The launch of the Rabbit R1 at CES left a lot of questions unanswered, but earlier today the brand finally shed some light on how the LLM (large-tongue model) device will enhance interactions with us mere mortals. The AI provider in question is none other than San Francisco-based Perplexity, which has ambitions to overtake Google in AI, so it’s no surprise that it’s already received investments from the likes of NVIDIA and Jeff Bezos.
Perplexity will deliver state-of-the-art search results through Rabbit’s $199 orange brick, with no subscription required. However, the first 100,000 R1 buyers will receive a year’s subscription to Perplexity Pro – normally priced at $200 – for free. This advanced service adds file upload support, a daily quota of over 300 complex requests, and the ability to switch to other AI models (GPT-4, Claude 2.1 or Gemini), although these do not necessarily apply to R1’s use case.
If you are interested:
Today we announced that we will be using Perplexity as one of our core LLM services for r1 – and r1 still requires no subscription to take advantage of this partnership.
The $200 credit for Perplexity Pro is an independent bonus offered by Please… https://t.co/qYMM7TKFyZ
— rabbit inc. (@rabbit_hmi) January 19, 2024
Designed by Teenage Engineering, the Rabbit R1 features a 2.88-inch touchscreen, a scroll wheel, two microphones, a speaker, a rotating camera, and a Push-to-Talk button. Using a Large Activity Model (LAM), this particular gadget can perform tasks such as booking trips, finding recipes based on ingredients you have, identifying people and objects (including items in your fridge, for example) or simply fact-checking. we now know it will rely on Perplexity’s real-time search engine. The R1 is available for pre-order before shipping in March or April.