Jesse Liu
Appearances
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Because the way I look at it is that people are not buying electricity. Electricity is basically controlled by here in California, South California Edison, right? You have an address, you have to pay for it, regardless of how much electricity you're using. But I think People are ultimately buying microwaves, cars, motorcycles, televisions. People are buying products powered by electricity.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
So research-wise, I can say very clear, we have at this moment of rabbit, there's no way that we can compete over OpenAI and Tropic and DeepMind and Google. But How can we play the game? We become partner of everyone, right? So R1 is hosting every single model, the latest model from these guys.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
And we offer their capabilities combined with our product management on the Rabbit OS and all the features offered to our user. So there is no way we can compete over on a research perspective, but we ship product fast, right? You saw OpenAI just released the Instant API, as they call it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I was actually invited to the meeting, but I'm launching the LAN playground yesterday, so I couldn't be there in person. But they're offering an API for people to build an agent for it. But yesterday, we dropped a LAN playground, which you can go to any website and just do it by voice. So I think computation is a different magnitude. I think money is definitely important.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
We hope that we can raise more money, of course. But I think right now, if you talk about computation, we have to play smart. They are good on research. We are good on converting all the latest research into a piece of product that user can use today.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
It's a very good margin, even though I cannot tell you the details, but it's over 40%.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
On the hardware margin. We run the calculation. We might have to redo the math because yesterday, literally after drop the LAN playground, the server crashed like multiple times. So we might need to redo the calculation. But again, first of all, in the beginning, we are making money. Now we have these more powerful features moving forward.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I think I haven't heard a company that went bankrupt because they got a popular service that is so popular that they couldn't afford cloud bills, right? I think if you build a good product, there will be- Well, hold on.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Obviously, we have this dedicated instance with all these cloud competitors, right? I mean, don't get me wrong, like the Amazon AWS, we're hosting on AWS. And there's AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure. On the LLM partnerships, we have Anthropic, OpenAI, and Gemini.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
They're not cheap. But what I'm trying to point out is that they are competing so fierce in a way that they have a lot of good benefit for the early startups. I have to shout out for all these companies. So they really want to figure out a way to help you on board and maybe making your money in the long run. But I think at this current scale, we can totally handle it. Yes.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
So we get great deals from them.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I think if a moderate user is using it in a non-robotic way or a non-malicious way, it's going to be really hard to break that negativity. Is that two years worth of usage, one year, six months? I think it's definitely over a year and a half. I'm not sure about two years because there's new features going to implement into this, right? Including LAN playground and teach mode.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
But yeah, so I want to kind of like share my understanding to this is that, yes, we did the mathematics. We are making money. No problem. We wish we can sell more, which we're hoping that we can sell more. That's going to definitely help. But the... target of this whole launch strategy is not set for making like X amount of money on like first six months.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I think there's other companies that are really greedy about how they want to launch their product. I'm not going to even mention the name, right? That won't work, right? That won't work. So I think if you look at any...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
A new generation of product, if the founder and the company and the board decide to set up a strategy that let's squeeze every single penny out of the user, it's not going to work because we know AI is very early. And we know that there's going to be a lot of things that go wrong. In fact, I believe that every company, regardless of if you're big or small,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
If you work on the latest AI stuff, the first two weeks, it's going to be a disaster because you're going to find a lot of the misbehavior by the AI. You're going to find a lot of the edge cases by the model, right? So I think the whole thing is too new. There's no way that we want to charge for subscription. That's even worse. I don't like that strategy in general.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
So even though this sounds very concerning that, okay, you can easily twist my story or someone might twist my story and be like, oh, Rabbit is doing everything great, except they're going to bankrupt no matter what, right? I think it's a very stupid way to think in that sense because a great innovation, you have to focus on the innovative part first.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Then when you figure out the money part, if we start figuring out the money part, none of this making sense. None of these making sense. I think, you know, there's another, you know, people in the industry that they have a great understanding of everything. And then they decided to release a wallpaper app charge for 50 bucks per month. Right. Hopefully that works, I guess. Yeah.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
You can go talk to that guy and you say, hey, there's no way you're going to bankrupt because your money checks you all this equation checks. If you charge for this, you're going to be making money. But that's based on the perspective that the whole logic needs to stand up, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
So I think I'm not really wasting a lot of my time at this point on trying to basically fine-tune a little bit about mathematic equations to make this more like 20%, 50%. Obviously, as a startup, we need to survive, right? And I think even though...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
We have like a roller coaster ride since launch, but we're growing and we're surviving and we're still pushing the features that none of the other devices can do, which is a very, very good sign. So, yeah.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I think there are multiple solutions to that question. One is that, obviously, if let's use R1 for every user for more than 18 months, there's a couple of solutions. One is that we're going to launch the next generation device. And maybe multiple devices still profitable from the hardware. Two, I think we have this prepared since day one. From last week, we rolled out the RFR teach mode.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
