RabbitR1, which claims to destroy all APPs, has sold 50,000 units in just 5 days! What concept? Priced at $199 each, the RabbitR1 has already made a lot of money - $10 million. The reason why it is so popular is its retro design and simple operation.


For example, in the actual test operation of CEO Jesse Lyu, he only needed to say "PlayFeelGoodInc" to it, and the song would play:


Another example is to hold it up to the Discord forum on the screen and ask "What are everyone discussing?" RabbitR1 can summarize what it "sees":


But at the same time, netizens who have now gotten the real phone have shown a completely different side from what Lu Cheng showed.

This netizen asked RabbitR1 to "look" at the menu and ask questions:

What's the best way to eat them?


After receiving the question, RabbitR1 first said "Let me see", and then...

For nearly 20 seconds, many netizens held up their machines and stood still waiting...

This netizen even said:

Imagine you are in a noisy environment and it doesn't fully understand you for the first time (or you just said it wrong), and it takes a minute to correct the mistake.


As soon as the actual test video of the real machine came out, the already popular RabbitR1 instantly attracted more discussions and controversy among netizens.

One of the controversial points is the problem of too slow machine response time. Some people attribute this to the processing speed of LLM itself; others think this is a common problem of all AI terminals.

But this triggered a bigger problem behind the explosion of RabbitR1——

Why is this kind of AI hardware so popular? Is it suitable for the present and the future?



So much so that some people directly posted a video like this, thinking that it would be enough for RabbitR1 to be an APP:


Faced with these many questions, we found that Lu Cheng gave his own explanation in an in-depth interview.

Why not an APP?

Lu Cheng believes that Rabbit can indeed be a software product, but from his perspective, there is a company behind it.

If Rabbit was just an APP,This means that Apple has access to its code, which is tantamount to sharing the company's intellectual property.

Secondly, they had to develop and maintain the APP for iOS and Android at the same time, which required a lot of continuous capital investment.

The most important thing is that, like other apps, Rabbit will be placed on the same platform, which brings a sense of uneasiness to Lu Cheng:

What if a better app comes out tomorrow? User loyalty is almost zero!

The reason why there are many concerns has something to do with the new operating system-RabbitOS installed on RabbitR1.


The underlying AI technology used by RabbitOS is not a ChatGPT-like large language model technology, but is based on the "Large Action Model (LAM)".

Large-scale action models place more emphasis on "behavior." Although from actual demonstrations, the functions that large-scale action models and large language models can achieve appear to be similar, RabbitOS equipped with this technology can understand people's complex intentions after hearing instructions issued by human natural language, and autonomously operate APPs to complete tasks.

Lu Cheng likened the importance of this technology to multi-touch technology, so much so that they wanted to build specialized hardware devices to run it as a protection for this technology and to reduce risks.

In addition, Lu Cheng added that the key processing of RabbitR1 is in the cloud, and user data is more secure than on most low-volume hardware. Another benefit is that it can reduce hardware costs, so each device can save some profits to pay for AI processing. For example, Rabbit purchases and pays ChatGPT services for users.

After some explanation, Lu Cheng introduced the truly scalable business behind RabbitR1:

People teach Rabbit to do their own things, essentially creating Rabbits rather than using apps, and when users sell their own Rabbits, RabbitOS will take a cut.

But for users, it still seems that there is still no good explanation of what the significance of RabbitR1 is now and in the future?

In other words, it is also another core issue that netizens are concerned about: "Whether it will be a flash in the pan."


Let’s extend the timeline a little further and start with the products Lu Cheng has created in the past.

Also “released” cool AI hardware

Lu Cheng is a Chinese serial entrepreneur in the field of AI. He graduated from Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and founded RavenTech.

In 2017, Baidu fully acquired Raven, and Lu Cheng served as Baidu's general manager of smart home hardware. In the same year, he led the team to release RavenH, Baidu's first smart speaker.


Later, when it was revealed at CES in 2018, the Wall Street Journal directly named this speaker the best product of the year.

However, even though it was successful for a while, judging from the results, the consumer market did not pay for it.

After one year at Baidu, Lu Cheng chose to leave Baidu and founded CyberManufacture Co., an AI-centered company in the United States, which is the predecessor of today's Rabbit.


Lu Cheng has a hobby - collecting vintage synthesizers, which brought him into contact with Jesper Kouthoofd, the founder of Swedish audio hardware company Teenage Engineering.

Teenage Engineering specializes in the design and manufacturing of electronic equipment and related products. The small handheld game console Playdate was jointly launched by it and the software development company Panic.


However, judging from the current sales results, they are also relatively average.


Later, when it came to RabbitR1, Lu Cheng also chose to cooperate with Teenage Engineering for design.

As for his initial thoughts on this product, Lu Cheng said in his own words:

Although mobile phones are a "necessity" in life, since I subscribed to the iPhone upgrade service every year, I feel more and more that the emotional connection with the iPhone is constantly being erased.

in other words,He has gradually lost interest in mobile phones.

After some discussions with the Teenage Engineering team, the two parties hit it off immediately, and the concept and design of RabbitR1 gradually became clear - to create a gadget that combines AI and retro.

Lu Cheng also compared the device with the Pokédex, a fictional electronic device in "Pokémon". Rabbit is equivalent to a Pokémon pet.

(Pokédex is an electronic illustrated book used to record information about various Pokémon encountered and captured by players)

Now obviously many netizens have realized this:


However, we can also see some similarities from the popular AI hardware created by Lu Cheng.

For example, RabbitR1, like RavenH, was unveiled at CES and became popular.

As for how long the popularity and sales of RabbitR1 can last, time will tell.