for all that, thanks to the smartphones with GPS and maps and real time transit instructions it was trivial. I am easy to impress. You just need to knock down barriers of communication. On the other hand, I can't say I was impressed by https://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/ https://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/ -- I surely was entertained, no question about that. When these LLMs roared onto the scene I was neither impressed nor was I entertained. I was frightened. Nothing has happened since which would have proven us wrong, to the contrary. Australia leads the way by banning deepfake porn. More of that please, most especially ban the use of deepfakes of people who run in elections and the mass generation of texts about those. As an aside, I enjoy the translate-in-camera functionality of smartphones very much so I am not against all AI -- it just needs to be used wisely.
  - tombert 2y ago
    I mean, LLMs are pretty different than deepfakes, but are "fear" and "being impressed" mutually exclusive? I agree that deepfaking stuff with politicians is extremely concerning, but that doesn't really detract from the fact that Stable Diffusion is pretty cool. I was very impressed the first time I tried out Midjourney and Udio.
- mypalmike 2y ago
  I wonder where this need to deny the impressiveness of LLMs is rooted. Maybe fear or ego.
- mtgr18977 2y ago
  tbf, I did this comparison with Prolog thinking more about the generated text bt LLM models than the tech behind it. My fault. But, I still think that rabbit r1 it's a SCAM in the sense that is misleading the users.
dpflan 2y ago
This X post is related: https://x.com/coffeebreak_yt/status/1792961247438119258 https://x.com/coffeebreak_yt/status/1792961247438119258
ranman 2y ago
I don't get this take... what is the scam part? It's a real device that people can buy, and it does what it was purported to do... maybe it's not as amazing as people hoped, but does that make it a scam?
- bmicraft 2y ago
  But that's the whole point. It doesn't do what they claimed it would
- nickthegreek 2y ago
  The LAM stuff doesnt appear to be real. This youtube had a pretty convincing take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLvFc_24vSM&pp=ygUGcmFiYml0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLvFc_24vSM&pp=ygUGcmFiYml0
  - tethys 2y ago
    Can't tell if the guy, or the background, or both are AI generated.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- tiagod 2y ago
  It does not do what it was purported to do though. It was supposed to have a built-in AI, including an AI to navigate websites that is just a bunch of manually written playwright scripts, and plenty of capabilities that are present in the marketing videos and promised by the CEO that simply do not exist.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- wmf 2y ago
  Some of the advertised features like Uber seem to be super buggy or permanently "temporarily" unavailable. I wouldn't call it a scam per se but it's more of a beta or early access product.
thephyber 2y ago
New generation of tech. Same old problems scraping webpages. > In the linked video below, Coffeezilla shows how actions fail when applications change their graphical interface - like Doordash, the US version of iFood, which altered a small hamburger menu in its interface, breaking the Rabbit R1’s action.
- hoherd 2y ago
  I don't know about anybody else, but the words "doordash", "hamburger", and "menu" made that sentence difficult to grok. I thought "How can altering the contents of a hamburger (food) menu (list of foods you can order) in a food ordering app break the device the app is running on?" Edit: yay for downvoting me for being unable to grok a sentence on the first try. That's truly the spirit of HN. /s