to a very selected group of testers. I would love to give you the access. So please reach out to us later on. We'll see if we can help you set it up. But we roll out a very small group of alpha testers, roughly around 20, 25 people, to be honest. And then over the last 72 hours, I saw more than probably 200, more than 200 lessons or agents has been created through Teach Mode. And
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
If you look at the current Apple ecosystem or Android ecosystem, I think the hardware is not going to be the number one money contributor. It's really hard to make that on top of the margin of the hardware anyway. So at some point you want to convert that into services and software, right? That doesn't mean that you're going to charge subscription for the device.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
What I think is very promising is that we're going to slowly roll out the teach mode to beta testers. And hopefully by the end of this year, we can like, Grant opened the teach mode as we promised on day one. So all these lessons created or rabbits or agents created by each independent users or developers, they can be considered as a new generation of App Store. On that, we can make big money.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Using the App Store economics of taking 30%- I don't want to invent any, exactly. I think it's very, I think I'm not trying to invent any new business model. I think as a startup, it's very risky to invent your own business model. But there is a very great business model out there, which is App Store. And that's contributing like, what, 70% for the annual income, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
We have to separate two different systems here, or maybe three different systems here. Let's talk before yesterday, because yesterday is really a great milestone. Before yesterday, what happens is that you talk to the R1. We have an intention triage system, which basically we convert this audio to a text.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
We send that text to our LLM providers, and then we have an intention triage system from there. After the LLM understands the intention we send to different APIs or different features. There are a lot of features which is on device, like set a smart timer or something like that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Or there's a simple question, but we think that there's other services or model probably answers better than the default LLM. So sometimes we send a particular query to Propaxity. Sometimes we send a particular query to Warframe Alpha. So you can understand as intentional triage system is dispensing on this to different destinations. And then the relative features will trigger.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
But after yesterday, which we have this playground, and that's a first stepping stone towards what we really want to create, which is a generic cross-platform agent system. It has to be generic, which on this case, it is a generic. It is not cross-platform yet because it handles only on website. It will be cross-platform very soon.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
But with this generic website agent system, essentially you can just talk to Rabbit and be like, hey, go to ABC website or go to somewhere. And then help me do this. So that's exactly how we wish to design a product. And I think everyone in the industry is heading towards this direction, which is you say something, we understand you, and we help you do it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
And what happens as we put a Windows on the rabbit hole that you can see is that the agent will break down different steps. I'm going to Google first. I'm searching for the Verge. I'm clicking to Verge home website. I'm trying to find this title as you requested. I'm clicking the button to share this. And in theory, you can chain multiple steps, infinite steps, follow-up queries to the system.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
So I gave you an example I tried. I think I showed this to another reporter is that, hey, go to Reddit first, right? And search for what are people's recommending for the 2024 best TV, 4K HDR, get that model, then go to Best Buy. that to my card if best buy is out of stock then search on amazon if they both are out of stock Get me the second recommended model.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
So you can actually chain different queries and you can pause it, you can add, you can tweak it, you can fine tune it. So it's really just like a playground. You can freely explore the system and the system is fairly good enough to do like daily tasks. And people are, you know, obviously developers and our hacker in Swastik, white hackers, of course, are giving us like impressive like showcases.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
There are people using the LAN playground to create an app. by just by talking to R1, because there are third party AI destination that you can just use prompt and create an app and download the code and stuff like that. So it's really amazing to see all this great showcase just within actually precisely 24 hours.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
It is not accurate. I want to take this opportunity to address that. If you go to the connections, now we have seven apps. By day one, we have four apps. Those are the first iteration of LAM, which is not a generic technology. We never on the CES claim that you cannot go to Amazon and order something. We said, we're working towards this piece, and today there's four apps that you can connect.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
We're going to add more services. And over the past couple of months, we did add three more services. So as if today there are seven services in total, then we keep working on the current LAN playground. And when the time is right, we swap it. So there's a lot of debate saying that wasn't there. That is not true. I can trace back to where this rumor starts.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
It's where there are people hacking to the R1. They saw R1 is fundamentally powered by an Android system on the local device. And obviously, that should be the case. It would be more sketchy if it's non-Android. So at the bottom of it is Android system. And they dump the code, which you can do that. In fact, every good piece of hardware in history has been hacked.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Someone goes into this and jailbreak the R1, which I guess every piece of hardware is jailbreakable at some point. And obviously, that's a factor to us. If you build a software and no one Even border to jailbreak it. It's probably not a good phone factor anyway. So people jailbreak it, find out the Android code.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
