A Rough Guide to the Rabbit r1
The Rabbit r1 launched to great fanfare on January 9th, but nobody I knew really understood what to use it for. It was one of those "Holy shit, that thing is rad, but..what does it do again?" moments.
What is the r1? For my regular readers, I'll start with this: It has nothing to do with DePINs or crypto (yet).
For everyone else...let's start with what it looks like. It's a little orange box about a thumb-width thick and maybe as long and wide as your index finger. Basically, a little smaller than your palm (unless you have plumber hands and can rip a phone book in half, in which case it's half the size of your palm.)
photo credit: Rabbit
It's got a scroll wheel and a screen, a camera that can roll its own eye up into a cover (so it can't watch you all the time) and a place for a SIM card so it can connect to the webz.
Now, far more interestingly, what does the r1 do? It uses fancy AI (technically a LAM, or Large Action Model) to watch what people do on their screens, listen to what they say while they do it, and then encode that into repeatable actions.
What the fuck does that mean?
Basically, it's like a very smart 10 year child with perfect recall who does exactly what you tell it to. It can watch and mimic what you do on a computer, sometimes with uncanny accuracy. Whether you're editing videos and could use an "auto mask" assistant, or you're always booking trips online and get tired of the details, you let the Rabbit watch what you do a few times, then, it just...does it for you.
Technically, a Rabbit is an agent, a "software entity capable of performing tasks on its own." Those of us with a love of sci-fi will remember the hotel agent in the book Altered Carbon; we ain't there yet, but we're getting closer.
The key points here are that a Rabbit will:
A) watch and listen to you
and
B) you can tell it what you want to do
No programming necessary. It doesn't have to integrate with an app any more than you do, it just listens, learns, and does. That's it.
Oh, and one more thing. The L in LAM. It doesn't just listen to and learn from you. It does that for everybody.
So if someone who is a movie editing wizard decides to walk their Rabbit through their process, well, not only can they reuse that process, but they can *sell* that process to you.
[Rabbit] is confident it can make business-sustaining money through licensing its platform.
This means the the experience-buying market is about to get even more frictionless. Upwork used to be the hot place to drop a tech gig you wanted done now, but that's still pretty messy. There's sifting through people, hiring one (or a few), testing 'em out, then seeing if you like working with them.
Of course, if what you want is an imaginative engineer to solve a current problem in a novel way, well, Rabbits prolly ain't for you. If, however, you'd like to just buy any kind of online executory experience that might have taken someone years to master and they now do as casually as Stephen Curry makes free throws, well, there may be a Rabbit for that soon.
So, where does that leave you, someone who owns or has ordered a Rabbit and is wondering what you'll do with it?
One thing we'll probably see is an explosion of "Master class" style offerings, except instead of Neil Gaiman teaching story-telling, you'll be be able to buy the story-telling Rabbit who was taught by Neil, then write your own Gaiman-esque stories.
If you were to consider preparing for your Rabbit, you might want a "What to do while you wait" pamphlet.
In broad strokes, it's reasonably safe to start thinking of any Rabbit action or sequence as requiring three things:
- Intent through spoken word
- Screen recording
- Desired outcome
An example of this might be:
Intent: Check across 30 Discords for the general sentiment around DePIN in crypto
Screen recording: Going through the Discord servers I'm in, searching through the latest posts, giving each server a rough "sentiment score" on DePIN in crypto
Desired outcome: Overall sentiment score for the idea of "DePIN in crypto", maybe on a scale of 1 to 10.
That's not by a long shot the best or only or most complex, it's just one idea based on some of the work I already do.
Obviously we'll see Twitter flooded with the "My boss thinks I'm a genius, but I've just got a Rabbit in my pocket" ads. I'm sitting down with my buddies to think up of all the ways we might use ours to help YOU! They may steer crops, make movies, manage social media details, or book that trip for St Cuthbert's walk.
In the meantime, what can you think up that your Rabbit might do for not just you, but all of us?
- booking a flight
- pentesting & wardriving (say no more!)
