Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
Marques specifically mentions it happening in video games, cars (Tesla self-driving), smartphones, and these AI things as particular offenders. I've also seen it with SaaS. Even a lot of the things being released by the big cloud providers at their yearly conferences are mostly in some half-baked state.
We've taken the concept of a "minimum viable product" and turned it into "minimum hype-able product". It sucks.
"Never. Ever. Buy a tech product based on the promise of future software updates."
I've seen interesting products, and either been curious or ready to buy. Unfortunately, the only available information to me is the marketing.
Seriously, look on amazon. You can see pictures of the product, read the description, and read the reviews. this leads to 2/3 of the information being by the marketing team, and quite possibly much of the final 1/3, the reviews.
Being able to view a video of the product by someone (anyone!) on youtube gives you a chance of critical information you need for a decision.
Who cares if he's lackluster. If he even in passing gives you an idea of what the product might actually be like, you've been helped.
By the way, even consumer reports, formerly the gold standard in unbiased reviews is part of the gravy train. When they switched from the magazine to online, they acted like a funnel to purchases. sigh.
"The entertainment you would watch" would probably amount to nothing and you probably wouldn't even finish the video, because it would be too boring.
He doesn't hold a candle to people like Dave2D or Hardware Unboxed, the latter of which has extremely thorough testing for every single one of the products they review. MKBHD is often inaccurate about many things and certainly not exhaustive in his reviews like other reviewers are. His channel can be better classified as infotainment, much like Unbox Therapy and (for certain of their videos) Linus Tech Tips are.
To sum this one up:
Tell me you can't tell the difference between an influencer and a reviewer without telling me you can't tell the difference between an influencer and a reviewer. The bar is really low with respect to quality (not production, but content) these days.
From a recent article [0]: "The 30-year-old YouTube kingpin makes money from sponsorship deals with brands, merchandise sales, and a whole lot of ad revenue from YouTube."
Where do you draw the line between his format and his sponsorships? And how do you know that he's "reviewing" without monetary bias? As an example he put out this [1] video with Buick a few years ago. Let's try to be honest for a second - he wouldn't be caught dead driving that car unless Buick paid him to. And that is my point. There's no boundary between his "reviews" and his "ads". They look, they feel and they are the same format. He's excited about this Buick, "reviewing" it on his channel, it does say that it's sponsored, but is it his actual opinion? Very doubtful. And that, right there, is the difference between a reviewer and an influencer. Is he a charlatan? Maybe not quite that far - but he is being dishonest by making the sponsor video in, basically, the same format as anything else he does. Does he have relevant points? Sure - but there are other reviewers that have much deeper knowledge of the reviewed product. Case in point is his car reviews - he's not a true car enthusiast. His car "review" videos clearly reflect that when you compare it to someone who knows the car market in-depth (there are a lot of great car reviewers on YouTube, MKBHD isn't one of them). Is it good enough? For most people, probably. But again - I don't trust anyone to do a full spot on a car that's not even close to being on his want-to-have list and then expect him to be unbiased when "reviewing" a competitor. He puts out ads for his own brand, and anyone willing to pay him. He's an influencer. And now, he's hocking wallets that are $125+ [2][3].
[0] https://fortune.com/2024/02/22/marques-brownlee-youtube-at-a... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfC8Y66tR6o [2] https://ridge.com/collections/mkbhd [3] https://ridge.com/pages/mkbhd-announcement
While I don’t think maturity has improved or got worse really, considering the general state of things 20 years ago, it should have by now.
As someone who likes to solve a problem rather than create two new ones, I will always go for a mature solution these days.
None of these products fit that bill. Hell, Apple Watch still doesn’t, nearly a decade later.
It's not a world-changing device, but it's a very useful accessory.
It was a great product though if you wanted to be future-shocked and to draw a ton of attention in public. But the 3g is where it took off as a consumer device.
Of course something like this product is on the verge of snake oil in comparison.
Plus Apple had already been very successful with the iPod line, so they weren't new in portable electronics and people were willing to trust them.
We built a system that (lossy) compresses all text on the internet and is able to be (fuzzy) searched with a human language interface. Storage size: under a few hundred gigs (depending on precision).
