There’s No Rabbit In This Hat
Grifters gonna grift
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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…