No, you don't need a 'very bespoke AOSP' to turn your phone into a Rabbit R1 — here's proof
No, you don't need a 'very bespoke AOSP' to turn your phone into a Rabbit R1 — here's proof
Rabbit recently said their AI service can only be accessed on the R1 with its “very bespoke AOSP” firmware, but that isn’t true.
- Rabbit R1, AI gadget, runs on Android app, not requiring "very bespoke AOSP" firmware as claimed by Rabbit.
- Rabbit R1 launcher app can run on existing Android phones, not needing system-level permissions for core functionality.
- Rabbit R1 firmware analysis shows minimal modifications to standard AOSP, contradicting claims of custom hardware necessity by Rabbit.
This is one of those shitty products that you can see being shitty from a mile away, yet all the coverage and discussion around it gives it a life it otherwise wouldn't have had.
It’s probably only because it’s co-designed by Teenage Engineering. Usually their devices get quite the fuzz.
They have so much quality audio equipment, it's understandable why people would stump for this because of the Teenage Engineering (TE) involvement alone.
Funnily enough, despite being a TE enthusiast, this is my first time hearing that they had anything to do with this joke of a product.
...which kind of does make me sort look at TE like... wtf were you thinking? ...and sort of definitely makes me question future endeavors from TE. Because this thing is a fucking joke.
Which is exactly like the "camera collabs" that phone makers sometimes do that end up being nothing more than marketing gimmicks.
Like the OnePlus camera "by Hasselblad" that is quality wise the same as any other smartphone camera in that price category.
Hopes were set unreasonably high because the hardware designer has a great reputation. And the hardware seems well made (for the price) and certainly tries out some interesting new ideas. I love how the camera is physically blocked while not in use for example.
The software team has let this product down. Not surprising, but dissapointing.
The hardware team made a device that just couldn't be turned into a good product no matter what the software team did. None of those AI-in-a-box devices are good products because they simply don't have a reason to exist. Everything they can do, phones can do. If you have a phone, you don't need one of those AI boxes, however if you buy one of those AI assistant things, you'll still need a phone (which, again, can completely replace the AI box with no loss in functionality).
Some phones and PDAs from decades ago had a "jog dial" on the side, like a mouse scroll wheel.
It was so easy to roll through menus and just push it to click.
The separate roller and button arrangement this has seems such a poor choice in comparison.
if you'd give me 17€ minimum to use it, I'd for sure be using it.
Technically, every Android phone uses a "very bespoke AOSP", because the Android kernel is customized for the hardware of every single phone model, which can include things like hardware drivers and carrier services.
This is the reason that there is no universal Android ROM that works across every Android phone, unlike Windows or normal GNU/Linux distributions.
What about custom ROMs like Lineage? The only thing holding it back from working on every phone is that many phones have blocks to prevent installing a custom ROM in the first place. Could be just like windows in that it has every driver for every piece of hardware in the package, just bloating it unnecessarily.
The manufacturer has to release the phone's kernel source code before any custom ROM development can happen for the phone most of the time for that reason.
There is a reason that GrapheneOS only works on a couple of Pixel phones.
Could be just like windows in that it has every driver for every piece of hardware in the package, just bloating it unnecessarily.
Google specifically designed the Android kernel so that the driver are excluded, unlike the normal Linux or Windows kernel, because, long story short, Qualcomm did not want it to happen.
I've no skin in the game related to this device or software. I simply don't care. However, in terms of an AI assistant, I am curious if there is anything on the market, including this APK device, that is worth using. For someone who is privacy centric, advert avoidant, and security focused... does (or even can) such an app/tool exist?
You won't like anything on offer currently except for that which is entirely self hosted.
What db2 already said. Microsoft just released Phi-3 mini, which could, allegedly, run locally on newer smartphones.
If I understood correctly, the Rabbit thingy just captures your information locally and then forwards it to their server. So, if you want more power, you could probably do the same by submitting the same info to a bigger open source model than Phi-3, like Llama 3, hosted on your homelab. I believe you can set it up with huggingface/gradio, which sort of provides an API that you could use.
