Useful information
Prime News delivers timely, accurate news and insights on global events, politics, business, and technology
It’s funny that almost all of the third-party integrations the company released (DoorDash, Uber, Midjourney, and more) are being retired, so those features simply don’t work. (Not that they really worked before.) The scroll wheel is less janky and the interface improvements are welcome. For example, you can now hold down the push-to-talk button and scroll up or down to change the volume.
There have been a host of updates to the R1 throughout the year, but three stand out: Beta Rabbit, LAM Playground, and Teach Mode.
Beta Rabbit uses improved large language models for a more conversational experience when you ask R1 something. I didn’t find it as conversational as GPT-4o or Gemini Live. I asked him how we know anything about the early years of the universe and he began to read an excerpt. At one point, he mentioned “cosmic microwave background,” at which point I interrupted and asked how it is detected. R1 then went on a tirade of “Looking for a cosmic microwave background,” “Looking for this,” and “Looking for that.” After five of them, he finally started reading an answer about CMBs.
LAM Playground is an interesting feature accessible on the Rabbit web portal. These “big action models” run in a virtual browser that you can interact with, and their main purpose is to show how Rabbit will be able to execute tasks on your behalf. (You know, because it couldn’t do that at launch!) Enter a message and Rabbit’s bots will run it. For example, you can ask it to search for an item and add it to your Amazon cart, although you’ll need to log in to Amazon through this virtual browser, which seems like a huge privacy risk.
I asked him to Google “best office chair” and then take me to the retailer’s website. It took too long to do this and he wrote “reviews of the best office chairs 2023”. (Is the R1 on a different timeline?) But I still went to the first result (which is my own office chair guide, thank you very much) and it took me to the product page to Branch Pro Ergonomic Chairmy main recommendation.
While LAM Playground lets you see how this all works, Teaching Mode lets you put it into action. It’s still in beta (I’d say the R1 is also in beta). After a few tries, an error kept appearing that made the feature unusable. Finally, it worked on a different day. I created a lesson and then ran the steps within a virtual browser – the R1 records each click. Then when I told my R1 device to perform the action, it mimicked my actions.
