Quick Rundown of the Rabbit R1 | TechCrunch

So what's rabbit steel the startup has Put out this R1 which is a little phone adjacent Device that acts as a standalone AI Assistant but with no subscription fee How are they going to make money rabbit Secret Sauce is what they call a large Action model or lamb unlike large Language models which are trained on Millions of books and articles the lamb Is trained on images and videos of People using apps so it basically learns How to press buttons the way the people Do and it does that not by using an API But by pretending to be you actually Using the app here here's the thing Running any AI model at scale is not Cheap and rabbit doesn't even have its Own language model so it told me that It's using open AI anthropic and Perplexity apis in order to understand What the user is asking for that's not Cheap either so how do they make money I Asked rabbit and they gave me two Answers first the CTO said they make Enough money off of the hardware to Cover their API costs for now ominous Second they've talked up the ability for Users to train up their own little AIS Which they call rabbits On apps that aren't already in the System but what they didn't mention at First is that there will be options to Charge for these little rabbits I think

They're just hoping that this blows up And then they can just collect rent like Apple does with the App Store so there Does appear to be a business model and They're not just looking to get acquired Will the R1 be free to use forever they Wouldn't commit directly when I asked Them but probably that said you can bet You'll be able to pay for extra stuff Like faster models or custom voices We'll know for sure whether it's worth It when we get our hands on one in the Next couple of weeks