CES 2024: Rabbit's LAM pulls R1 out of the hat

(Image: Rabbit Inc.)

AI startup Rabbit Inc. has unveiled the Rabbit R1 at CES 2024, and it's creating quite a buzz. This pocket-sized device promises to shake up the personal AI assistant space, changing how we interact with technology.

"Smartphones were supposed to be intuitive," says Rabbit Inc. CEO and Founder Jesse Lyu during the R1's presentation. The reality is they are not, over time your smartphone has become an aggregator of apps, with all your services tied to 100 different apps that you have to thumb through to get what you need.

This is the opportunity that Rabbit saw, a space for a middle-man-esque service for your digital life, a sort of concierge that can manage all your services for you.

Simply put, think of the R1 as your digital companion that you interact with using Natural Language Commands. The device itself is small, a pocket-sized square with a 2.88-inch touchscreen, rotating camera and a scroll wheel for easy navigation.

It has a 2.3GHz MediaTek chipset, 4GB of on-board memory and comes with 128GB of storage. It supports both 4G and Wi-Fi for connectivity, and Rabbit says it has "all-day" battery life with a single charge.

The hardware isn't really the main sell here though, R1 uses AI to accomplish its tasks and learns directly from human interaction with apps. It works across all platforms as well, be it Android, iOS or even the desktop.

All you need to is to connect the services you use the most to what the company calls "rabbit hole", a one-stop shop for all your services. Rabbit makes it clear it does not store your credentials or use any of your data for training its models.

With a simple press of the push-to-talk button and a few voice commands, Rabbit can accomplish a lot of tasks for you, for example - controlling music over Spotify, or ordering something on Amazon or even sending text messages through one simple interface.

LAM or Large Action Model is a type of Artificial Intelligence (AI) model that has been trained by watching humans interact with popular apps like Spotify or Uber.

Thanks to this training, LAMs can plan their way around apps and help you accomplish tasks that would otherwise leave you stuck in annoying loops. It can also work across services, for example - it can fetch your birthday dates from your calendar and order gifts for you.

But what if you give it tasks it has not been trained for? Well, Rabbit thought of that. The R1 has a "teach mode", where you essentially show the model how you interact with a specific app. It will take your actions on the app as context and will execute it the next time you tell it to do so.

The Rabbit R1 costs $199 (Approx. Rs 16,500) and though you can pre-order it right now, you will notice it is not currently shipping to India.

This means that you will need to call in favors from the family abroad to get this thing in your hands.