busybee fluffy rambles

The tech world is abuzz with the announcement of the Rabbit R1, a little handheld AI assistant thing that has an interesting goal.

The tl;dr is that it’s a ChatGPT model that will run little AI agents (called “rabbits”) on your behalf to make complex API requests for you. I actually think it’s a pretty cool idea and one of the few things that I don’t hate about the modern AI push (ethics of ChatGPT aside, of course).

At $200 for the hardware it’s obvious that the LLM is running in the cloud somewhere, and it’s not like the other stuff wouldn’t also require cloud to operate anyway, though, and that raises the one big question I have about it: who foots the bill for the actual backend services? Because at $200 it’s probably being sold at-cost or for a small profit, and operating the necessary cloud services ain’t free.