Revisiting the 3 Biggest Hardware Flops of 2024: Apple Vision Pro, Rabbit R1, Humane Ai Pin

Interestingly, almost all third-party integrations the company rolled out (DoorDash, Uber, Midjourney, etc.) have been discontinued, so these features are unavailable. (Not that they actually worked before.) The scroll wheel is less janky, and the interface improvements are welcome. For example, you can now hold down the Push to Talk button and scroll up or down to change the volume.

Over the year, R1 has received a series of updates, but three stand out the most: Beta Rabbit, LAM Playground, and Teach Mode.

Beta Rabbit uses an enhanced large language model to provide a more conversational experience when you ask R1 any question. I didn’t find it all conversational. GPT-4o Or Gemini Live. I asked it how we know about the early days of the universe, and it started reading an excerpt. At one point it mentioned the “cosmic microwave background,” at which point I interrupted and asked how it could be detected. Then, R1 began a tirade about “looking for the cosmic microwave background,” “looking for this,” and “looking for that.” After waiting five times, it finally started reading out the answer about CMB.

LAM Playground is an interesting feature on the Rabbit portal. These “large action models” run on a virtual browser that you can interact with, and are designed to show how Rabbit performs tasks on your behalf. (You know, because it can’t do that on startup!) Enter the prompt and Rabbit’s bot will execute it. For example, you can ask it to find items and add them to your Amazon shopping cart, although you’ll need to log into Amazon through this virtual browser, which seems like a huge privacy risk.

I asked it to Google “best office chairs” and took me to the retailer’s page. It took way too long to get to this point and type “Best Office Chair Reviews of 2023”. (Is R1 on a different timeline?) But it still goes to the first result (which is my own) Office Chair Guidethank you very much) which took me to the product page Branch Ergonomic Chair Promy top recommendation.

LAM Playground lets you see how it all works, while Tutorial mode lets you put it into practice. It’s still in beta (I think R1 is still in beta as well). After several attempts, I kept getting errors that made the feature unusable. Finally, it worked another day. I built a class and then performed these steps in a virtual browser – R1 logged every click. Then when I tell my R1 device to do that, it mimics what I do.