Rabbit R1 It's a Scam
paulogpd.bearblog.dev
paulogpd.bearblog.dev
Although tools like ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and other stochastic parrots are useful in specific contexts, AI still has nothing of "I"; on the contrary, what they really do is generate text that makes sense (grammatical text, as opposed to ungrammatical texts), which was already possible with Prolog in 2011.
- It's not a scam, I paid $199 for the device and I have one
- The hardware is nicely designed and fun to use, the UI for interacting with the LLM is better than other options (my grandma could play with it easily)
The action model idea for training UI usage as a mechanism is an interesting idea.
The author is just so incredibly wrong about the shift in capability from prolog and GOFAI to now it's almost a caricature.
In the case of this device, it told users it has functionality that, plainly, it does not have. It marketed itself based on these features. That is a scam.
they said they are faster than chatgpt, but allegedly they are a chatgpt wrapper
On the other hand if you bought with the expectation to sell in the future for a profit, you are trading on the perceived value. Scams rely on making you believe that the future accepted value will be much higher than what it will actually be.
That would be analogous to creating the expectation of absent functionality in the Rabbit.
In both cases the fraud is not in the item being sold but in the misrepresentations about it.
I think why this matters is because these days it feels like everything is misrepresented. I can buy a graphics card and be happy with its performance even though it is almost guaranteed to be well below the manufacturers promised level.
What is the returns policy for the Rabbit? Can people get a refund if they don't like it?
For example, if someone sells you a machine that they claim is powered by magic but actually there is a hidden physical mechanism, you can claim the machine still performs the function, but they have misled you about the workings in a way that has huge implications on the capabilities of the product.
That is what is going on here. Look at MKBHD's review, the main potential he pointed out was the LAM functionality and the possible future uses of that. It turns out that entire thing was faked, and the "magic" that was the LAM is a "hidden physical mechanism" of duct tape'd together manual automations
I think the people calling it a scam are the same group that just complains about anything. The author drawing an equivalence between prolog and LLMs is a lot of evidence in favor of this sort of bullshit, I just have a really low tolerance for this kind of argument and person.
I'm not delusional - I think the Humane device is extremely disappointing (and their marketing was way more misleading imo), but I'm glad they built and shipped something/tried something in this space. I don't believe the rabbit complaints are earnest it's just cool to hate new stuff for some people. It's the same batch that hated the iphone in 2007, just tedious and uninteresting.
Thanks! I`m not a huge fan of people like you too.
I suspect the plan is/was to replace this with an actual LAM after release or possibly they thought they'd have it ready for release but ran into the 'last 5%' issue that seems to plague AI automation of anything. Definitely not an ethical move, but I can see how someone who bought into the AI hype might think it was a reasonable gamble to become a billionaire.
Asking AI to do anything that requires "I" has it falling flat on its face in a cruel mockery of the word "I" and I just don't understand the hype. Well, that's a lie I do understand the hype and the mechanism by which piles of cash and gigawatthours of energy are being burned through and it makes me sad.
When all of the upcoming virtual brand ambassadors prove to be embarrassing failures maybe a splinter of reality will penetrate the hype-reinforced skulls of all of the "visionaries" funding this nonsense.
ETA:
I should point out that it doesn't just "smoosh google results together", and it can actually do pretty interesting transformations beyond a simple "Grabbing the first result". If I ask ChatGPT to give me ten unique Java homework assignment problems, it will give me exactly that, and from my experience they actually are unique, at least they don't show up immediately when I search for similar things on Google. I can then ask it to give me those questions in LaTeX so that I can render it into a pretty thing. I guess you could argue that that is just an AST, so fair enough, but I think it's pretty easy to see why people are losing their shit over it.
It also has for more than a year hooked into Wolfram Alpha, so it addition to usually correctly parsing your problem, it can then send that parsed problem to a more objective source and get a correct answer.
ChatGPT has been an immense timesaver for me. It's been great to generate stuff like homework assignments, or to summarize long text into something more palatable. I don't automatically trust its output obviously, but it's considerably more useful than a Markov chain.
And I agree that there is certainly a capacity for reasoning, no matter how flawed it is. There is plenty of evidence of AI solving novel problems 0-shot. Maybe not 100% of the time, but even if you have to run it 100 times and it gets it right 75% of the time in pure reasoning problems, it's doing better than randomness.
It doesn't have to be "magic" to displace a lot of things people spend time on every day.
