Why the Rabbit R1 is no longer a serious product in my view
The Rabbit R1 pocket companion has shown very little signs of changing its arc at this point, and I’m finding it harder and harder to maintain any faith in the project and its leadership. I stand corrected by all the internet people who correctly pointed out that the project seemed scammy. In my defense, I was ignorant of a lot of details about the project, and the criticism looked a lot more like cynicism to me at the time. But new things have happened that have confirmed that I was wrong about the Rabbit being a legitimate product.
What happened, you ask? The “Magic Camera” feature.
“Magic Camera”
Can you imagine a world where the pictures you take don’t actually show the actual thing you took a picture of? What if, instead, when you took a photo of your computer mouse, instead of getting a picture of your computer mouse, you got a picture of a mouse that looks kinda like yours, but is clearly an artistic reinterpretation of the picture you took? I mean it does sound kinda cool when I put it that way. Let me explain what’s bad about this.
“Pocket Companion.”
the whole pitch of the R1 was that it’s a computer. A computer so smart, you don’t have to learn how to use it, it learns how to work for you. That was the pitch. The core of the idea. I wanted to believe that this little orange box was their attempt to “shopcart” the idea; to make a smaller more minimally viable version of the actual thing they wanted to make. An AI assistant that can do things for you and act on your behalf. This is not that.
This is a totally gimmicky feature that serves no real-world purpose. It’s a toy feature. This was not in their release timeline, either, and that’s a problem for me because to me it shows that they’re being dishonest about what they’re working on. They said the thing would have reminders, basic calendar functionality, (y’know, like Siri,) by “summer 2024” and those are highly requested, important features to users who want to use this thing for its advertised purpose.
Moving goalposts
We don’t have timers, alarms, reminders, calendars, or a basic calculator, but we do have Wolfram Alpha support for very advanced highly abstracted math problems. That’s the one thing that was in the release timeline that has come out, is the Wolfram Alpha integration. But frankly I don’t think i would trust it to handle transcribing and understanding the kinds of calculations that I’d want to use Wolfram for anyway, given how rocky its other functions have been.
To some people it might be like, oh wow look what they surprised us with, this fun cool little feature that’s just for fun, and it was a surprise! That means they really do care about us. But that’s not how I see it. The thing is, this is not new. This is something we've been able to do with existing apps for years now. And more importantly this is not in keeping with what their stated vision was. This does not fit with what they said their secret sauce was, and that's why I take it as further evidence that there is no secret sauce.
They’re failing to deliver on basic features that the community have expected since day one, and they’ve implied they’re working on, but still haven’t seen the light of day.
Meanwhile, they’re shitting out these stapled-together automations, where one AI describes the scene to another AI which generates an image. Anyone could do this. I was already doing this with DALL-E back before that got integrated into ChatGPT making it a hell of a lot easier. Literally you can perform this action in one step with ChatGPT now. send it a picture, tell it to describe the picture, and then tell it to generate an image matching that description. Ok so it’s two steps.
The really weird thing
I was expecting the subreddit to blow up with cynicism about this feature, but instead what I’ve seen more of is people posting the pictures generated by the thing, and going “Oh wow so cool omg wow it looks so good wow omg so cool wow.” Nobody (that i’ve seen) is talking about how the feature is a huge potential privacy problem / attack vector, no one talking about how this wasn’t part of the original roadmap, doesn’t fit into the company’s supposed vision, and shows their hypocrisy or incompetence in managing software development.
if they can do something like this then why can’t they do basic functions that people need? But I guess it shows that just because reddit gets some things right doesn’t mean you should rely on it for information.
Wrapping up
I guess the point i’m trying to make is that I no longer see the Rabbit team as “onto something.” What I needed to see, to change my mind and consider them a “grift” or “scam,” was that they don’t adhere to their own roadmap. When a startup company comes out of nowhere and says “we’re going to do this by this time,” I like to wait and see what they actually do by the time they said. That’s one main reason i felt like most of the online cynicism about the Rabbit was unwarranted. It was too soon to tell.
Now it’s not too soon to tell anymore, and I have had multiple signs that there was possible deception. Now I have been given one instance of what I consider actual documented deception. They misrepresented their values.
They started off with this thing positioned as a modest but helpful helper bot. Now it’s become a cute toy for silly nerds who can’t tell the difference between a toy and a gadget. They launched this thing claiming it would be a gadget and it has since become a toy.