They dump the Android code to another media and they say, hey, there's nothing about AI here. There's nothing about LAN here. Of course, because all the stuff is in AWS. So that's where the rumor starts. And then there's a lot of media, and they just take that piece and reiterate that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Yes, yes. Why? What do you mean why? There is no API.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
There is no API. There is no API.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
That's a partnership. That's a partnership. Go to Spotify, read their documentations. There is a specific line is that you cannot use API to build a voice-activated application. Literally.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
We have a conversation. They realize this is agent behavior. And we said, look, we ask user to log in on your website. And they're 100% legitimate user. And they're paid user. And when we do the trick, we help them click the button.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Everything is accurate, except we don't help you log in. You have to log in for yourself, and we don't save your connection.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
We are basically giving everyone a virtual machine, which is a VNC, which is 100% within policy. And you have the rights to access that VNC. And on that VNC, We basically work directly on website, just like today's LAN playground. So we're not getting the audio from server from Spotify or somewhere else.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
We're basically going to Spotify website and play and do the things for you and play that song for you.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I am not re-streaming the song to you. I am basically presenting the VNC directly to your R1.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
First of all, I see where you're going. Before you go deeper, I just want to say, first of all, we're not using API. Second of all, to say LAM is not there, that's a false claim. Because we have all these services. If you really pay attention to their documentation, there is no API for like DoorDash. There is no API for Uber.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
It's not a problem for now. We'll see how this problem evolves. But I remember when Apple was relatively not so big, I mean, not as big as today. When I read Steve Jobs' book, there's one chapter he said, okay, go talk to Sony from tomorrow, $0.99 per track. Remember that moment? So at some point, this level of negotiation needs to be happening.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I'm not sure if we're leading this or someone else is leading this, but this is the working proof that we're not using API. And I don't think the services are... Not building API just because they're trying to prevent people from automating the company. It's just because API to them is not making money. And they for sure will love to set up a negotiation in some phase later when we grow bigger.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
But I guess, you know, we try to reach out to Uber. We did before launch. They're like, who are you? You're too small. That's it. We don't care.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
No, the Uber website, which is very janky, which is very useful right now.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
It is a little bit more technical to achieve that, which we are working on the other platforms. I think I showed a very select group of people of a working prototype that LAM is operating on the desktop OS, such as Linux, with all that local apps. So we're definitely heading to that direction.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I guess there's always a way that you can detect, but I think the question is, this is actually a very good topic that we're talking here, is that think about CAPTCHAs.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
LAMP Playground or any capable AI models now can go there and solve text-based CAPTCHAs. So their old system to prevent automated systems like this are currently failing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
And this is an industry effort to push everyone in the industry to rethink about now with this AI, now with all this agent, how their business is going to reform or how their business is going to, how all these policies need to be changed. I do agree. This is a very complicated topic. So, but what I can see is that this is not a rabbit doing some, you know, really fancy magics here.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Like every company is doing this. We have other agent company like Motel, even the GPTs are doing this, right? So this is like a new wave emerging for all this old services that they have to think about.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
But I can tell you my personal experience dealing with scenarios like this, like when we first start building one of the first smart speakers back in like 2013, you know, like all this music label, they don't care. They don't care until everyone's building smart speakers. They're like, okay, we have to resell the whole copyrights for this particular phone factor.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I guess end of day is about money, right? They want to sell the same copyrights to as many phone factors they want and if there's a popular one. So we're okay to have this kind of negotiations, but certainly, like you said, there's bigger companies that are doing similar things or even more advanced things that needs to be addressed. I'll give you another example, like Siri and Microsoft.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
There's a feature called Microsoft Recall, which they put back that feature now, and I think they relaunch it, which is very aggressive. That is taking a screenshot of your local computer This is what I saw was happening in AI in the early days. There's going to be a lot of different takes and tries, and eventually people will reconcile and agree on a single piece of terms and agreements.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
But if you check how we automate the website to their interface, the most important part is we don't create a fake user. We don't create a spam user. We don't log in on your behalf. And you are you. The way I help you to do things is by help you click the buttons and mouse. It's equivalent of if I want my body to help me, I'll give you an example. So if I'm busy, I'm about to head into a meeting.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I want my buddy to help me order a burger from DoorDash. All I need to do is I unlock my phone. I pass my phone to my guy and my guy helped me click that. And in this process, I'm not sharing my credentials to my body, right? I'm not telling my phone password. I'm not telling my DoorDash password. I'm not even sharing my credit card info. All he do is just add to the cart and click confirm.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
That's it. So this guy is equivalent of the first generation of LAN, which is, unfortunately, we don't like it. So that's why we work so hard. Now we have Playground, which is more generic technology.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
