“You haven’t thought of AI like this before” we wrote when the startup Rabbit revealed the R1 at this year’s CES, a box with AI functions. And the title may match it, but perhaps not quite as we thought ahead of the following revelations.
From LLM to LAM
“The company spoke up something they refer to as LAM: “Large Action Model (LAM),” could be the answer to being able to perform tasks more efficiently than what is the situation today with many logins to a number of services to perform a task. The head of the new company Rabbit, Jesse Lyu, believes LAMs are the answer, and their first product of the same name is the intention to do something about the login and chaos of the number of services required,” we reported in January.
So the company has a web interface to their own cloud services, that’s one thing, but they also boasted that the device ran a very special “mixture” of hardware and services as if to create a unique AI hardware-to-the-cloud and services. Now exactly that story is cracking.
Additionally, most of the reviews have been abnormally negative with 3 out of 10 points from The Verge and 40 out of 100 from Engadget.
Runs Rabbit OS’s “Vision” function on a regular Android
For Android Authority has looked at the Android version the company uses and found that no special changes have been made to the low-level and firmware of r1. The Android newspaper even found out that the gadget contains standard Android apps that the user does not have access to with Rabbit’s “launcher”, i.e. the Android home screen. In addition to a separate UI and a software keyboard that is a modified version from another developer, they have added their own startup animation.
So what is so special beyond a well-designed box from Swedish “Teenage Engineering”)? Perhaps nothing in the hardware layer, because as you can see from Android Authority’s video below, the Android version runs with the r1 shell as expected of an Android app, on a completely normal Android mobile. Even Rabbit’s Vision app works like with the $199 r1:
The founder answered this on 1 May
Jesse Lyu, founder and Rabbit CEO, denied on May 1 that the stray software gives the correct impression of r1, writing at the same time on X that “rabbit OS and LAM run on the cloud with highly customized AOSP and lower-level firmware modifications, therefore, a local bootleg APK without the correct OS and Cloud endpoints will not be able to access our service.” Android Authority’s May 4 article seems to dispute that.
“rabbit OS is customized for r1 and we do not support third party clients. using a bootstrapped APK or web client involves significant risk; malicious actors are known to publish bootstrapped apps that steal your data. for this reason, we recommend that users avoid these bootlegged rabbit OS apps,” concluded Lyu’s message on the same day.
