This is why we can't have nice things
Some time ago I was talking about how the rabbit r1 sounds more reliable then the AI Pin (see the review from MKBHD for more information about it). Not that I was excited about a tool/gadget who does nothing at all (let's be honest)m but, at least, I thought it was a better product.
Well, not so far. The reality is way worse than AI Pin itself. Today I was reading my emails and a link from HackerNews spammed on my screen, It was about the rabbit r1 LAM SO and the source code of it. Ok, nothing new, I guess, on the front. It's just a startup trying to survive on the capitalism and leading the VC and customers to buy something we don't need (we as society). It was bad but it was not new.
What it's new so? The way they are doing it. Take a deep breath, take a sip on your juicero-made juice and read about it:
rabbit.tech has been making waves with its highly publicized release of the Rabbit R1 device, claiming it can perform tasks on your behalf and liberate you from app-based interactions. But let's call a spade a spade – this is a blatant lie. And we're about to expose it with the first partial release of the source code for its so-called "large action model". For those with a technical background, it's painfully clear that there's no artificial intelligence or large action model in sight. In reality, they're simply relying on several Playwright automation scripts to do the job for you, which is why they only support four apps: Spotify, Midjourney, Doordash, and UberEats. What's even more alarming is that they ask you to login through their web portal, which is just a virtual machine connected via NoVNC. They also expect you to fill in your private passwords on their VMs. To make matters worse, they store the user sessions on their machines without any additional layers of security. This is both a blatant disregard for user privacy and a hilariously bad engineering practice. Sadly, this shouldn't come as a shock to anyone who's done minimal due diligence on the team. After all, they were still hawking NFTs just two years ago. Spread the word and stay vigilant.
I know.