No. No. We're working on your symbolic, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I'll tell you, Spotify changed interface all the time. Right. And I think in the past six months, five months since the first LAN was adding the Spotify with the connection since launch, I think we probably put the Spotify under maintenance for like maybe two times, one hour in total.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I really want to laugh hard. Okay. Two things. I disagree that the Spotify is not working good. Spotify has been working amazing. Sure. Five months... maybe two times we put on admittance, a total amount of time put on admittance, probably under one hour. You can ask any R1 users. That's not through API, which is impressive. That's through agent.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
That's through agent to handle- I get that it's impressive for an agent. I'm just saying- No, you said it's not good enough. I said it's not good enough.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
That's my second part. Yes, API is 100 percent, but you're relying on they give you the API that's stable, that works. I'm the user, I don't care. That's what I'm getting at. As the user, why should I care? user doesn't need to care. We need to care. We need to care. And we need to care because we checked what are the good APIs we can use. Don't get me wrong. Propexy API has been great.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
OpenAI API break every day or two. They said we observe an issue. You can follow the chat GPT down. There's a very detailed how many breaks per day. It's more than, I guess, more than 10 on average that chat GPT API breaks. or instable, whatever it takes, we have a notifier. So API, first of all, API is not stable. It is not stable. Sure. And... You have to chase for the services people want.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
We want to offer this music feature, and we think Spotify is the best experience overall. And we want to chase for this partnership, and we're still chasing for this partnership. But to talk from technical perspective, why I said I don't like APIs is because think about Alexa. Alexa speakers are all using APIs.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
And you literally have to go there and negotiate because, like I said, today, not everyone is opening APIs. A lot of the traditional services don't have API. And then startups, for startups, it's impossible. When you go talk to them, they think you're too small. We did that. We just did that to everyone. They think we're too small. They don't care. So we can't get API.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Does that mean that we're not going to figure out an alternative way to make it work? No, hell no. We're going to make it work. And this is exactly how we make it work. So we care about user to use this feature. We don't care about how to do it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
In fact, because we know that you don't care how this is being done, I don't want to spend six months, eight months, suit up to talk to Spotify people and Uber people and one by one, let's do that, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Yeah, this is a fun part of the game, really. How do you win the game? First of all, speaking for myself, I've sold my company before when I was 25. I don't want to build another app. I should chase my same dream because I really think that the grand vision that I have and our team was working on is actually the current direction everyone's chasing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
And it just feels so bad if you don't chase the same dream, no matter how hard it is, really. And in reality, we feel blessed and happy to say the exact situation because We don't have any serious competitors from startups, to be honest.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Yes. So I said, as if right now, I don't think we have serious competitors from startup. And then... When we talk about competitors, obviously there's Apple, there's every big companies out there, including OpenAI. First of all, I think this is good for us because it validates our direction. It's absolutely correct.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
And I also are curious about what are going to be the definitive route for the generic agent technology, because different people in the industry might have different ideas, right? There are still debatable states. There is no evil for agent systems yet. There is no very good evil yet. And you can see a lot of different research houses and companies trying different routes.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Obviously, there's API routes like GPTs, which doesn't really take off. There's pure neurosymbolic routes. There's Hebrew routes. There's all this multimodality. So we're still in the phase of everyone trying their own recipe. And hopefully, that can become a definitive recipe, including Apple.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I think the benefit for Apple to do that is that, yes, they understand the user better, much, much better than any companies out there. And they have infinite money. theoretically infinite money and they have the very close ecosystem. The way that they're rolling this out is that they have this SDK called app intent, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
So different companies or app developers need to choose to enroll or not enroll with that to have the new theory to control stuff. I guess my relative advantage as a small group as Rabbit is that we move fast, right? We move fast and we keep growing. I think if we put all the cars on our table, we have a spectacular launch. We are the most sold dedicated hardware yet. And we have made good profit.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
We fixed all the day one problems and the company actually quadrupled the size. So we're growing, we're moving fast. And now we drop this, I think... Like you said, put a marker between today and yesterday. I think today I can say a lot of things that you can do on R1 you cannot do on iPhone.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I believe eventually everyone will be able to come to the same solution that all the device can do same kind of similar stuff. But I firmly believe at least this remaining half a year or the Q4 of 2024 and probably the Q1 2025, it is still a game of you have something that they don't have versus you guys all have the similar stuff. Who's done better?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
So I think relatively, we have a good six to eight months ahead of start. Like we have our little room here. But obviously, I also believe when big company wants to kill startup, they have a million way to kill you. That's just the reality. I think people keep talking to me and ask me questions. What happens if the risk is too high? What happens if the company dies?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I really don't think that all these questions matters because we're on this course. We're going to see the end, whether it's a good end or bad end. And I don't think like any answer to this question will change our course, to be honest. I can go here and tell you and be a crybaby, like this is super hard. This is impossible.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Everyone in the industry can kill us easy or the YouTube reviewer can kill us by posting a video. It doesn't change the course because we are doing things. We're launching, we're shipping things, right? We're moving forward. So it'll be interesting to see what Apple came from. I was on the Apple iPhone upgrade program. So I automatically get a new iPhone every year by paying the same monthly fee.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