This one is a definite none.
As pointed out elsewhere I was gaslit into changing the subject by an LLM the other day and then it got stuff wrong. End game is it created more work than not using it.
And that’s what we need to be careful of. The promise versus benefits of technology are not always obviously swayed towards the benefit end.
An example: Google/Apple doesn't allow third-party apps access to call audio. So you couldn't implement live translation/transcription, by just being an app.
Google/Apple will jealously guard their turf in their ecosystems (to make space for their own AI assistants probably), so this level of third-party access is unlikely to be forthcoming.
But, from a business sense, doesn't it seem like they're doing it backwards? Why not make a best-in-class AI assistant app, build a big userbase, and take the money to research hardware and harass Apple concurrently? Why start with hardware first?
When they decided to charge $80 for a plastic bag to carry the op1, that was made abundantly clear.
They don't make good products. What they do well is hype and style over substance.
I can read faster than the computer can talk and type/touch faster (and more clearly) than I can talk. Unless the voice output is really finely tuned a lot of stuff I usually search for sounds like gibberish when read back with TTS. I've yet to find even AI TTS that recognizes source code or technical abbreviations and reads them correctly.
Then there's of course the privacy aspect, or complete lack of privacy.
If I wanted that experience I’d talk to a human.
I understand this particular product is [edit] designed by Teenage Engineering and it's kinda what they do. But that makes it a niche product.
But there is no reason for a serious product to have a screen, a camera, a speaker, and a network connection and not be a smartphone.
Both are expected to release major updates to their assistant including on-device LLM/LAM.
The technology has only recently reached a point where it could rival traditional mobile computing. Dismissing the entire field based on these early attempts would be a mistake.
If anything, current smartphone leaders would be foolish to not jump at the opportunity to introduce standalone devices themselves. They eventually likely will, and will market their versions as the real innovations.
And from people who have used the Rabbit the LAM concept as they have done it is unusable e.g. it was ordering from DoorDash to the wrong address / incorrect tip and they had no way to change it.
User experience is just as important as the technology.
These devices should be apps on your phone. Google and Apple will won't open their devices enough for these assistants to useful cause they want to roll their own. So their only hope is to create a stand alone device.. But yeah they're dead in the water.
A: Because people wouldn't pay $200 for an app. Because there is ChatGPT as an app. Because people love buying tangible stuff. Because VC see this as "a new category" they want to dominate.
I think this project itself has a lot to do with teenage engineering. The success of TE (low tech, high marketing) gave them inspiration. In terms of musicality, TE is far behind, for example, Elektron, which is also from Sweden, not to mention the master of analog sound by companies such as Moog. TE may only have a very impressive hardware innovation in TP7 (which is not so popular). As for other popular pocket operators, KO2, and OP1, there are too few hardcore innovations, and hype and trend culture have the upper hand.
With that being said, looking at the sales of Moog and the outcome of its acquisition, it must be admitted that marketing is still very important. But musical instruments are different from mass-market commodities. After all, the former can be collected and one does not have to consider their practicality too much.
Now the easy access of AI service at the backend will obviously lead to more and more low tech, which is normal and just a phenomenon. But I will give more praise to hard-core innovation. If there is hard-core innovation and excellent UX use cases, it will be icing on the cake.
Generative UI, and teach mode as mentioned in this video. If they manage to get these to work, I believe a future iteration of this product can seriously challenge smartphones.
I doubt the science is there yet though. It's easy to over promise here.
We're building this over at https://github.com/OpenAdaptAI/OpenAdapt. OpenAdapt learns to automate tasks in desktop apps by observing human demonstrations.
Early demo: https://twitter.com/abrichr/status/1784307190062342237
Contributions and feedback are welcome and encouraged :)
I'm just bored and fed up with his smart-alec "hey this is a bad new thing" videos to catch eyeballs and feed the algo.
Seems as though unless you're a big-bucks big-tech that's going to give him a discount on a fancy electric car then you're nothing.
Who knows if Notch was the first to herald in this new paradigm of half-finished products? It's the first thing that comes to mind every time I experience, read about or witness a product, service or idea that isn't quite fully baked. I say, "Self, they are just cashing in while they iterate and extend... or not."