Rabbit founder defends ‘rough’ release of AI assistant R1

Rabbit founder and CEO Jesse Lyu (pictured above) has strongly defended the startup from criticism after the launch of a new generation of AI devices.

The company, whose rabbit R1 product aims to be a handheld, AI-powered personal assistant, has faced scathing online reviews and criticism around bugs since its release at the start of the year.

Speaking at Collision conference in Toronto, Jesse accepted that the early release of the R1 had been “rough”. However, the founder spoke of the dawn of the automobile as evidence of the faith we should have in these new AI tools.

“When the first car was invented – the first Mercedes vehicle – it took 100-times more hustle to get the engine start up and running. And it ran way slower than a horse, and would not autopilot like a horse,” Jesse said. “But [does that mean] we should not build the car and we should still ride a horse now? No.”

Jesse admitted: “It’s been a rough early release. There’s no doubt about it. But as a startup, this is the best result we can get. And certainly that means that we’re not going to stop, we’re gonna keep improving the device faster and better.”

“We’re a small startup, we never had the mentality to think that a startup can beat Apple or Google or any of the well-established big companies out there. But we need to find our unique way to offer a unique product.”

Jesse also outlined the importance of human feedback on improving AI devices, saying that continued sales meant that the R1 was now starting to get consistent real-world responses. 

“I said multiple times, we were expecting to sell 3,000 units, and that was it. But we sold over 10,000 on the first day, actually the first half of the day. And now we’re selling more than 130 units [per day] worldwide,” he said. “The AI language model is a black box. It needs to be rolled out to the customer, and needs real human feedback.”

Jesse added that getting 130 examples of human feedback per day “is better than 10,000, or zero.“

Jesse also told the Toronto audience that the R1 had “new features that are bug fixes or improvements” and strongly “recommends people to try on the latest version”. 

Responding to the media’s approach to the R1, Jesse suggested that critics needed to have some perspective about what was possible for startups versus Big Tech. 

“I think the media perspective of the current AI technology is out there putting big company standards on startups – and assuming that you can compete over a project they dump over a billion dollars [into]” he said.

Instead, Jesse suggested that rabbit’s approach was to try and get the product out to market and use consumer responses to iterate and improve in real time.

“I’m really trying to push out this product early… I think that’s a very important message,” Jesse said. “You can’t think of the AI generation of software performing the same way as traditional software. You don’t find a dozen engineers just trying to look at the code for each line of the code and try to make it perfect.”

Jessie’s comments were made as part of a wider discussion on startups and consumer hardware at Collision, which is returning to Toronto for its sixth year. Global founders, CEOs, investors and members of the media have come to the city to make deals and experience North America’s thriving tech ecosystem.

More than 1,600 startups are taking part in Collision 2024 – the highest number of startups ever at a Collision event. 44 percent of these are women-founded, and startups have travelled to Toronto from countries including Nigeria, the Republic of Korea, Uruguay, Japan, Italy, Ghana, Pakistan and beyond.

In total, more than 37,800 attendees have gathered at the event, as well as 570 speakers and 1,003 members of the media, to explore business opportunities with an international audience.

739 investors are attending Collision, including Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures; Wesley Chan, co-founder and managing partner of FPV Ventures; and Nigel Morris, co-founder and managing partner of QED Investors, as well as nine companies on the Forbes Midas List, and 12 investors from those firms.

Top speakers at Collision include:

• Geoffrey Hinton, Godfather of AI
• Maria Sharapova, entrepreneur and tennis legend
• Aidan Gomez, founder and CEO of Cohere (an AI for enterprise and large language model company, which raised US$450 million at a US$5 billion valuation in June 2024)
• Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi (a Canadian autonomous trucking company)
• Jeff Shiner, CEO of 1Password (a cloud-based password management tool)
• Dali Rajic, president and COO of Wiz (a cloud security platform)
• Alex Israel, co-founder and CEO of Metropolis (an AI and computer vision platform)
• Jonathan Ross, founder and CEO of Groq (an AI chip startup)
• Keily Blair, CEO of OnlyFans
• Autumn Peltier, Indigenous rights activist

All of our summaries will be published on the Web Summit Summary Service page.

For any questions about this or any other Web Summit Summaries content, please contact us at media@websummit.com.

About Web Summit: 

Web Summit runs the world’s largest technology events, connecting people and ideas that change the world. Half a million people have attended Web Summit events – Web Summit in Europe, Web Summit Rio in South America, Collision in North America, Web Summit Qatar in the Middle East, and RISE in Asia – since the company’s beginnings as a 150-person conference in Dublin in 2009.

This year alone, Web Summit has hosted sold-out events in Qatar, which welcomed more than 15,000 attendees, and in Rio, where more than 34,000 people took part. Our events have been supported by partners including the Qatar Investment Authority, Snap, Deloitte, TikTok, Huawei, Microsoft, Shell, Palo Alto Networks, EY, Builder.ai and Qatar Airways. 

Web Summit’s mission is to enable the meaningful connections that change the world. Web Summit also undertakes a range of initiatives to support diversity, equality and inclusion across the tech worlds, including Impact, women in tech, Amplify, our scholarship program, and our community partnerships.

Useful links

• Collision website: https://collisionconf.com/ 
• Collision media kit: https://collisionconf.com/media/media-kit  
• Collision images: https://flickr.com/photos/collisionconf 
• About Web Summit: about.websummit.com