Ten thousand units sold for 199 dollars in a single day, a success that surprised the inventors first. The r1 si Rabbit AI is one of the most interesting curiosities seen at CES.
Things
It is a red-orange rectangular device, half the size of a normal smartphone. Designed in collaboration with Swedish company Teenage Engineering, it has a 2.88-inch touchscreen and an analog scroll wheel on the right. Above is a camera that can rotate 360 degrees or even face up or down to ensure users’ privacy. The Rabbit Eye can also be used for photos and video calls. It runs on a MediaTek Helio P35 processor with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, has WiFi and cellular connectivity with a SIM slot and a USB port. The battery, according to the company that builds it, guarantees a full day of use.
But be careful: the r1 is not a smartphone, nor does it want to replace it, as the HumaneAI smart pin aims to do. Rabbit AI is, if anything, a digital assistant that can perform a series of tasks on behalf of the user, thanks to artificial intelligence.
All thanks to the proprietary operating system, Rabbit OS, based on an artificial intelligence model called Large Action Model (LAM). Unlike the more common LLM (Large Language Model), on which generative AI systems such as ChatGPT are based, LAM is designed to understand and respond to human input in a dynamic and flexible way, thus improving the interaction between man and machine. In short, it learns from gestures as well as words: the LAM was trained by humans who interact with apps like Lyft or Instagram, showing the machine how they work. The LAM learns to recognize the appearance of an icon and move through the interface of the various apps, to understand when the requested car is arriving or there is a comment on a post.
There’s also a dedicated training mode, which you can use to teach the device how to do something, so that it can then repeat what it’s learned on its own. In the presentation press conference, CEO Jesse Lyu gives an example: “Just say: ‘Hey, first of all, go to a software called Photoshop. Open it. Search for the photos in the album. Create a lasso on the watermark and click on the command .This is how you remove the watermark.’ It takes 30 seconds for Rabbit OS to learn, Lyu says, and then it can automatically remove all watermarks on its own.
Remotely
The system operates on a remote platform, in the sense that Photoshop is not installed on the r1, but on the Rabbit AI servers, with all the resulting problems, from privacy to copyright management. But the undeniable advantage is that no developer will have to write a single line of code to make his app compatible with the Rabbit gadget.
And for those who were left without, have no fear: after the first batch shipped in March, a second batch of Rabbit r1 will be available, arriving between April and May. Also in Italy.