The Rabbit R1’s unfortunate launch

It has been a month since the launch of the Rabbit R1 Pocket Companion, and it has not been smooth sailing for this startup. It has been one thing after another for them, from the founder’s past association with overly-ambitious projects, to gaslighting and broken promises. It looks bad enough that I am no longer able to call myself a believer in the project.

I won’t say that the company is doomed or that it was a scam. Neither of those things have to be true for the product’s launch to have failed. There is still a chance they could salvage it, but at this point the public perception is so bad that it might not even matter all that much. This kind of lack of trust can do lasting damage to a brand and the people associated with them.

So what actually happened, aside from the internet losing its mind? Because that happens every Thursday.

Coffeezilla, a YouTuber who primarily focuses on financial scams. He built his channel’s reputation off the spectacle of crypto and NFT scams. He made a two part video series about the Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu’s past involvement with one of those super-ambitious super-vague tech startup projects where it was a video game but they called it a metaverse and it used NFTs to power the in-game item trading economy, and they apparently raised millions of dollars for this project that never materialized.

The first thing that sealed it for me was hearing a recording of Jesse talking in a Clubhouse (which is like Twitter Spaces) about his lofty ambitions for that project. My face felt hot & prickly as i listened to him talk about that project in the same tones that he spoke about the Rabbit project. I’m ashamed to say I believed him when he talked about their large action model and what it could do, but the demo never did show that it actually worked as described.

The second video was about the huge gap between what the company claims the device is currently capable of, and what it can actually do. I was under the impression that the team were soft-balling the device’s capabilities, being modest about what it can and can’t do. But he pointed out that they are claiming that the LAM is fully functional now, even though it clearly doesn’t work as described. They say it’s an AI that can click on websites for you and run apps and do things on your behalf. As it stands, it works with about 2-4 apps, and those apps barely work.

I wanted to believe they could do what they said they could do. I thought I saw signs that the demo couldn’t have been fake. It seemed to make so much sense. And now I’m left again with a better understanding of why people at large don’t trust technology.

There is so much over-promising and under-delivering in tech. The Vision Pro’s FOV was hidden because it’s just flat out worse than other headsets. The headset arguably makes up for it in other areas of visual quality, but the field of view is an important metric for VR immersion, and it’s an area that apple knew the vision pro was lacking in, so they hid it and were super vague about it, implying it was bigger than it was, using language that encourages you to believe.

So I guess this means that OpenAI update was also fake. They literally removed the main voice that was demonstrated. And they got Scarlett Johansen to make a fuss about it to cover their asses. Because you know everything in tech is a lie. So Sam Altman hired Johanssen to play the role of herself in real life and act like she was upset about that voice so they could say they had to take it down for legal reasons, so no one would find out how fake the demo was when the feature comes out.

I wanted Rabbit to win. I really thought we were seeing the genuine cycle of inspiration from one generation of tech companies to the next. But at this point in time it would take a lot of suspension of disbelief from me to say that they still have more than a very slim marginal chance to actually make something out of this little orange box they’re selling.