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.)

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.

Kyle Wig­gers, Tech Crunch

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/