- growing crops using sensor networks
- writing new songs
- setting up complex network rules (firewalls, device tunnels, etc)
- visualizing all sensors in a space
- visualizing all DePIN miners in a given location
Batch 1 ships starting March 31st, 2024. To the future!
Curious about the Rabbit? Buy yours here (no, not an affiliate link) --> https://www.rabbit.tech/
Archived Comments
Warren Bowman - 1/12/2024
Nik, I love what you do. I was just wondering what the hell this rabbit thing was. Thanks for explaining it. If I may pick one small nit: editing is a subjective craft. Each piece has it’s own look and feel. As a career film editor, I doubt that this device can compare performances on a subjective level, intuit what the writer intended, realize the director’s vision, and give the producer what they want. Am I missing something?
Nik - 1/12/2024
Right on Warren. As a brand new film editor, I'm on the other side; a ton of stuff that is probably super basic for you is time-consuming for me; drawing a mask around an object, moving that object through frames to simulate motion (think the "superhero landing effect"). That's just a small example, but expanding it out, let's say you had a Rabbit watch you edit, oh, 2 or 3 short films. As you edit, you tell it what you're doing, then you package that up and sell it as a "editing assistant" on the Rabbit marketplace. I buy the WB-Edit-Assist for my RAbbit, and then it's like I've got you in the room with me for when I want to do all the small tech tweaks that are natural to you. Does that make sense?
Fernando Cassia - 1/14/2024
Hardware specs? Is it wifi or LTE enabled or both? How much bandwidth does it use and what degree of control do I have on bandwidth usage?
Nik - 1/14/2024
2.3 GHz MediaTek MT6765 Octa-core (Helio P35) processor 4 GB memory 128 GB storage 8 MP, 3264x2448 photo 24 fps, 1080p video Bluetooth 5.0 / Wi-Fi with 2.4GHz + 5GHz / 4G LTE All specs on their page: https://www.rabbit.tech/
You - 1/14/2024
People need to be realistic about what $200 can get them lol. ChatGPT is $20 a month and is barely agentic, and somehow idiots expect they can get a smart agent for $200 with hardware?
Joe Rizo - 1/15/2024
I am most interested in the rabbit teach, which i'm sure is what is creating the biggest stir in the developer community. i just pre-ordered the rabbit r1, but would like to get started now on creating the action agent i need. when do we get access? i dont see anything for developers on the site.
Oro - 4/29/2024
Thanks for this Nik! Now i have a better understanding of an r1. So an r1 and it’s LAM are like an automated code writer for Selenium WebDriver or Puppeteer/headless Chrome? I used to write test scripts similar to the web example on the Research page https // rabbit tech/research using them. BTW, did you receive an r1 yet? What are your first impressions? Also, what do think about the Ai Pin? Does it have DePIN potential? https // humane com/aipin
Nik - 4/29/2024
Right on! I just got my R1 today. I'd say it's a fun gadget that's not yet delivering on the hopes that got built up. For me that's totally fine; it was $199 and after so much experience with crypto hardware I'm just psyched they delivered on time. :) I don't have any experience with the AI pin. I don't think either of 'em will go the DePIN route, though I heard rumblings at one point they might do a token.
Oro - 5/1/2024
Thanks, Nik! Interesting article on r1: "The Rabbit R1 is probably running Android and is certainly powered by an Android app under the hood." https //www.androidauthority.com/ rabbit-r1-is-an-android-app-3438805/ Hmmm.
Shane - 5/16/2024
Does rabit1 have an affiliate program
Nik - 6/8/2024
I'm not sure. If they do, I'm not on it yet.
Randy - 6/18/2024
Seeing the demo on January 9th I thought cool, and only $200. Let's give it a try. I've been an early adopter (for the most part), for a long time ... My Rabbit R1 arrived yesterday. Not sure what I can do with this yet but its been fun playing with it. Recording a meeting and having it summarized could be useful, but I haven't tried it yet. Visual object identification is cool and hopefully will get better over time.
Nik - 6/18/2024
From what I've seen with mine, you won't be able to do much yet, but it's fun to experience.