But I really don't find any reason to upgrade that because people are talking about Rabbit being launched too early. Now you have the company like Apple. If you go to the, what is that called? The Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, where it's close to here, or I guess Mission Street in San Francisco. You go to any major cities, you see this gigantic posters, billboards that Apple puts there, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Pro. What are the other lines underneath? It says Apple Intelligence. Is it ready? Is it out?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
First of all, you saw that article from, I guess, Verge.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
No, but there's a Verge that says R1 only has 5,000 users daily, which is from... which is from Rick Bird. That's a quote from you. What I said there can be misinterpreted. What I said is that if you go look at the data doc right now, you probably will find 5,000 people using R1, at least 5,000 people.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I said it can be misinterpreted.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Yeah. First of all, I think we saw a very steady growth of all the people interacting with R1, and each time with new features, there's going to be more people using it. I gave you some numbers that I want to throw to you, and maybe I can share a very detailed usage sometimes in the future. First of all, there are about 5% people
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
that they have their R1, they're not happy, that return, less than 5%. Sure. Which is a very good number. And I think the top features that people are using are asking questions and visuals and visions and all that. And We really are hoping for people to discover more use cases, but unfortunately we have like four, seven apps on the connections, right? That's one of the bottleneck.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
So if you check for the total query, most of the cases you ask a question, you forget about it, right? So it's not about how many times you ask R1, it's about what kind of tasks you ask R1 and is R1 actually going to help you? I guess, yeah, very unfortunate. It seems that that's a misinterpretation. So what's the number?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
What is it? I will go back and get you a very accurate number, but I can tell you yesterday our server actually crashed. So I think... Is it double? Is it 10,000? Is it 25,000? Oh, yesterday our cloud cost actually... Actually, let me check right here. Cause I can check right here.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I think we delivered more than 100,000 units, and that should be around 33%, 34%. Sure, that makes sense.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Yes. What were the days before that? So past two days, 5206. So if you minus 33, that's another 20,000. Wait, I'm sorry.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
So past two days, 5206. That's the total of two days. Correct.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Correct. Then there's the article by The Verge just used that title, 5,000, which is wrong. I can tell you that's wrong. That's very wrong. That's misinformation right there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
He wasn't there, and he or she, that journalist wasn't there, and that's not what I said in the quote, okay?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Thank you, Nina. Glad to be here.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Yeah. We're confident that this technology is the current technology route that it will work. And I haven't yet to see another approach that actually make any generic agent system work in any other manner. That doesn't mean that we're locked in to one technical pass. If you talk to any company, it's probably not a smart idea to say, hey, we just buy this for next 10 years.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
technology change so fast, you have to adapt. But right now, I think we're off to a good start. We launched a concept with Playground with free off-charge that you can explore so that we understand how this system can be improved In fact, I believe the speed can be improved very fast. But we're not here to say, hey, we're stuck into this.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
We do have patterns about this, but we're not saying, hey, we think this is the correct path to go. I don't think anyone in the AI industry can give you a very definitive answer. Be like, hey, if you just do this, here's the structure. This is going to guarantee you success. the best result in the long run. I think that's not a good way to think of it. But yeah, I agree.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Everyone in the industry are experimenting something new. And a lot of companies that we saw are going to, like you said, run into some sort of legal problems. There's music generation platforms. There's
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Here's a little bit of history of it. So I actually started an AI company back in 2013, which is called RavenTech. We were at YC Winter 15 batch. And it's basically my personal dream to chase this grand vision that, you know, I guess... me being this generation grew up, we watched so many sci-fi movies, you know, there's AI stuff here and there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
There's like a YouTube training video can be used by this or that. You know, there's all sorts of things like this. Yeah. But I think it's not just the builder are adapting. The industry are going to adapt to the builder too. At some point, there's going to be a conclusion that, okay, this is a new policy. This is a new kind of like terms that we need to follow.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
No, at the moment, we don't have the resources to fight that fight. And at the moment, that's not a real threat to us because they said we're too small. Fair enough.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I don't think that it's a dead end for us, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Like, I don't think that they are not willing to change their terms. And I think unlikely they're going to put terms like, it has to be a human. It cannot be. There's a lot of automation tools out there already, right? So, like, there's no turning back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I think what they would like to work with any companies, including us, is that when they see a popular demand from this new kind of agent technology, they want to charge for it. We ask our user and us to pay for them. And that's a business deal. That's more like a money terms. That's what I can see. But yeah, for now, we're not breaking any of their terms and agreements, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
