Revisiting the 3 Biggest Hardware Flops of 2024
Hilariously, almost all the third-party integrations the company launched—DoorDash, Uber, Midjourney, and more—are being retired, so those functions just don’t work. (Not that they really worked before.) The scroll wheel is less janky, and the interface improvements are welcome. For example, you can now press and hold the push-to-talk button and scroll up or down to change the volume.
There has been a litany of updates to the R1 over the year, but three stand out: Beta Rabbit, LAM Playground, and Teach Mode.
Beta Rabbit uses enhanced large language models for a more conversational experience when you ask the R1 anything. I didn’t find it all that conversational like GPT-4o or Gemini Live. I asked it how we know anything about the early years of the universe, and it started reading an excerpt. At one point, it mentioned “cosmic microwave background” at which point I interrupted it and asked how that is detected. The R1 then began a tirade of, “Searching for cosmic microwave background,” “Searching for this,” and “Searching for that.” After five of these, it finally started reading out an answer about CMBs.
LAM Playground is an interesting feature accessible on Rabbit’s web portal. These “large action models” run on a virtual browser you can interact with, and it’s largely meant to showcase how Rabbit will be able to execute tasks on your behalf. (You know, because it couldn’t do that at launch!) Enter a prompt and Rabbit’s bots will execute it. For example, you can ask it to find an item and add it to your Amazon cart, though you will need to log into Amazon via this virtual browser, which seems like a massive privacy risk.
I asked it to search Google for the “best office chair” and then to take me to the retailer’s webpage. It took way too long to do this, and it typed “best office chair reviews 2023.” (Is the R1 in a different timeline?) But it still went to the first result (which is my very own office chair guide, thank you very much), and it took me to the product page for Branch’s Ergonomic Chair Pro, my top recommendation.
Where LAM Playground lets you see how all of this works, Teach Mode lets you put it into action. It’s still in beta (I’d argue the R1 is still in beta too). After a few attempts, I kept getting an error that rendered the feature unusable. Finally, it worked on a different day. I created a lesson, and then executed the steps within a virtual browser—the R1 logs every click. Then, when I told my R1 device to perform the action, it mimicked my actions.
