Revisiting the 3 biggest flops of 2024: Apple Vision Pro, Rabbit R1, and Humane Ai Pin

Ironically, almost all of the third-party integrations the company launched — like DoorDash, Uber, Midjourney, and more — have been shut down, so these functions don’t work. (Not that it actually worked before.) The scroll wheel is less annoying, and the interface improvements are welcome. For example, you can now press and hold the push to talk button and swipe up or down to change the volume.

There have been a series of updates to R1 over the course of the year, but three stand out: Beta Rabbit, LAM Playground, and Teach Mode.

Beta Rabbit uses optimized macro language models for a more conversational experience when you ask R1 anything. I didn’t find it all like a conversation GPT-4o Or Gemini Live. I asked him how we know anything about the early years of the universe, and he began reading an excerpt from it. At one point, she mentioned “cosmic microwave background” at which point I interrupted her and asked how that was discovered. R1 then began a series of “search for the cosmic microwave background,” “search for this,” and “search for that.” After five of them, I finally started reading an answer about CMBs.

The LAM Playground is an interesting feature that can be accessed through Rabbit’s web portal. These “large action models” run on a virtual browser that you can interact with, and are largely intended to showcase how Rabbit will be able to perform tasks for you. (You know, because he couldn’t do that at launch!) Enter a prompt and the Rabbit bots will execute it. For example, you can ask it to find an item and add it to your Amazon shopping cart, though you’ll need to log into Amazon via that default browser, which seems like a huge privacy risk.

I asked him to Google “best office chair” and then he took me to the retailer’s web page. It took a very long time to do this, and the “Best Office Chair Reviews of 2023” was written. (Is R1 in a different timeline?) But it still goes to the first result (which is my own result Office chair guidethank you very much), and it took me to the product page Comfortable chair for Branch ProMy highest recommendation.

Where LAM Playground lets you see how it all works, Teach Mode lets you put it into practice. It’s still in beta (I’d say R1 is still in beta too). After several attempts, I kept getting an error message that made the feature unusable. Finally, I worked on a different day. I created a lesson, then ran the steps inside a virtual browser — with R1 recording every click. Then, when I asked my R1 to perform the action, it mimicked my actions.