  - bowsamic 2y ago
    A hamburger menu is a specific UI element (the one in many apps that reveals an app's functionalities and is rendered as three stacked horizontal lines). Now that I've told you that, you should be able to grok it.
    - hoherd 2y ago
      No, I got it. I just didn't get it the first few times I read the sentence.
stmonty 2y ago
These two videos by the YouTuber CoffeeZilla seem relevant for exposing more about the R1 and its operation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPOHf20slZg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPOHf20slZg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLvFc_24vSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLvFc_24vSM
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
supermatt 2y ago
Humane brooch(mentioned by author), Alexa, Siri, whatever, also fails on all these points, or doesn’t offer the respective functionality. Why is the author giving them a free pass? What is wrong with the tooling using playwright scripts for services that don’t provide an api? What does the alternative offer? What is this magic ai automation the author thinks exist supposed to use? This whole article is just singling out one interface from many, and doesn’t understand the very basic backend implementations these agents, including ChatGPT plugins, Siri, Alexa, etc, use. I’m flagging this post because it is unjust.
- mypalmike 2y ago
  The company promised there is a "LAM", or "Large Action Model" which uses AI to perform actions. The claim is that it can perform actions on-the-fly that the Rabbit devs never considered, rather than simply turning NLU into a fixed set of actions as with Siri, Alexa, etc.
  - supermatt 2y ago
    I don’t see anything like that on their marketing doc. Maybe you are projecting your unrealistic ideals onto it?
    - mtgr18977 2y ago
      Maybe you should watch their announcement video again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22wlLy7hKP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22wlLy7hKP4 Or the interview of the CEO, Jesse Lyu aboutn the LAM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-MNgciL5hw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-MNgciL5hw If you're still sure that the LAM is present in their product, that's fine, but my view (and I understand how plugins, LLM, AI and other related things work) ist thre are no LAM in the rabbit r1.
      - supermatt 2y ago
        Nowhere do they say the LAM will magically infer how to perform a task from the UI. ALL their documentation says it learns from actual UI sessions. That means someone clicking through the site/app to fulfill a task.
bowsamic 2y ago
Of course the HN gods have smote this post off the front page, as they did with the post criticising Microsoft for producing a crappy LLM hype product. It seems recently that any post on HN criticising LLMs gets instantly wiped off the front page. This seems to coincide a little too neatly with YC's announcement that almost all of their funding choices this year will be "AI based" companies
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
pembrook 2y ago
Calling everything a "scam" is quickly evolving into a scam of its own. It seems everyone on YouTube is doing clickbait thumbnails and Yellow Journalism in an effort to build a get-rich-quick "creator" business ultimately selling ads for junk D2C products and VPNs. Soon we'll have folks doing hour-long YouTube exposés about the people who create hour-long YouTube exposés in a recursive loop. The winner will be Manscaped.
stranded22 2y ago
I disagree, I don't think they are a scam at all. I cancelled my order with them a couple of weeks ago as I felt it wasn't worth the money to me - they gave me a refund without complaint at all.
em1sar 2y ago
[dead]