Sure, markov chains are also picking the next token, but so am I when writing this comment. Am I just a "stochastic parrot"? Or is it the author that is parroting other people's opinions without giving them any thought?
Because I agree with you that sounds ridiculous to me, but also my level of Prolog is like
parent(a, b).
parent(c, b).
couple(x, y) :-
parent(x, z),
parent(y, z).
So I'm prepared to believe the state of the art for ChatGPT-like thing done in Prolog is a lot more impressive than I might have expected if someone asked me yesterday.
The problem is that most people can't see that rabbit r1 is a deceptive product, at least. chatGPT (and Gemini, Claude and many others) doesn't do this (it doesn't trick its users into thinking that the product does one thing, but it actually does another).
As I say, I know i pushed the limits, that's on me.
In 1995 we discussed the HP48G calculator on Usenet and Dave Arnett who designed the calculator chimed in.
When my uncle left illegally Hungary in 1981 for the US, communication was sparse. We went to my grandmother for Sunday lunch and wrote a letter, together. Answers came in like two months. End of the 1980s phone calls began to happen but supremely expensive and short. By the time my grandfather passed in 2011 at the tender age of 98 he spent easily an hour every day video calling over Skype for free with his son.
I wintered out in Israel in 2007. It was almost impossible for me to get around on public transit as I do not read Hebrew. I also spent more than a week at the turn of 2015/2016 in Israel: Tel Hazor, Tel Megiddo, Avdat, Mitzpe Ramon, Eilat. I used public transit for all that, thanks to the smartphones with GPS and maps and real time transit instructions it was trivial.
I am easy to impress. You just need to knock down barriers of communication.
On the other hand, I can't say I was impressed by https://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/ -- I surely was entertained, no question about that.
When these LLMs roared onto the scene I was neither impressed nor was I entertained. I was frightened. Nothing has happened since which would have proven us wrong, to the contrary. Australia leads the way by banning deepfake porn. More of that please, most especially ban the use of deepfakes of people who run in elections and the mass generation of texts about those.
As an aside, I enjoy the translate-in-camera functionality of smartphones very much so I am not against all AI -- it just needs to be used wisely.
I agree that deepfaking stuff with politicians is extremely concerning, but that doesn't really detract from the fact that Stable Diffusion is pretty cool. I was very impressed the first time I tried out Midjourney and Udio.
I don't know if I'd call it a "scam", just a bit dishonest.
It was claimed that the R1 would navigate an app like a person would. That it wouldn't matter if the UI changed because the AI would figure it out the same way a person would. It follows a script and breaks when the UI changes.
It was claimed that it would be faster than ChatGPT. The majority of it is a ChatGPT wrapper.
A product exists, sure, but I'd be surprised if anyone feels it met expectations.
Turns out that it is just an automation script and it cannot deal with site redesigns or CAPTCHAs.
Edit, just found they have made this claim also which simply doesn't exist at all:
> The R1 also has a dedicated training mode, which you can use to teach the device how to do something, and it will supposedly be able to repeat the action on its own going forward. Lyu gives an example: “You’ll be like, ‘Hey, first of all, go to a software called Photoshop. Open it. Grab your photos here. Make a lasso on the watermark and click click click click. This is how you remove watermark.’” It takes 30 seconds for Rabbit OS to process, Lyu says, and then it can automatically remove all your watermarks going forward.
Regarding its “learning” - it is still a model that needs data. The best you can expect is it will take actual UI sessions (as in users interacting with the website) for specific tasks to build its scripts, and as with any current “large” model it’s not going to update in realtime based on user input alone.
One of their former engineers gave a statement that LAM is just a marketing term and nothing like that exists.
If all the selling points are in future tense at what point can we call it a scam?
Edit: also the founder’s previous gig was a crypto scam that also promised AI on the blockchain
The problem is their LAM sucks, and is likely no more than just a task builder prompt on GPT (instead of a model specifically tuned for generating these tasks) using lang chain for resolution. They also have limited tooling, and some of it is already broken.
As for it being a scam. I definitely don’t see how you can offer lifetime ChatGPT with no subscription. So unless they are going to bring in additional revenue somehow it is effectively a ponzi scheme.
Instead of that, they shipped a bunch of manually written playwright scripts for a small number of websites and apps... With no AI involved.
I see from your other comments you are saying this was supposed to be some AI that can navigate websites and perform tasks with no user input.
