Many people have sent me videos of the rabbit R1 and they’ve asked me vun what are your thoughts on this and to summarize I’m very bullish about the company and the team but not so much on the product before we get into why let me just quickly summarize the rabbit R1 for you it’s a device with a speaker screen mic and all the AI stuff that it’s actually running which is the large action model is online it’s running it on the cloud so it doesn’t need powerful processing now if it doesn’t need powerful processing you can can bring the price down so this is a device that costs $199 roughly 16,000 rupees and it’s much much cheaper than a phone.

Over the last week,  many people have sent me videos of the rabbit R1 and they’ve asked me vun what are your thoughts on this and to summarize I’m very bullish about the company and the team but not so much on the product before we get into why let me just quickly summarize the rabbit R1 for you it’s a device with a speaker screen mic and all the AI stuff that it’s actually running which is the large action model is online it’s running it on the cloud so it doesn’t need powerful processing now if it doesn’t need powerful processing you, can bring the price down so this is a device that costs $199 roughly 16,000 rupees and it’s much much cheaper than a phone.

A lot of people keep saying hey this is a $199 replacement to the phone and it has no distractions no apps no content Etc they are wrong see I’ve been following the debate around AI devices quite closely and I think there’s some misunderstanding from some people on what a smartphone actually does people think the value of a modern smartphone is in using utility apps like booking a cab or ordering food or whatever this is true but it is in the power use case if you look at the average human screen time if you look at your screen time 90% of your usage will be consuming content.

Images text and video when you use WhatsApp also it’s images and text that you’re consuming most of the time so I’ll tell you how most humans use the phone there’s this book I read along long time ago called Brave New World it’s also a TV series it’s written by

Huxley and that book is about a futuristic Society right so what they do is they carry with them a bunch of drugs they call the drug soma it’s a drug you pop every few hours to ease your boredom and anxiety and every time they feel even a little bit bored or anxious they pop the drug most of us consume content in periodic intervals on our phones as a way to do exactly this as a way to load up on dopamine and the minute the ability of a user to explode and consume content which is consume these drugs is removed it becomes a pure utility device with 5 minutes of usage time per day so even though a lot of people on the internet will virtue signal they’ll be like I want to get off I want to stop.

Doom scrolling I want to stop watching reals they don’t actually do that because even today you can delete the Instagram app you can delete the Twitter app and many of you actually end up deleting the apps but you always reinstall it it’s a drug and we are all very good at virtue signaling by saying

We want to get off this we don’t want to do this but our buying Behavior our screen time usage patterns all dictate that we are addicted to the drug of consuming content and that’s where 5 to 6 hours of your time goes per day the minute you bring out a device and you say we don’t have that a lot of people think they want that but then they stop using it after a while so it’s got a lot of hype the first Cycles might sell but after that people are going to go back to their phones and start consuming this content in micro drips like we always do by removing the main dop provider you have a device that’s far less useful.

Something you’ll use once in a while which is not good for the device manufacturer the second thing about money it’s much cheaper people say that’s true but almost everyone in the world today already has a smartphone it’s not like the market doesn’t have a replacement device that people already have so the switching factor to this new device becomes weak now they’re sold out but that’s because of early hype remember at some point the cheap.

Micromax phones from India were making a billion dollars in Revenue a year now they are making less than 10% of that finally Android and iOS are definitely going to have Lambs which is the large action models or something similar in fact right after rabbit’s announcement an open source version was spun up there is zero software differentiation in AI now you build something a decent team out there can build it next week and an open source team will build it next month and give it to free for everyone it’s just a matter of time at CES for example which is the Consumer.

Electronics Show lots of cars show showed how chat GPT is now in the car same thing will happen here if the large action models are good they will be in Android and iOS soon enough one thing I’ve learned the hard way is not to battle with the Giants they have too much money Superior research and marketing and that’s hard to compete with you need to find gaps they suck at as Peter theel says competition is for losers and rabbit ran just walked into an arena full of competition there is one pro though one reason they might win one thing I’ve noticed these days is that sales now now has become all about attention positive or negative PR doesn’t matter most people actually have $16,000 or $199 of disposable income.

If something has hype it’ll sell enough to make the team Rich it’s still really good-look as a collector’s product I’m also very confident the team will build most products most Hardware companies start with one thing and then eventually do another thing you gain experience with the first one and then the second thing comes out really well so I’m very bullish on the team if they can pull it off once they can pull it off multiple times I’m also very wary of looking at a young small team trying some new experiment and saying things like it’s not going to work.

Because I know how fragile early startups are and the more negative feedback you get the more you feel like quitting so I don’t want to be the person in the ecosystem who says this is not going to work the product they’re building today might not be a big leap over what currently exists but I’m very sure the second version of the third version will have enough differentiators lastly one thing is that the device looks gorgeous the rabbit R1 company partnered with teenage engineering which is a very very well-known consumer electronics designer from Sweden and I’ll make a full video on teenage engineering I think they deserve one the era of high quality interaction design in the world of Hardware is beginning welcome to that future.