AI grifters being former NFT grifters? How shocking. They hop from one tech craze to the next, hoping to rake in that VC money before the jig is up.
[The Verge] Turns out the Rabbit R1 was just an Android app all along
- Thread starter Tobor
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AI grifters being former NFT grifters? How shocking. They hop from one tech craze to the next, hoping to rake in that VC money before the jig is up.
You're in luck! Teenage Engineering also helped design the Playdate. A device with an actual purpose!
Playdate. Order now!
It’s yellow. It fits in your pocket. There’s a crank. It comes with 24 free games to get you started. Say hi to Playdate from Panic.play.date
Heard of this but didn't know they made it. So cute but I can't justify the cost to myself :')
I have my ultra infront of me with cellular. What can the r1 do that is better than my watch ?AI gadgets continue to be on a roll. $200 for subpar hardware that just runs an Android app.
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Turns out the Rabbit R1 was just an Android app all along
Looks like this gadget could have just been an app.www.theverge.com
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I have my ultra infront of my with cellular. What can the r1 do that is better than my watch ?AI gadgets continue to be on a roll. $200 for subpar hardware that just runs an Android app.
Turns out the Rabbit R1 was just an Android app all along
Looks like this gadget could have just been an app.
ai integrated into Siri and google assistant Can't cone soon enough.so all grifters can go away. Ai pin is the worst offender.
You're thinking of the Humane pin. The Rabbit is basically a pocket MP3 player type device with a screen at I think $200. Not that that makes it much more useful lol.
I watched the the MKBHD review of this device, and the design seems just as terrible as the rest of the product.
Obviously the aesthetic part is a matter of taste, but the choice to go with the wheel and single button make the device seem like it would be infuriating to use. And the wheel also takes up a lot of space in a device that has bad battery life.
I just mean the aesthetic part, on a tactile, toylike level. Its use as an actual functional device is worthless, I watched the same review.
I certainly think there is a market for a useful digital AI assistant in the future. At the same time, I feel like we should also ask what that looks like. A really good personal assistant, by nature, must know your habits, wants and needs well. A useful digital assistant should be greater than just a calendar reminder, especially if you want to integrate AI into it. Afterall, we can already manage our calendars easily, without AI, if that's all we need. So we must ask ourselves, are we prepared to handover every aspect of ourselves to the people behind such digital AI assistant? That is the only way to have a genuinely useful digital assistant, I feel. You can't have privacy and expect the assistant to be predictive and personalized, yeah?
i don't see how that doesn't count as an AOSP fork. the "OS" in this case is more like a launcher that connects to the cloud, but that's all it needs to do. it would have been deeply surprising if this thing was designed any other way.
"it doesn't do anything your phone doesn't do" is a valid complaint, but the fact that it isn't your phone is the whole point of the device. that doesn't make it a good idea or a good product, but treating this like a gotcha revelation is weird. everything is android!
Honestly, a miniature computer without a screen that you access with your voice to do stuff is a cool idea, but even in the best of worlds and 100% accuracy, is still a niche product next to your phone because most of us still crave visual media.
The idea that it would do stuff for you, not just generate answers, was interesting, letting it hook onto all your various accounts. But I'm a bit too nervous about double checking to order travels through a wiseass device. And I'm sure all that will be built into phones very soon, whether you like it or not. The way the camera works does seem to show actual promise, identifying and solving problems in the real world, but it's probably still too slow and cumbersome, and this too will soon be a phone feature regardless of them claiming it's not about apps or phones.
they were the biggest draw for people since the design is the only compliment it gets.
this is like saying a kindle could just be a phone app. the point of it is how dedicated hardware can offer a better experience.
does it in this case? sounds like it doesn't! but i'm definitely not writing the idea off altogether. i don't always want to use my phone for everything.
I knew this would rubbish as soon as I saw it on Twitter ages ago. A mutual who is a pretty great designer but always seems to jump on these fads (he was an NFT guy) were all over it. I just didn't understand.
At least the AI pin was a cool IDEA. This is just daft.
At least the AI pin was a cool IDEA. This is just daft.
I mean it makes all kind of sense to make it an Android app... makes life a lot easier for the developers and also that's a lot of developers you can hire to work on the thing. I personally would have made it a an browser and make it a website. But i guess this is a little bit of breaking keyfabe.
I guess all i want to say is that this seems like it's the least of this thing's problems.
I guess all i want to say is that this seems like it's the least of this thing's problems.
