It will. I don't know which VC did the due diligence but the CEO once founded a scam company called RavenTech and the CTO just dropped out of CMU.
They used to be called CyberManufacture Co. and was selling NFTs. You see where this is going?
i don't think apple or google are well-positioned to build this revolution, because they are too conservative and too bought-in on the old interaction model.
(if jobs were still around, different story. alas.)
they already have a habit of replicating the most useful apps natively
i don’t see why not here
replace siri once and for all, while running a local llm server for apps to tie into instead of an api to chatgpt
By my reckoning, this approach is probably ten years ahead of its time. I simply cannot imagine that the tech is there right now to make this nearly as seamless as it will need to be to actually supplant the UI paradigms we have today, and it's going to take billions invested by the duopoly to get to that point.
But I really do think this is at least a fuzzy picture of where we're headed. Your iPhone in 2034 won't look like this, but you'll likely be able to trace some things back to it. There are a lot of pieces missing that we barely even know are missing yet, but it's incredibly exciting to see a startup try to jumpstart a step change like this.
Apple and Google presumably know about LLMs so I don’t really see this device being very influential.
I could imagine replacing my iPhone and my laptop with something Rabbit sized and a lightweight set of AR glasses.
But they need far more than the toy “OS” that Rabbit are demonstrating.
Perhaps at some point technology will allow glasses to have screens that are functional without making you look like, as they called them ten years ago, a Glasshole. Ten years may be enough time.
Anything that even threatens those business models will be strangled before it gets released.
IMHO Microsoft has the most to gain here. If they manage to turn Apple and Android into platforms that interface with MS made/ran/hosted LLMs, MS wins the day.
The problem is monetization, these LLM services are expensive, and telling users they need to pay another $30 a month to use their phone will be a hard sell. Hopefully LLM hosting costs go down, but if hosting LLMs becomes too affordable, MS's giant war chest of $ and hardware become less of an advantage.
The other danger is Apple/Google throwing a bunch of restrictions in place, but all the anti-trust scrutiny they are under right now could give them pause on attempting that.
Both of those companies had it handed to them, like, literally got completely smoked by OpenAI, a company with a thousand employees +/- in San Francisco. The giants are incredibly vulnerable, just like the giants that Google and Apple disrupted such as IBM, Yahoo, AOL, etc.
1. OpenAI is building in a brand new space. Mobile phones are well established. LLMs as a product for consumers are brand new. While it’s true Rabbit are trying to merge LLMs with mobile, the elephant in the room is the mobile incumbency. The existing players just have to add LLMs to their existing dominant platforms and Rabbit is done for. OpenAI, on the other hand, was unopposed launching ChatGPT. They had a genuine technical edge and consumers were hungry for it. Is everyone hungry for Rabbit’s concept? Give me a break.
2. OpenAI raised an order of magnitude more capital. Rabbit’s $30M isn’t going to get them much farther than a prototype device. My impression is the founder here managed to convince some VCs to give him money during the boom times and leveraged the generative AI hype train more recently. But where is he getting his next round? The one that he will need to actually make phones at scale. That will cost billions ultimately, and the incumbents own the supply chain he needs to access. His effort is all but doomed.
3. OpenAI’s formula was easier for a startup to master. All they needed was money for the best AI engineers and scientists and money for GPUs, and they could create a blockbuster product. Rabbit needs the top engineers as well as extensive capital for manufacturing and distribution. There is a reason that hardware favors massive scale and a reason why hardware startups tend to focus on pinpoint innovations. The energy barrier is extreme.
These are three reasons why Rabbit is in an entirely different situation than OpenAI was circa 2022.
I worked with one of the (many) teams at Microsoft who worked on Cortana.
The way the team leader explained it to me is that Cortana could do a lot more, but internal corporate politics prevented it. Rather than implementing the best solutions to user's problems, they had to do things like ensure Bing search handled certain results, to make sure that team stayed happy.
Or to take it to the extreme, if someone at Google came up with a device that directly beamed 100% correct search results into your brain, Google would never release the product because of the loss of search ad revenue.
Even if Google builds something like this, gets market share and sells at a profit, it might still be a net loss for them because of all the advertising money and click tracking data they won't be getting.
Google definitely has the expertise to build this, but they also have an extremely risk-averse attitude resulting in layers upon layers of bureaucracy, and this product is literally cannibalizing their most important markets. I can't see this going over very well at all the internal reviews.
Apple was a lot leaner than Google when they build the iPhone (which was also cannibalizing one of their main products, the iPod), but they still had to make a completely independent team with no oversight except for Steve Jobs to get it right.
We also know how bad Google is at hardware. They seem to have gotten marginally better in recent years, but Pixels are still far from successful, even in countries where they are sold, which honestly isn't that many in the first place.
I'm very bearish on Google in this fight. Apple probably stands a much better chance, they've already proven they can cannibalize their own products, they need to do far less of that in the first place, as most of their revenue comes from hardware sales and subscriptions (which is perfect for something like this), they do have a lot of hardware expertise and they've already made major steps towards AR glasses, which might end up as a better form factor for such a device than a phone. Their pro-privacy attitude might be an impediment, this stuff works a lot better if you run it on a beefy GPU in the cloud instead of a tiny, battery-conserving chip in your phone, but I hope they find a good enough compromise.
You've got absolutely insane market saturation by two major players that have some of the most advanced AI teams on the planet.
Almost nobody is going to buy an "LLM-first phone," they will just wait for Apple or Google to put an LLM into their existing phone.