While announcing a reportedly $6.5 billion team-up on AI hardware between his startup, io, and OpenAI, Jony Ive spoke to Bloomberg and commented on last year’s attempts at making AI hardware happen, the Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin:
There have been public failures as well, such as the Humane AI Pin and the Rabbit R1 personal assistant device. “Those were very poor products,” said Ive, 58. “There has been an absence of new ways of thinking expressed in products.”
Our initial reviews certainly backed up Ive’s impression, as David Pierce said the Pin “doesn’t work,” and called the R1 “a worse and less functional version of your smartphone.”
Humane, which, like io, was lead by former Apple employees, has already disappeared into the mist of an acquihire by HP and shut down all AI Pins in February.
The Rabbit R1 is still going, even if its “large action model” hype and momentum appear to have dissipated. Earlier this month, the company added a memory log that can help its AI assistant have context for interactions. It’s also offering a free a free trial of Intern, its “upgraded AI-native operating system that coordinates multiple agents to get things done,” even if you don’t own an R1, as it continues to work on rabbitOS 2.0.
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