It'a also phone app in addition to dedicated device and Rabbit isn't.
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A kindle has an e-ink screen. A Steam Deck has built in controls and ergonomics for comfortable gaming. The Playdate is a funky little gaming device in a Teenage Engineering case. A device separate from your phone has to have a unique purpose.
The R1 has literally nothing unique that warrants a separate device. It's not better at anything.
Not to mention they want you to authenticate all your accounts on a virtual machine on their servers, which is a huge security risk.
Choosing Android just makes it easy to develop as basically all it does it sends requests to ChatGPT or similar. Anyone can code such app in a day or two, and it shows how little effort has gone into this product.
It also explains why the battery life is so shit as it has to run the entire OS for basically no reason.
It also explains why the battery life is so shit as it has to run the entire OS for basically no reason.
sure, but all it had to do was be a different kind of screen, and even then it was in super early adopter territory. it cost $400 even though amazon wasn't attempting to make money on the thing. and it came out the same year as the iphone!
i'm not saying the R1 is good — i'm saying i think it's likely that there will be a good standalone AI assistant device at some point, and it will almost certainly be "just an android app" too
I would love the idea of an AI assistant. Note that I said AI, not generative AI. This was destined to fail bc a lot of the pitch for generative AI is snake oil. It's like when we got "hover boards" and they weren't anything like what we saw in Back to the Future.
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Any good AI assistant will exist on the phone or be an accessory that connects to the phone.
Those $300 meta Raybans that just look like regular glasses are the closest thing to it. AirPods will be an AI assistant.
Any AI feature worth a shit will be baked into the phone OSes.
yeah i actually think the meta ray-bans are pretty close already. i would consider them dedicated hardware even though they need to be connected to a phone. same goes for earbuds — nothing's latest have chatGPT built in, for example.
but especially on iOS, you're quite limited with how deeply you can integrate these things, and i think at some point there's going to be something with a screen that makes more of being standalone. maybe it's just a smartwatch if the DoJ case goes anywhere.
We've been using AI tools a lot at my workplace and it's increasingly apparent that AI is unfit for any task that has a failstate. "Usually right but frequently very wrong" is fine when you're generating funny limericks or pictures of lamas, but dangerous with anything more serious. Even mundane stuff like "summarize a phone conversation/Zoom meeting" will wholesale invent things participants said out of thin air.
So yeah I'd never give one of these models access to an account because the ways "frequently very wrong" could go with booking flights lol
Same. Big fan of their work. Hate how this Rabbit thing will come to mind every time I think of teenagine engineering.
I mean, a kindle or other e-book reader have the special factor of a screen that should look and feel like real paper and reading from a real book, that is some very special thing that no phone or tablet can just emulate. An e-book reader has It's reason for existing, It's a very bad comparison.
Shit like this is just a phone screen with an bad ai and countless of technical limitations and has nothing, literally, that a phone doesn't have or can't give you.
"i don't always want to use my phone for everything."
But you want to take an extra thing out of your pocket or from your shelf to do stuff that you phone already could?
That makes no sense at all.
it's so very clear that all these bespoke AI devices are a big scam to take money from investors. I refuse to believe anyone truly believes an AI device like these is anywhere approaching a good product when smart phones can already do all of this stuff and everyone is already walking around with them in their pocket.
"whimsical world of AI artistry"loads of placeholder art was very clearly AI and unlabelled
and then there was explicitly labelled and promoted generative stuff:
and googling it, looks like they've been pretty open about liking it and using it for customer service etc too
Fuck aaaaaaallllll the way off
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If you listen to the Vergecast, and hear them talk about this stuff, you can tell that they're bored with iOS/Android being everything.
This whole anti-phone thing is just weird boredom, where people just want some new doodad gizmo. They want new toys.
So they hem and haw and say "Yeah, this could just be on the phone or my smartwatch, but I really think there is an idea here…"
An AI assistant is a feature, not a standalone product.
And yeah, where the rubber meets the road is when they have to walk around with something else in their pocket that constantly needs to be charged, or some nonsense clipped to their shirt burning their chest. It really is a fidget spinner for tech enthusiasts.
We have phones and watches and earbuds we already carry and wear. We often wear glasses. Put this shit in the accessories we already wear and have it talk to the powerful computers already in our pockets. Anything beyond that is just boredom and grifters.
loads of placeholder art was very clearly AI and unlabelled
and then there was explicitly labelled and promoted generative stuff:
and googling it, looks like they've been pretty open about liking it and using it for customer service etc too
I wonder if at the IKEA in Jakarta they have "whimsical" generative wall art of people forcibly relocated or paddling through a partially submerged north part of the city due to rising sea levels?