And if they change the terms and agreements tomorrow, we'll take a look and we'll see how we adapt. But the agent is out there yet already. There's a lot of agents running already. So I think there's no turning back. And it's very unlikely they say, hey, we're going to stop agents using our services. That's not a... That's not going to happen.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I might have a different opinion here. Okay. I think... Foundation models like OpenAI, you know, obviously they're raising for a crazy amount of money. I think we take benefit from what they've been worked on, right? Because their primary services is selling their models as APIs, which saves a lot of money. We don't want to recreate a wheel retraining like an OOM.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
It might not as scary as a lot of people might think. I think there's a huge gap between converting the latest technology into a piece of product versus pushing for a more advanced technology. Obviously, I'm very proposed to do high-end research. We want to have a research house here set up at the same scale as OpenAI and DeepMind, even though they're already far, far behind.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
But I think what we're trying to do right now at this current scale Because here's the money we have, right? We don't have like $1 billion. We don't have like $2 billion. We have this very limited budget. Is that how can we convert the latest technology and research and build to a product that we can ship early and collect feedbacks and learn from it?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
And I guess every geek wants to build their own Jarvis at some point, right? So that's exactly how I started the Raven tech 11, 12 years ago. Back then, you know, we had this idea, we had this direction, but the technology back then, obviously there wasn't like GPU training, there wasn't transformer and stuff. So we worked really hard on the early days of like voice dictation and NLP and NLU and
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
So a lot of people have different definition of AGI. I don't really talk about this term because I think so many people have so many different definitions for it. But I do think that AI understand what you say and can help you do things. And maybe here we're talking about virtually help you click buttons and stuff. There are a lot of companies doing human Android.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
that they're actually giving a hand and legs for the AI to do things. I think it is an entire human's effort and a lot of the resources can be shared instead of each company has to go raise for this amount of money and take that amount of time to achieve the same goal. So it's really hard to say, but we know we need more money and resources, that's for sure.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
But I think you've seen how efficient this team has been performing. From seven people, 17 people till today, we risked obviously much less than Humane or any big companies out there. I think it's actually one of our advantages that we can do things in a relatively cost-efficient way and fast.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I think the AI model will get very smart very fast. But I think we're talking about a generational shift. I think, obviously, we don't want a 2024 piece of technology operating on eBay's website, which is basically designed back in 1990. So I think a lot of the infra needs to be refreshed. And the biggest gap, as I can see here, is productionized.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I think in our roadmap, we think that it's very likely that we can get all this separate piece of technology we have, like LAN playground, teach mode, and RabbitOS at some point, maybe next year, kind of like merge into a new RabbitOS 2.0. And that actually will push a huge step forward towards this generic goal. But my general take is that AI model is smart enough.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
But the action part is a lot of infrastructure. There's a huge gap between research and production. So that's what we learned. So I would say that I'm very optimistic in the three years term. But I think, like I said, right now and starting of next year is everyone trying different approaches and we'll see which one works. But I think we're confident on the approach that we'll take right now.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Yeah, I'm not against any form factors. In fact, I really think that there will be a lot of form factors. When we were trying to design R1, the reason is that we know it's not going to be a smartphone because we know people are going to do a lot of other things on smartphone, which the current AI cannot do. So we deliberately avoided smartphone phone factor.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Talking about pins with lasers and glasses, I have different comments for each phone factor because there's no universal rules here because...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
for let's talk about pains right so like i think my general pushback for making it as a pain with a laser like humane i think first of all i think it's really cool but i think you know uh it's too risky you are trying to offer a new way of utilizing your technology used to have user use software And that's already new to them. And you don't want to just introduce a sci-fi kind of type of gear.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
which is natural language processing and natural language understanding. So the technology weren't there. We tried our best. We actually built an entire cloud system and the hardware, which is similar to what we have in Rabbit today. But the phone factor was like more of a smart speaker, as if we all know back in 10 years ago, everyone's chasing that phone factor.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
So two new things stacked together, that's too risky. So if you look at R1, it's like very familiar design. You know, there's a button, you know, you're going to push, you know, a wheel probably can scroll. There's a screen, you can look at things. So The R1 phone factor is very conservative in the sense that it de-ricks the software.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
It's just like people haven't figured out how to interact in the virtual world. And all of a sudden, back in 2016, there's like 200 different companies making goggles, right? And they all fell. So I think I'm very, very conservative on the hardware phone factor. Talking about the glass, that's a different story. I think your skull actually grew to fit the frame, not the other way around.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Because I used to wear prescription frames. I know the pain. Your scroll is growing to fit a glass frame. Now they're the other way around. So I think there is really no generic fit on a glass frame. I was having fun with my design team joking. I'm like, maybe if we do the glass, we'll probably do the Dragon Ball style, like the Power Reader or whatever that is.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
But I'm really like, I can't wrap my head around, I'll have to put like a frame, you know, like that doesn't fit. Yeah, we'll see. I think even the current smartphone, I think is perfect. I really like the state of a glass or a screen phone factor. But the real problem here is not about the phone factor. The problem is about the apps, right? Because now we see all this agent technology, AI stuff.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
