Rabbit Is Back, This Time With an AI Agent App
Two years after trying to sidestep mobile apps with dedicated AI hardware, Rabbit is launching OS3, a cross-platform agent that lives on the screens you already use.
Jesse Lyu doesn't think the Rabbit R1 was a flop.
Lyu's gadget was among the first in the gold rush to create dedicated AI hardware that acted as a virtual assistant. You could speak into the R1 and ask it to complete tasks for you—book an Uber; order food on DoorDash. After a buzzy launch at CES 2024, it earned scathing reviews. All the agentic stuff on the R1 just didn't work that well. WIRED gave it a 3/10 .
Since those early days, the capabilities of AI assistants have vastly improved, and now the tech is all the rage. So Rabbit is banging the drum again.
On Tuesday, Rabbit announced OS3, a standalone “agentic operating system” designed to run across multiple screens. It also arrives as a software update for the company's R1 gadget, though you don't need an R1 to use it. Instead, you can access OS3 through a desktop browser, Telegram on your phone, or even iMessage.
It’s a striking pivot for a company that once championed the handheld hardware over smartphone apps, but the environment for this type of software has ripened.
Agents that handle tasks for you are all anyone in Silicon Valley talks about. Meta's new Muse agent was just banned from crawling Amazon to shop on a user's behalf using a virtual machine. Lyu smirks as he brings it up, saying, “We've been through all of this a year and a half ago,” calling back to the R1's controversial use of a virtual machine to execute app actions on your behalf. So was Rabbit just too ahead of the curve?
