Generative AI Hardware Startup Rabbit Reaches $30M in Funding Round
Generative AI device startup Rabbit Inc. has raised an additional $10 million to a previous $20 million funding round to support the launch of its product powered by a proprietary large language model (LLM). The new funding was led by existing investor Khosla Ventures to accelerate the development of Rabbit’s Large Action Model (LAM) LLM and the ‘r1’ employing it.
Rabbit LAM
LAM is a generative AI model designed to understand and act on human intentions. Rabbit claims it goes beyond generating text the way chatbots like ChatGPT do. Instead, it can accomplish real-world tasks like booking tickets and ordering groceries without needing custom programming. rabbit will officially unveil r1 and its new generative AI operating system, rabbitOS, at a virtual launch event on January 9th, coinciding with CES 2024 in Las Vegas. rabbitOS uses LAM to eliminate the need to jump between different apps to accomplish tasks.
“The current app-based operating system has been around for many years, but the way we interact with it – downloading hundreds of apps, fumbling through multiple pages and folders to find the app you want to use, requiring developers to tailor all these apps to various operating systems – has always been disjointed and cumbersome. The Large Action Model is the missing piece that will bring about a vastly improved way for humans to interact with technology and get things done faster than ever before,” Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu explained in a statement. “We dedicated a significant amount of the initial research effort on learning app interfaces and how humans interact with them. That is how the Large Action Model (LAM) was born. Our operating system, rabbit OS, powered by LAM, understands your intentions, automatically conducts research, operates various computer apps through interfaces, compiles and presents information, and ultimately accomplishes tasks for you.”
The r1 device, a result of a collaboration with Swedish firm Teenage Engineering, stands out for its ability to interpret natural language requests and navigate various apps accordingly, thereby simplifying the user experience. Rabbit’s establishment was spearheaded by a group of experts, including former Kaggle Grandmasters, ex-Google engineers, and seasoned entrepreneurs. The startup’s CTO, Alexander Liao, brings a wealth of experience from his time as a machine learning researcher at Carnegie Mellon. As a two-time participant in the Y Combinator program, rabbit has established itself as a noteworthy player in the Los Angeles tech scene.
“LAM breaks the boundaries of existing app interfaces,” Liao said. “Our technologies have enabled us to intelligently analyze information and take actions across multiple isolated apps in response to a natural language request, a feat that is rarely possible in existing operating systems. By utilizing neuro-symbolic techniques in the loop, it sits at the forefront of interdisciplinary scientific research in language modeling, programming languages, and formal methods,” explained Liao.
Generative AI has largely centered around software and applications linked to existing hardware until now, but there is a growing movement toward dedicated devices. For instance, the new Human Pin is designed to absorb and process everything the wearer says to better train an LLM to assist them. Meanwhile, production company 1stAveMachine and AI developer SpecialGuestX created the 1stAI Machine to employ tools created by synthetic media startup Runway to video edit professional-looking films through generative AI creations.
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