They're doing things that app are doing and they're doing things that apps can't do. I think the problem is with apps.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I'm a very intuitive person. I like to trust my intuition on big directions, like, you know, what's going to happen, you know. In the long run. But meanwhile, I'm quite conservative that I hate to predict things. So I think when people replay this episode, they will hear probably I got really tricked by some of your questions. It's just my brain couldn't work for like...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
predictions is that I don't like to make predicts. Like what happens if this happens, if that happens, what do you think? Like, I think when I manage my team, I tell people like, we make decisions based on current fact and we find the best solutions to it. If you spend too much time, at least if I spend too much time thinking about what if Apple knocks on your door, what are you going to do?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
And ultimately, the company got acquired. It's not a new idea for myself, but it's definitely a new opportunity that when I saw the progress on the research side of Transformer, obviously I got a chance to try like chat GPT or GPT's API very early time. We were really impressed because, you know, we felt the timing is right because being able to do something like R1 or GPT,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
And what if this A happened, then B happened, then C happened, what are you going to do? Most likely, you're going to get a different strategy, right? Because if you think about...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
If B is a solution to A, when A happens, you just do B. But there are other type of people, they're like, hold on, have you ever thought of when A happens, then D happens, then E happens, then F happens, are you still going to do B? If you think in that way, probably not, right? So I just choose not to predict a lot of what-ifs, and I make short predictions.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
clear, concise decisions based on current fact. And in fact, if you do the recap for what were launched back in the CES, it was probably the best timing. The price is probably just right. The color probably just right, right? And the decisions of not negotiating, spend six months negotiating with T-Mobile is probably just right. You know, like... I make current decisions and that's my style.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
And I talk to people, everyone talk to me. I told my team, you know, everyone in my team, they can find me anytime, talk to me anytime. I spend a lot of people, a lot of time talking to my peoples. And it's just, we are in general, just a very... real team like down to earth.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
And I really don't like some of the other type of startups that they kind of like spend too much time enjoying the feeling if you understand what I'm indicating. But there are a lot of people that they say, oh, I'm a founder. I'm cool. You know, like No, I've grown enough to get rid of that. Probably the same way as if I'm 21, 22, but now I'm like 34. Startups is really tough. It's a war.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
It's about survive, right? It's really, really tough. And it doesn't really matter if others want to do something like whatever. You have to be survive. And just survive by your own is tough. in any sense. So that's why a lot of people ask me, I got asked a lot, like, okay, what if they do this? What if they do that? Well, end of day, there's nothing you can do.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
You have to do your thing, and they will react to it. I think it's fair to say that with other startups like us, the biggest company like Apple, they react to us. They react to us in a very hostile way, like very unusual way that they have this new phone, but all of things are still not there. Well, we're making a very small dent, but that even doesn't matter.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I think for us, we care about our customers. One thing I want to say is that, yes, there are a lot of misinformation. There are hates. There are all that feedbacks, criticisms. If you talk to the R1 user, they're happy. That's what I care. That's what I care. Otherwise, there will be a lot of returns. There will be a lot of refunds. We have less than 5% return.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Put that term in any consumer market. Electronics device, it's a good benchmark. Yeah. We're going to keep releasing all the stuff. And in fact, we pushed 17 OTAs within five months. The other company pushed like, what, three, two, three, four, five OTAs. So I think, I really hope people can see us as, you know, we're a bunch of underdogs, yeah?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Our solution isn't perfect, but it is David versus Gordie on day one because... It's a reality and don't expect perfect stuff from us because we are not perfect, right? We raise a very little amount of money and we're a small team, but we move fast. What we can guarantee is that when Rabbit shows you something, you probably couldn't even find somewhere else.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Just like the hardware, just like the playground, or even the very janky day one version of LAM, we are the first company that has Apple music can be streamed to our device.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't get legal documents to my door. Maybe I will get one, but maybe they think we're too small. But yeah, we do things in our way. I guess that's what I want to say. We're a really down-to-the-ground team. Like, that's my style.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
you know, more sci-fi Java stuff, you really need to figure out two parts from the backend. One is that you want to make sure that by talking to the device, the computer or device actually understand what you're talking about, right? Which is the transformer, the large language model part. But
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Yeah. Thank you so much. My pleasure.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
We believe around 2020, 2021, we believe that the transformer is absolutely the right path that OpenAI and other companies are heading to. We believe that portion has been solved, will be solved. So our focus immediately shift to, after this device can understand you, can it actually help you do things?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
The company I started 10, 11 years ago, Raventech, we were actually one of the first company that we designed a cloud API structure that, you know, after the recognition, after the understanding, the query got sent into different, you know, APIs. The system has a detector to understand, oh, maybe you're looking for a restaurant on Yelp. Maybe you want to play a song from this streaming software.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
