rabbit
6 HN mentions · mentioned in 5 months, 2024–2025
25:30 · 5.4M views · Jan 9, 2024
The keynote launch video for the Rabbit r1 handheld AI device, presenting its assistant and a teachable mode for agents. It is a product announcement with live-style demos.
HN mostly cites it as an example of a misleading or faked product demo, with a few pointing to its teachable-mode segment.
6 comments from Hacker News
If you pre-record your live demo then it isn't a live demo... What I dislike is presenting something as if it is live when it isn't. Demos are fantastic things and it is even perfectly fine to have imaginative aspects to them. But there's a division line between demoing and lying. Take Rabbit R1 as an example[0]. This whole thing was faked yet it was presented as a live demonstration, not an illustration. In other words, fraud. The difference is if you're trying to show your customers (or potential customers) what you're imagining the device works like vs what the device actually works like. The difference is how you're communicating the difference to them. I'm not sure why this is a contentious opinion, but just don't lie to people? [0] this video
I think the interesting bit here is actually the teachable mode (19:30 in the vid): this video there are tools that exist that teach agents what to do, but the ability to have them on command and return a nice little summary in a neat UI is actually kind of compelling. It also feeds the company routine information to fine tune agents and maybe results in a dev ecosystem of some kind? need to learn more about how the system prevents some of the concerns hear like taking undesirable actions on your behalf
Fun tidbit: There's a point in the tech demo where he asks the rabbit device to "filter job candidates to ones that are LA-based" When the r1 address replies to him, it attaches a new spreadsheet, and he opens it on-stage. But the spreadsheet it sent, that they then show on screen, has not filtered any candidates to LA-only. (The column next to their names shows labels on screen like "NYC", "Austin", "Miami", "Seattle", etc) this video (exact timestamp)
Maybe you should watch their announcement video again: this video Or the interview of the CEO, Jesse Lyu aboutn the LAM: [LINK] If you're still sure that the LAM is present in their product, that's fine, but my view (and I understand how plugins, LLM, AI and other related things work) ist thre are no LAM in the rabbit r1.
Their "keynote" just screams shenanigans. It's the most blatantly fake product demo I have ever seen. To take one example, at 14m30s, the CEO is shown using the device to book a trip to London. This is presented as a live demo, but it's clearly simulated. this video