David Pierce for The Verge: Rabbit R1 Hands-On: Early Tests With the $199 AI Gadget

Almost immediately, though, I started running into stuff the R1 just can’t do. It can’t send emails or make spreadsheets, though Lyu has been demoing both for months.

And:

Rabbit’s roadmap is ambitious: Lyu has spent the last few months talking about all the things the R1’s so-called “Large Action Model” can do, including learning apps and using them for you. During last night’s event, he talked about opening up the USB-C port on the device to allow accessories, keyboards, and more. That’s all coming… eventually. Supposedly.

A challenge these A.I. tools have is that we’re coming down from the novelty high we had at the launch of ChatGPT a year and a half ago and now they need to deliver on actual use cases that make people’s lives better. As someone who uses Claude almost everyday, I think there’s clearly something there, but the big promises from these companies feel like they’re constantly falling short of those promises. We can’t constantly be “6 months away” from these finally achieving the exponential capabilities they supposedly have.