71 points by mtgr18977 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Although tools like ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and other stochastic parrots are useful in specific contexts, AI still has nothing of "I"; on the contrary, what they really do is generate text that makes sense (grammatical text, as opposed to ungrammatical texts), which was already possible with Prolog in 2011. If you think LLMs are no more capable than Prolog, I'm not sure if you'll ever be impressed by anything.

baq 2y ago
I too think oranges are more capable than apples
manojlds 2y ago
Probably impressed with themselves
homefree 2y ago
There are so many things bad about this contentless article. - It's not a scam, I paid $199 for the device and I have one - The hardware is nicely designed and fun to use, the UI for interacting with the LLM is better than other options (my grandma could play with it easily) The action model idea for training UI usage as a mechanism is an interesting idea. The author is just so incredibly wrong about the shift in capability from prolog and GOFAI to now it's almost a caricature.
- PodgieTar 2y ago
  I mean, it is a bit of a scam though right? I can pay for an NFT, 'own' the NFT, and still have been scammed. In the case of this device, it told users it has functionality that, plainly, it does not have. It marketed itself based on these features. That is a scam.
  - stoniejohnson 2y ago
    they said they have a large action model, but allegedly they just have playwright scripts that break as rideshare apps update they said they are faster than chatgpt, but allegedly they are a chatgpt wrapper
    - viscanti 2y ago
      They say it's going to be free forever with no subscription, but they have to pay for chatgpt API calls. Even if you forgive them for overhyping their chatgpt wrapper, they're still a ponzi scheme.
  - Lerc 2y ago
    I still think of NFTs like the art market. If you bought the thing and you are happy with just owning what you got then there isn't a problem. On the other hand if you bought with the expectation to sell in the future for a profit, you are trading on the perceived value. Scams rely on making you believe that the future accepted value will be much higher than what it will actually be. That would be analogous to creating the expectation of absent functionality in the Rabbit. In both cases the fraud is not in the item being sold but in the misrepresentations about it. I think why this matters is because these days it feels like everything is misrepresented. I can buy a graphics card and be happy with its performance even though it is almost guaranteed to be well below the manufacturers promised level. What is the returns policy for the Rabbit? Can people get a refund if they don't like it?
- bowsamic 2y ago
  Just because the device exists and appears to work doesn't mean it isn't a scam. For example, if someone sells you a machine that they claim is powered by magic but actually there is a hidden physical mechanism, you can claim the machine still performs the function, but they have misled you about the workings in a way that has huge implications on the capabilities of the product. That is what is going on here. Look at MKBHD's review, the main potential he pointed out was the LAM functionality and the possible future uses of that. It turns out that entire thing was faked, and the "magic" that was the LAM is a "hidden physical mechanism" of duct tape'd together manual automations
  - the_snooze 2y ago
    You're looking for the Juicero: a real tangible (over)engineered product that certainly did a thing, but nowhere near what the manufacturers said it aimed to do.
    - bowsamic 2y ago
      Juicero might be an example, though I'm not sure if they made any specific large claim that was totally false, unlike in this case. Perhaps if explicitly Juicero claimed that some special magic was going on during the squeezing process, but I don't think they did
      - ziml77 2y ago
        They claimed that you needed the large amounts of force from their machine to squeeze the juice from their packets. People found that you can open them up and squeeze the juice out by hand because the machine isn't actually doing any sort of fresh juice squeezing.
  - homefree 2y ago
    When I watched the keynote/preordered it seemed obvious the LAM UI training was work-in-progress. The core of the device was a new UI for interacting with an LLM via voice in a way that's better than the phone. It does this. I think the people calling it a scam are the same group that just complains about anything. The author drawing an equivalence between prolog and LLMs is a lot of evidence in favor of this sort of bullshit, I just have a really low tolerance for this kind of argument and person. I'm not delusional - I think the Humane device is extremely disappointing (and their marketing was way more misleading imo), but I'm glad they built and shipped something/tried something in this space. I don't believe the rabbit complaints are earnest it's just cool to hate new stuff for some people. It's the same batch that hated the iphone in 2007, just tedious and uninteresting.
snakeyjake 2y ago
I get where that comment is coming from. As far as I can tell when asked to generate text what all of the popular AI products are doing is the equivalent of smooshing together the first page of google results for the same prompt, xor'ing the shit out of it, then running the soup through a Word grammar checker, and then slowly typing out the results at like 300 baud and everyone is losing their shit over it. Asking AI to do anything that requires "I" has it falling flat on its face in a cruel mockery of the word "I" and I just don't understand the hype. Well, that's a lie I do understand the hype and the mechanism by which piles of cash and gigawatthours of energy are being burned through and it makes me sad. When all of the upcoming virtual brand ambassadors prove to be embarrassing failures maybe a splinter of reality will penetrate the hype-reinforced skulls of all of the "visionaries" funding this nonsense.
- tombert 2y ago