That way, you don't need a shitty orange box, and can always get the latest open source models with a few lines of code. There are plenty of open source frameworks in the works at the moment, and I believe that we're not far off from having multi-modal LLMs running on homelab-level hardware (if you don't mind a bit of lag).
huggingface! i found it once and never could remember again who hosted all those models. thank you!
i use a different device than homelab, but now I am curious what I may be able to achieve with my syno system. it's hw weak, so probably not a lot. but i would like to give it a go. if it's decent, i may consider another device for the purpose.
ChatGPT 4 is a great assistant, I find it indispensable... I use it on my phone and computer but would like it in a dedicated device.
Privacy? Yeah it's not great, but that's mitigated by OpenAI focusing the product hard on areas that don't really need privacy.
I do think these tools can be private - but to get there we need more RAM on our computers and phones, and it needs to be expensive high bandwidth RAM, which costs a fortune right now. A lot of research is being done to reduce memory requirements and more manufacturing capacity for memory is being ramped up.
Last I checked (around the time that LLAMA v3 was released), the performance of local models on CPU also was pretty bad for most consumer hardware (Apple Silicon excepted) compared to GPU performance, and the consumer GPU RAM situation is even worse. At least, when talking about the models that have performance anywhere near that of ChatGPT, which was mostly 70B models with a few exceptional 30B models.
My home server has a 3090, so I can use a self-hosted 4-bit (or 5-bit with reduced context) quantized 30B model. If I added another 3090 I’d be able to use a 4-bit quantized 70B model.
There’s some research that suggests that 1.58 bit (ternary) quantization has a lot of potential, and I think it’ll be critical to getting performant models on phones and laptops. At 1.58 bit per parameter, a 30B model could fit into 6 gigs of RAM, and the quality hit is allegedly negligible.
So you are using OpenAI's app? Do you have it integrated into your phone? What are the main features that you use (beyond asking questions like one does from their app/site)?
No, you don't need a 'very bespoke AOSP' to turn your phone into a Rabbit R1
I just fucking need to get the APK from a goddman reliable source and I only know APKMirror
The article says that you need a custom launcher to establish a connection to their cloud service, so the apk only won't do it either way. But give it a few days and someone will have rigged up a full package, no doubt. Then you've probably got 6-8 weeks to use the service before they kick the bucket and shut down forever...
The APK is called "R1 Launcher"...
They've already proved it works from an Android phone.
I don't really care for this product. It's another unnecessary AI assistant. What I'm struggling to understand is why it matters which platform it's been built on. What difference would it make if they wrote an entire OS from scratch only for this device instead of using Android, if the end product would be the same?
Because the main criticism of this class of products is "why in the fuck would I need a device for this? my phone already has a data plan, a microphone, and a camera. Make it an app" and the response is some vague "oh well it's so advanced (it's not.) it couldn't possibly run on a phone".
The vision is that once TPUs become affordable enough to run these models on-device, you would need a device that has such a TPU and you would go to them. But this is completely overlooking the fact that all snapdragons and the like would also have the same TPUs integrated, and also we're not there yet, so for as long as you need to send the query to openAI's API, why is this not an app?
It just drives the point home that it should have, and could have been an app on your phone. If they hadn't sold this as some sort of revolutionary new product and instead were honest to themselves and us about what it was this would be a different story.
Just like all tech bs it's just a bunch of lies to make initial sales that they never follow through with.
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If the product was as they marketed and sold it, it shouldn't be able to run on Android.
Clearly they lied to their customers, I'd be pissed.
Not sure what the surprise is. It is a device that needs you to sign into an account and have an internet connection. Ie it is just a dumb terminal. Kind of like how Alexa speakers are useless without an internet connection. All the processing is done on servers.
Even if it was not an android app, you probably could have made a clone of it since you are basically interacting with a web api.
In their defence the device has the advantage of giving you instant access to their ai through the touch of a button whilst on phones you would need to physically open the app as the "assistant" functionality is already reserved to Siri, Bixby, etc.EDIT: I wasn't aware you can change assistants.Personally I like the concept if the processing was done within the device, but considering you need monster machines to run llms I guess we are least decades away from that reality.
Well you can change your 'assistant' in Android so not even that.
Ah wasn't aware of the ability to change assistants. I stand corrected!
Another day, another scam, nothing new.