Maybe you had some unrealistic expectations about what they were offering, as it has been quite clear they only offer limited integrations. It was even widely discussed that it was just some langchain (or similar) driven agents - apparent to anyone who has read even basic information about the product.
> In the linked video below, Coffeezilla shows how actions fail when applications change their graphical interface - like Doordash, the US version of iFood, which altered a small hamburger menu in its interface, breaking the Rabbit R1’s action.
Edit: yay for downvoting me for being unable to grok a sentence on the first try. That's truly the spirit of HN. /s
It seems everyone on YouTube is doing clickbait thumbnails and Yellow Journalism in an effort to build a get-rich-quick "creator" business ultimately selling ads for junk D2C products and VPNs.
Soon we'll have folks doing hour-long YouTube exposés about the people who create hour-long YouTube exposés in a recursive loop. The winner will be Manscaped.
It seems recently that any post on HN criticising LLMs gets instantly wiped off the front page. This seems to coincide a little too neatly with YC's announcement that almost all of their funding choices this year will be "AI based" companies
I cancelled my order with them a couple of weeks ago as I felt it wasn't worth the money to me - they gave me a refund without complaint at all.
What is wrong with the tooling using playwright scripts for services that don’t provide an api? What does the alternative offer? What is this magic ai automation the author thinks exist supposed to use?
This whole article is just singling out one interface from many, and doesn’t understand the very basic backend implementations these agents, including ChatGPT plugins, Siri, Alexa, etc, use.
I’m flagging this post because it is unjust.
Or the interview of the CEO, Jesse Lyu aboutn the LAM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-MNgciL5hw
If you're still sure that the LAM is present in their product, that's fine, but my view (and I understand how plugins, LLM, AI and other related things work) ist thre are no LAM in the rabbit r1.
Or, at least, think about the misleading with the rabbit r1 by readning a little more about it.
Like this: https://nitter.poast.org/JD_2020/status/1794057162819260461#...
EDIT: I think a end-user doens't need to read the documentation to understand how the "magic" happens, this user just want the buy something that works as advertised.
Or, you can nsay that an automation is a LAM (it's not).
With the definition of the Silvio Savarese’s article (from the podcast you indicate):
> To be clear, an LAMs job isn’t just turning a request into a series of steps, but understanding the logic that connects and surrounds them. That means understanding why one step must occur before or after another, and knowing when it’s time to change the plan to accommodate changes in circumstances. It’s a capability we demonstrate all the time in everyday life. For instance, when we don’t have enough eggs to make an omelet, we know the first step has nothing to do with cooking, but with heading to the nearest grocery store. It’s time we built technology that can do the same.
**
The definition provided by Silvio Savarese highlights the ability of a LAM to not only transform a request into a series of steps but also to understand the underlying logic that connects and surrounds these steps. This includes the ability to adjust the plan as circumstances change.
Based on this definition, claiming that rabbit r1 is a LAM-oriented assistant seems to be inaccurate. If it does not demonstrate the ability to understand and adapt to contextual changes in a logical and effective manner, it cannot be classified as a genuine LAM.
For a true LAM, it is crucial that the technology not only follows a predefined sequence of steps but also understands the logic and purpose behind each step, adjusting as necessary to achieve the desired goal. If rabbit r1 does not meet these criteria, its classification as a LAM indeed needs to be reviewed.
And, with that in mind I can assure you that rabbit r1 it's not a LAM oriented assistant as they claim.
I don’t know exactly how sophisticated the setup is - it’s likely some tooling around langchain or similar - but it evidently DOES do this given the nature of some of the queries that it resolves.
You are suggesting that a LAM must route itself around a critical failure in its tooling. Maybe you also expect a LAM to grow arms and water your plants for you? You are taking an experts definition and projecting some extra magical requirement onto it to dismiss r1 having a LAM.
The r1s LAM sucks, for sure, but it evidently exists in some form.
As for it being a scam overall - I don’t see how they can offer ChatGPT for life with no subscription, so unless they have some other revenue stream they won’t be around for long.
The actions are definitely faulty, as per the door dash example. I can’t get Alexa to play my last audiobook consistently. They all suck. Amazon own audible and still can’t get it right.
It IS faster than chatGPT. Even if it’s using GPT for inference the transcription and TTS latency are less than is available from OpenAI - at least at present.
Rabbit is just a “better” understanding alexa with less actions IMHO. They all suck, so why pick on this one specifically? Amazon charges $50 for an echo dot which cant even answer a basic question.