  I don't know if I completely agree with that summary; ChatGPT (and Claude and Gemini) also has some degree of memory and context as well. It can at least to some degree remember what I and it typed and adjust things based on that. I would consider that some level of "intelligence", even if it's kind of baby intelligence. ETA: I should point out that it doesn't just "smoosh google results together", and it can actually do pretty interesting transformations beyond a simple "Grabbing the first result". If I ask ChatGPT to give me ten unique Java homework assignment problems, it will give me exactly that, and from my experience they actually are unique, at least they don't show up immediately when I search for similar things on Google. I can then ask it to give me those questions in LaTeX so that I can render it into a pretty thing. I guess you could argue that that is just an AST, so fair enough, but I think it's pretty easy to see why people are losing their shit over it. It also has for more than a year hooked into Wolfram Alpha, so it addition to usually correctly parsing your problem, it can then send that parsed problem to a more objective source and get a correct answer. ChatGPT has been an immense timesaver for me. It's been great to generate stuff like homework assignments, or to summarize long text into something more palatable. I don't automatically trust its output obviously, but it's considerably more useful than a Markov chain.
  - tiagod 2y ago
tiagod 2y ago
Ironically, the "stochastic parrot" could very likely put together a better argument than this ridiculous comparison with Prolog and 2011 tech. Sure, markov chains are also picking the next token, but so am I when writing this comment. Am I just a "stochastic parrot"? Or is it the author that is parroting other people's opinions without giving them any thought?
- homefree 2y ago
  I had the same thought, the quality of writing from the LLMs themselves is a lot better than what's written here.
OJFord 2y ago
'in 2011' is weirdly recent though isn't it, not even to mention specific? Was there some particular advancement in Prolog based NLP around then that those of us with only a basic introduction to it (and not using it in an NLP course) wouldn't be aware of how capable it is in that regard? Because I agree with you that sounds ridiculous to me, but also my level of Prolog is like parent(a, b). parent(c, b). couple(x, y) :- parent(x, z), parent(y, z). and dimly recalling what a 'cut' is. (I'm exaggerating a bit but I've barely used it since university, not even 100% sure about that syntax) So I'm prepared to believe the state of the art for ChatGPT-like thing done in Prolog is a lot more impressive than I might have expected if someone asked me yesterday.
- mtgr18977 2y ago
  In fact, when I compared it to Prolog, it was exactly with the view that, back in 2011, it was already possible to define a sentence/text as grammatical or ungrammatical with just a few lines of code. What LLM models like ChatGPT do is generate text based on corpora distributed across the web, grouped, tokenized and trained with a general purpose, but, in the end, they still need the same rules as Prolog to determine whether or not they can regurgitate the text to the user. The problem is that most people can't see that rabbit r1 is a deceptive product, at least. chatGPT (and Gemini, Claude and many others) doesn't do this (it doesn't trick its users into thinking that the product does one thing, but it actually does another).
  - tiagod 2y ago
    I think you have a misconception of how these transformer models work.
    - mtgr18977 2y ago
      I know how they work, and I think it's a really good job. But in the end, they still have to perform a gramatical check (like Prolog sentences) to be sure the text should be sent. As I say, I know i pushed the limits, that's on me.
chx 2y ago
Impressed? Here are few things that impressed me in the long decades since I am online. In 1995 we discussed the HP48G calculator on Usenet and Dave Arnett who designed the calculator chimed in. When my uncle left illegally Hungary in 1981 for the US, communication was sparse. We went to my grandmother for Sunday lunch and wrote a letter, together. Answers came in like two months. End of the 1980s phone calls began to happen but supremely expensive and short. By the time my grandfather passed in 2011 at the tender age of 98 he spent easily an hour every day video calling over Skype for free with his son. I wintered out in Israel in 2007. It was almost impossible for me to get around on public transit as I do not read Hebrew. I also spent more than a week at the turn of 2015/2016 in Israel: Tel Hazor, Tel Megiddo, Avdat, Mitzpe Ramon, Eilat. I used public transit for all that, thanks to the smartphones with GPS and maps and real time transit instructions it was trivial. I am easy to impress. You just need to knock down barriers of communication. On the other hand, I can't say I was impressed by https://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/ https://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/ -- I surely was entertained, no question about that. When these LLMs roared onto the scene I was neither impressed nor was I entertained. I was frightened. Nothing has happened since which would have proven us wrong, to the contrary. Australia leads the way by banning deepfake porn. More of that please, most especially ban the use of deepfakes of people who run in elections and the mass generation of texts about those. As an aside, I enjoy the translate-in-camera functionality of smartphones very much so I am not against all AI -- it just needs to be used wisely.
- tombert 2y ago
  I mean, LLMs are pretty different than deepfakes, but are "fear" and "being impressed" mutually exclusive? I agree that deepfaking stuff with politicians is extremely concerning, but that doesn't really detract from the fact that Stable Diffusion is pretty cool. I was very impressed the first time I tried out Midjourney and Udio.
mypalmike 2y ago
I wonder where this need to deny the impressiveness of LLMs is rooted. Maybe fear or ego.
mtgr18977 2y ago
tbf, I did this comparison with Prolog thinking more about the generated text bt LLM models than the tech behind it. My fault. But, I still think that rabbit r1 it's a SCAM in the sense that is misleading the users.

