Jesse Lyu of Rabbit Talks About the Essentials for Startups: ‘Grow Fast or Die Fast, But Don’t Give Up’
Rabbit co-founder and CEO Jesse Lyu isn’t afraid of death… the death of the company, at least. He told TechCrunch the company is a startup whose fortunes may be influenced by the caprices of multi-billion-dollar rivals — but that’s no justification to capitulate and abandon the venture.
Speaking at StrictlyVC LA, Lyu expounded his rather philosophical perspective on the risk of Google, Microsoft, or Apple planning to annihilate them. (Paraphrases have been minimally tweaked for clarity.)
Rabbit’s r1, the pocket AI assistant that garnered substantial buzz after its introduction at CES, indeed provides an inventive proposition. Being half the size of a phone, the device solely functions as a voice-controlled assistant, but it can remotely manipulate your applications, execute intricate tasks, and even respond to queries or hold a conversation similar to ChatGPT. He labeled the two segments as “intent” and “action.”
“I foresaw this concept numerous years ago, actually a decade ago, but the technology wasn’t matured yet. This is the first instance in history that a device like this is genuinely feasible,” uttered Lyu.
He discussed his fascination with Language Learning Models’ (LLMs) ability understand language and identify intentions. Noticing the versatility of transformer-based systems, he found it logical to utilize them to perform actions.
Can a striking design set rabbit’s r1 pocket AI apart from a gaggle of virtual assistants?
“Upon utilizing super-prompts to drive actions through these language models, the results were disappointing,” he remembered. “An existing example demonstrates an LLM being used to visit Mr. Beast’s latest YouTube video and leaving a comment. While it is something that a language model theoretically could do, it was time-consuming and required constant supervision. A single task took about two to three minutes to accomplish, a time frame that we believe can’t result in a satisfactory user experience.”
Their innovative solution is the ‘large action model,’ a model that is extensively trained through long hours of actual user interactions with popular apps such as Spotify, Uber, Expedia, DoorDash, and so on. They incorporated the top 800 most utilized apps into the training process. A neural symbolic network was set up, and they called upon the AI, now referred to as the large action model, to inspect these clips frame by frame. The vision is that the AI, given its symbolic significance, will ultimately become efficient enough to extract all buttons and elements, making it possible to construct a logic for automation.
The rabbit r1 in use. Hand model: Chris Velazco of the Washington Post.
The language operation continues to be handled by third party LLM services like Perplexity, leveraging the popularity of Rabbit. They offer a year free service in addition to what r1 brings. However, there are concerns around whether the API costs pose a potential risk to the startup’s financial stability.
“We are not running at a loss by selling r1, which is a huge achievement, particularly for a new startup like us on gen 1. Selling more units won’t put us into bankruptcy. All the applaud goes to my fantastic hardware team for negotiating and reducing the parts and BOM [bill of material] costs,” he remarked. “We’re nearly reaching 100,000 orders. Just two days prior to the keynote, I had hoped that we could sell 500 units on day one. Yet, we sold 18,000.”
Concerning a subscription model, Lyu does not see it as feasible when the tenet of their device is affordability and simplicity. He did hint at the possibility of allowing users to train and sell their app-specific models, with Rabbit taking a portion of the revenue. However, he warned that this is a long-term plan with no further details available yet.
Lastly, when confronted with the fact that the biggest, richest companies in the world are spending billions to get ahead in AI, Lyu provided an almost Zen perspective on the prospect of being crushed under the heel of Google, Microsoft, or Apple (whose CEO Tim Cook just said will “break new ground” on AI this year).
“I’m not delusional, to think that we’re not a startup. We are a startup,” he said. “I mean, the first lesson I ever learned from Y Combinator two years ago, is that 99% of startups will die. If your mentality as an entrepreneur is, ‘Oh, I have a genius idea, and I can guarantee this will work, no matter what all these big tech companies try…’ I mean, you’re delusional. There is no such thing like that. The reality is a startup is a survival game, and you better spend your time focusing on your own stuff.”
“They’re gonna do what they’re gonna do, and I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do, right? There’s gotta be some founders, when they heard Apple is doing Apple Cars, they stopped, right? They just canceled. Now what? I think it’s good to have this level of competition that’s only going to help us grow faster, or die faster, which is the nature of startups. It’s either or — I don’t know yet. But I’m trying my best — like I said, it’s a survival game.”
You can watch the full panel below.
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