Santa Monica-based AI startup Rabbit Inc. is offering a virtual assistant in the form of a pocket device that the company says can improve upon mobile phones by learning to use your apps and running them for you. Heavily publicized at CES 2024 in Las Vegas this week, the initial run of the company’s r-1 units had as of Tuesday sold out at $199 each. The retro-looking device with a 2.88-inch touchscreen is continuing to take preorders; shipments are scheduled to begin in late March. The company says its proprietary Rabbit OS is the first operating system built on a Large Action Model (LAM) foundation. LAMs are LLMs trained on datasets of actions and consequences.

The r1 “works as a sort of universal controller for apps,” The Verge reports. Rabbit developed r1 to offer users “an app-free online experience” in which the device — which features a push-to-talk button, 360-degree rotational eye and analog scroll wheel — “navigates all of your apps … so you don’t have to.”

The LAM “can infer and model human actions on computer interfaces by learning users’ intention and behavior when they use specific apps, and then mimic and perform them both reliably and quickly,” Rabbit explained in an introductory announcement.

“The company is hoping you’ll carry a second device around to save yourself the trouble of opening your phone — and has gone to extraordinary technical lengths to make it work,” TechCrunch writes, explaining that “instead of pulling out your phone, unlocking it, finding the app, opening it and working your way through the UI (so laborious!), you pull out the r1 instead and give it a command in natural language: ‘Call an Uber XL to take us to the Museum of Modern Art. Give me a list of five cheap restaurants within a 10-minute walk of there.’”

“You don’t interact with the r1 by opening apps; instead, you press a physical push-to-talk button to ask a question or play a song on Spotify as if you were speaking into a walkie-talkie,” reports CNET, adding that Rabbit CEO and founder Jesse Lyu “likens it to handing your phone to a friend to order takeout rather than doing so yourself.”

“The phone is an entertainment device, but if you’re trying to get something done it’s not the highest efficiency machine,” Lyu says in TechCrunch, pointing out that “to arrange dinner with a colleague we needed four-five different apps to work together.” Large language models, he says, offer a universal means for devices to understand requests.

The Verge notes those who preordered before January 9 can expect delivery in March, while those ordering after that official launch date should receive the item “between April and May 2024.”