dpflan 2y ago

This X post is related: https://x.com/coffeebreak_yt/status/1792961247438119258 https://x.com/coffeebreak_yt/status/1792961247438119258

ranman 2y ago

I don't get this take... what is the scam part? It's a real device that people can buy, and it does what it was purported to do... maybe it's not as amazing as people hoped, but does that make it a scam?

bmicraft 2y ago
But that's the whole point. It doesn't do what they claimed it would
nickthegreek 2y ago
The LAM stuff doesnt appear to be real. This youtube had a pretty convincing take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLvFc_24vSM&pp=ygUGcmFiYml0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLvFc_24vSM&pp=ygUGcmFiYml0
- tethys 2y ago
  Can't tell if the guy, or the background, or both are AI generated.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
tiagod 2y ago
It does not do what it was purported to do though. It was supposed to have a built-in AI, including an AI to navigate websites that is just a bunch of manually written playwright scripts, and plenty of capabilities that are present in the marketing videos and promised by the CEO that simply do not exist.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
wmf 2y ago
Some of the advertised features like Uber seem to be super buggy or permanently "temporarily" unavailable. I wouldn't call it a scam per se but it's more of a beta or early access product.

thephyber 2y ago

New generation of tech. Same old problems scraping webpages. > In the linked video below, Coffeezilla shows how actions fail when applications change their graphical interface - like Doordash, the US version of iFood, which altered a small hamburger menu in its interface, breaking the Rabbit R1’s action.

hoherd 2y ago
I don't know about anybody else, but the words "doordash", "hamburger", and "menu" made that sentence difficult to grok. I thought "How can altering the contents of a hamburger (food) menu (list of foods you can order) in a food ordering app break the device the app is running on?" Edit: yay for downvoting me for being unable to grok a sentence on the first try. That's truly the spirit of HN. /s
- bowsamic 2y ago
  A hamburger menu is a specific UI element (the one in many apps that reveals an app's functionalities and is rendered as three stacked horizontal lines). Now that I've told you that, you should be able to grok it.
  - hoherd 2y ago
    No, I got it. I just didn't get it the first few times I read the sentence.

stmonty 2y ago

These two videos by the YouTuber CoffeeZilla seem relevant for exposing more about the R1 and its operation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPOHf20slZg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPOHf20slZg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLvFc_24vSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLvFc_24vSM

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supermatt 2y ago

Humane brooch(mentioned by author), Alexa, Siri, whatever, also fails on all these points, or doesn’t offer the respective functionality. Why is the author giving them a free pass? What is wrong with the tooling using playwright scripts for services that don’t provide an api? What does the alternative offer? What is this magic ai automation the author thinks exist supposed to use? This whole article is just singling out one interface from many, and doesn’t understand the very basic backend implementations these agents, including ChatGPT plugins, Siri, Alexa, etc, use. I’m flagging this post because it is unjust.

mypalmike 2y ago
The company promised there is a "LAM", or "Large Action Model" which uses AI to perform actions. The claim is that it can perform actions on-the-fly that the Rabbit devs never considered, rather than simply turning NLU into a fixed set of actions as with Siri, Alexa, etc.
- supermatt 2y ago
  I don’t see anything like that on their marketing doc. Maybe you are projecting your unrealistic ideals onto it?
  - mtgr18977 2y ago
    Maybe you should watch their announcement video again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22wlLy7hKP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22wlLy7hKP4 Or the interview of the CEO, Jesse Lyu aboutn the LAM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-MNgciL5hw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-MNgciL5hw If you're still sure that the LAM is present in their product, that's fine, but my view (and I understand how plugins, LLM, AI and other related things work) ist thre are no LAM in the rabbit r1.
    - supermatt 2y ago
      Nowhere do they say the LAM will magically infer how to perform a task from the UI. ALL their documentation says it learns from actual UI sessions. That means someone clicking through the site/app to fulfill a task.

bowsamic 2y ago

Of course the HN gods have smote this post off the front page, as they did with the post criticising Microsoft for producing a crappy LLM hype product. It seems recently that any post on HN criticising LLMs gets instantly wiped off the front page. This seems to coincide a little too neatly with YC's announcement that almost all of their funding choices this year will be "AI based" companies

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pembrook 2y ago

Calling everything a "scam" is quickly evolving into a scam of its own. It seems everyone on YouTube is doing clickbait thumbnails and Yellow Journalism in an effort to build a get-rich-quick "creator" business ultimately selling ads for junk D2C products and VPNs. Soon we'll have folks doing hour-long YouTube exposés about the people who create hour-long YouTube exposés in a recursive loop. The winner will be Manscaped.

stranded22 2y ago

I disagree, I don't think they are a scam at all. I cancelled my order with them a couple of weeks ago as I felt it wasn't worth the money to me - they gave me a refund without complaint at all.

em1sar 2y ago

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