"AI" is the bleakest, most black-pilled turn for modern capitalism yet. Creating dogshit content via platforms with a voracious energy appetite, further turning the screws on climate change.
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/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25429570/Rabbit_R1_top.JPG)
Rabbit R1 review: nothing to see here
This device is nowhere near the super-smart assistant we were promised.
www.theverge.com
Art Gen AI has its own clear ethics issues and some are trying to solve that through ethical database scraping. It doesn't, however, mean all Gen AI is trash and useless because it most certainly is not. As others have pointed out, LLM databases can be great for text input/output, algorithm support and actual data analyst/comparison.
Of course, the questions then come into play of how was the data generated and whether that data has an clear bias such as race, gender or political profiling.
So, yeah, the company that made this was just an NFT company that rug-pulled and pivoted into the next thing to trick everyone with.
www.wheresyoured.at
I don't understand how anyone can still be excited about anything anymore.
Plus, when confronted, the founder called people the R-slur.
View: https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1787539078101311759?t=Wq-zwwntdivkeSZM-miXZg&s=19
Rabbit Holed
Thank you to Emily Shepherd for her hard work reporting parts of this story, as well as her assistance clarifying details related to GAMA and finding company documents related to Rabbit and Cyber Manufacture. In November 2021, a company called Cyber Manufacture Co raised $6 million for its...
www.wheresyoured.at
I don't understand how anyone can still be excited about anything anymore.
Plus, when confronted, the founder called people the R-slur.
View: https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1787539078101311759?t=Wq-zwwntdivkeSZM-miXZg&s=19
So, yeah, the company that made this was just an NFT company that rug-pulled and pivoted into the next thing to trick everyone with.
Rabbit Holed
Thank you to Emily Shepherd for her hard work reporting parts of this story, as well as her assistance clarifying details related to GAMA and finding company documents related to Rabbit and Cyber Manufacture. In November 2021, a company called Cyber Manufacture Co raised $6 million for its...
I don't understand how anyone can still be excited about anything anymore.
Plus, when confronted, the founder called people the R-slur.
View: https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1787539078101311759?t=Wq-zwwntdivkeSZM-miXZg&s=19
The investors that fund this stuff deserve to have their money taken at this point. I feel for every person duped into buying these sham products, but wow, the investors would get a better return burning that money in a fire pit.
I don't think this business model makes sense. Pay once with no subscription fee, but the actual work runs on remote servers? I guess Apple managed to make that work for Siri but LLMs have to be several orders of magnitude more expensive per query. (In that Siri can now mostly work on-device but a competitive LLM inference takes a 70 GB model and a few GPUs?)
They were never going to take the losses for long enough to survive and build market dominance until they could move the whole process on-device.
They were never going to take the losses for long enough to survive and build market dominance until they could move the whole process on-device.
Well, they may already not be surviving.
From the article:
So, yeah, the company that made this was just an NFT company that rug-pulled and pivoted into the next thing to trick everyone with.
Rabbit Holed
Thank you to Emily Shepherd for her hard work reporting parts of this story, as well as her assistance clarifying details related to GAMA and finding company documents related to Rabbit and Cyber Manufacture. In November 2021, a company called Cyber Manufacture Co raised $6 million for its...
I don't understand how anyone can still be excited about anything anymore.
Plus, when confronted, the founder called people the R-slur.
View: https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1787539078101311759?t=Wq-zwwntdivkeSZM-miXZg&s=19
"serial founder"
lmfao
Is there anything to be said about air-gapping your AI assistant away from your phone? I guess it's functionally the same to have an app which you can then configure the permissions - what it's allowed to scrape etc. Idk, just musing about it.
This Rabbit thing, I don't think it's a low effort device, actually I give some credit for attempting to do something different.
This Rabbit thing, I don't think it's a low effort device, actually I give some credit for attempting to do something different.
I don't really get it either. I would assume when the assistant is on a phone its abilities could actually be greatly enhanced. Like it could buy stuff through connecting with the Amazon app, write your emails etc.
Not a future I necessarily want but at least I see a purpose
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Yeah, it means you air-gap it out of your pocket and into a drawer where you forget about it.
From the new Zitron piece linked upthread:
Raising $6m to reskin Lyra. NFT grifting was next level.