But, you know, I guess 10 years ago, there's a great opportunity of APIs. There's a lot of company working on APIs and, yeah, If you remember like 10 years ago in Silicon Valley, like everyone was talking about maybe in the future, the entire operating system will be just HTML5s, right? But that didn't live quite long.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
So I think now when we're looking after 2020, like the API business is not really like, you know, major business for most of the popular services. So we also want to take an evaluation of, you know, whether we can build like a generic piece of agent technology, which is really hard because I believe the current AI is all generic. Obviously, there's a lot of people doing vertical stuff, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
You can build an agent for Excel. You can build an agent for legal documentation process. But I think the biggest dream, what really makes us excited is like the generic part of it. It's like, can we build something that without pre-training, without knowing people want to do what, and they just tell whatever they want and will be able to smart enough to handle all the tasks.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
So that's why we felt the opportunity was right. And we started Rabbit right after COVID. Yeah.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
At the current moment, we're roughly around 50 people, 50 to 60 people if we plus the interns. But when we started, the company was seven. And by the time we launched our CES, it was 17. So just by growing the team within like four or five months is quite a challenging job for me.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Most of the part is just engineers. We have a very small group of design slash hardware design or ID that we started from day one. And most of the new folks are working on AI and infrastructure perspective, like cloud. Basically, we not only ship the hardware, we build the entire web OS for it, right? So I think the major work is always going to be in the software part.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
We are primarily located in Santa Monica. We have a device team, really great folks in Bay Area. And we have a couple of research engineers here and there. So it's kind of like mostly in-person, but somewhat hybrid system. And the way that we find our people is mostly by internal referring. So we're not like... you know, spending money chasing for like agents, agencies to do the hiring.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Most of the good folks that we basically do an internal recommendation.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
It's really flat in a sense. We have different departments, obviously. The hardware, ODM, OEM, that part is in Asian. We have our IT team in collaboration with folks in Stockholm, Teenage Engineering in this case. And we do our own graphics and marketing, all that in-house. And then for the software part, we have the device team that they need to work with, the ODM, OEM.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
And we have the cloud team. We have the AI team. That's basically how much team we have. And each team, there's obviously crossovers. And we basically work in project base. So there is no like really like hierarchy, like crazy hierarchy going on. I mean, the biggest company I ever led was back in the Raven. I believe by the time we got acquired, we were like 250 people.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
So this is like still within my comfort zone to manage like 50-ish people. So yeah.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
Yeah, so the way we work together, obviously this is not the first time we collaborate. We did a collaboration back in Raven. First of all, Teenage Engineer is my hero company. It's basically a fanboy dream become true story for me. I really appreciate their help over the years. The way that we work together is very intuitive.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
There are obviously many ways that are considered to be the proper way of designing a project like this, but I think we're out of the... ordinary way of doing this. I can give you an example, like back in the Raven, all we did is that we had probably two meetings in person, a couple of phone calls, no email, no text messages.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
We set up a secret Instagram account that we just share sketches and we just hit like on that Instagram account. And that's how we designed the previous Raven project. This time is even quicker. I think I shared this publicly. I think we spent like probably 10 minutes. on deciding the R1, how it's going to look like. And we have quick sketches here and there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
And ultimately, I pushed Jesper back for using the current color, which is the orange from Rao. We do have maybe two or three projects in our mind. But I think by the end of this year, our current focus is to really get this LAM pushed to the next level. So yeah, stay tuned.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
I think one thing people will realize is that this team do hardware really quick because when we start sketching the R1, it was like last year back in November. And we introduced that by January and we start shipping by April. So if we want to launch the next project, it's going to be like roughly in, I don't know, six to eight months time frame, certainly not like a year or two.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
But that being said, I think I was having my own community voice chat yesterday. I was talking to people about the current R1 because I really don't like the current consumer electronics, like one year per generation by default, regardless, right? Like we've seen that from the smartphone companies and doing annually release for all this stuff with minor changes. When we started designing the R1,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
The entire Rabbit OS runs on the cloud. That means that this piece of hardware, even though it's $199 and not the latest chips, is really capable of offloading the future features to this device. So I don't think R1 is like a one-year lifespan device. And so does our community thought. They think they can tweak so many things about it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
So in that sense, we're not in a rush to drop another version of it. But we do have different form factors in our mind at the moment.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
He was literally in our office last Sunday, which is three days ago. Yeah, we are actively working together.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
That's a good question. I want to be accurate, but it's somewhere around 50 million total in the whole lifespan. Last part was 35 million led by Sound Venture and also Hostel Venture and Amazon Alexa Finance Synergist. So last round was 35. And if you consider all the money together, I think it's around 50.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn't thinking too far ahead
No, but I think talking about competition, money is one part of it. I've considered myself a veteran because I've done startup before. I know how it works. Certainly, money is very important, probably most important in the early couple of years, but I think... When we talk about competition, we ultimately want to ship products to consumers, right?