There's No Rabbit In This Hat

Grifters gonna grift

Image: Badly edited by author

Move over “this meeting could have been an email,” we have a new kid on the block. 

“This device could have been an app.

It’s not been a good few weeks for AI. There was the launch of the pretty broken Humane AIPin. There have been weird stories of Meta’s AI saying strange things, and the AI-generated content plastered all over the platform — including viral images of dead children — is ruining what’s left of the user experience. There was a video that popped the hype bubble surrounding OpenAI’s Sora release, with the company who used it to make many of the launch videos revealing it took a lot of post-editing and that getting results from prompts was “like a slot machine.” And now, we have the release of the Rabbit r1, and you guessed it, it’s another unfinished, barely functioning device that delivers very little of what it promised and does the few things it can do very slowly and very incorrectly. But hey, at least it’s colorful?

If you need evidence, watch this excruciating video of Rabbit founder Jesse Lyu trying to order from DoorDash through the device in front of a live audience. It’s mind-numbingly slow, and doesn’t work the first time. Considering DoorDash is one of only FOUR apps the device can integrate with at launch, we’re not off to the best start. It’s also been compounded by poor reviews, most of which say something along the lines of “cool looking device that doesn’t do much.” AI devices are certainly setting a trend, though not quite the “next smartphone killer” one they were aiming for. 

I like the way Ryan Broderick put it in his newsletter, Garbage Day — 

“The R1 launching unfinished and useless is actually exactly what the AI boom is all about. Finding — and automating — new ways to get people to pay for worse versions of what they already have.”

Tasty. This takedown from Dave2D was also a great mic drop moment.

Of course, the Rabbit founders have followed the ‘if it’s broken, ship it’ playbook to a tee. They’ve responded to criticism of the device — lack of uses, slow and laggy, awful battery, cumbersome usability — with the usual ploy: roadmaps of future features, promises and the “we’re a small team, give us time” sympathy call. Unfortunately for them, it seems consumers have had enough of this bullcrap. The defensive nature of Rabbit’s PR hasn’t helped either. I get it; it sucks to have people dunk on your work, but attacking back is rarely the best option. It only encourages the pile on — and pile on they have.

Nifty hackers have been looking at its underbelly and have discovered that the device that should have been an app is literally an app. It appears to run Android under the hood and the entire interface users interact with is powered by a single Android app. The Rabbit founders have responded by saying that this is untrue, but they also said in their statement that “rabbit OS and LAM run on the cloud with very bespoke AOSP.” Well, AOSP is the Android Open Source Project, and the fact there’s no subscription to any kind of cloud service means the cloud claim is a little dubious. 

An AI researcher shared some screens of the leaked (and now deleted) source code, claiming there is no artificial intelligence behind the device at all. Someone else discovered that the process to login to the four apps is more than a little sketchy and potentially insecure — it could allow Rabbit to see your credentials. Yikes. 

This is out of my wheelhouse, but it doesn’t seem like it’s quite the AI device the founders have been selling it as. It turns out that we should have seen this coming. Someone was digging into the founder’s past and unearthed that Jesse was previously behind a grifty NFT project called Gama. (Here’s a great thread with more details on another abandoned Web3 dream nightmare.)

Who would have guessed it?

It’s another example of the good ol’ NFT to AI switch up. At this point, we can assume Jesse also had a dabble in Crypto to, completing the grifter trifecta.

Details are hard to find on the project because it’s been deleted, and so have videos that show Jesse speaking about it. But, thanks to the wonders of Web.Archive, we can see it in all its glory. Want to know how bad it is? It opens with this line: “Gama is building the principles of the future through its next generation metaverse, the Game Space Station.” It also promises “a new world of entertainment.” 

Did Gama usher in this next generation metaverse? Or a new world of entertainment? Absolutely not. The project was nothing more than a rug pull, with Jesse doing a disappearing act on the project’s Discord channel and seemingly pocketing a lot of the money from the initial NFT sales. 

I’m not suggesting it means anything — founders try and fail all the time — but when you try to bury the evidence of previous ventures and then follow it up with a barely working device that just so happens to coincide with the newest “next big thing”… all signs point to this being another project that hoped to suck as much money as possible before it was exposed as a piece of plastic trash. And let’s be honest, the device is as good as dead. While the team will push out some updates and shout loudly about its future potential, the interest will have waned long before it lives up to even the vague promises it made.

There’s going to be no rabbit pulled from this hat. 

I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of AI folks telling me they’re creating the future only to deliver absolute garbage. I’m tired of grifters jumping from Crypto to NFTs to AI, burning through millions in VC cash — and the money of consumers — telling us they’re going to change the world and producing nothing of note. I’m sick of people like Sam Altman waxing lyrical about how “he doesn’t care if he burns through $50 billion a year” to create AGI when he and his cult followers can’t even explain what AGI is or how/why it’ll benefit humanity. Who the fuck is this guy? I’m fed up with everyone telling me it’s going to change how I work, or if I work, when the current outputs are doing nothing but de-leveling the market. 

The current AI rhetoric is sociopathically disconnected from reality. 

If AI is really going to be revolutionary, it’s time to start delivering the evidence. Not more ifs, buts and maybes. Not high-level, world-changing statements. Not the same statements spouted by the same people over and over. We need real, tangible evidence of the net gain to society. 

If the Rabbit, Humane Pin and ChatGPT are as good as it gets, this revolution is going to go out with a whimper.