One of the standout gadgets of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the rabbit r1, will use Perplexity AI’s tech to answer user queries, both companies said in an announcement.
Perplexity noted that the first 100,000 r1 buyers will get one year of Perplexity Pro for free.
We're thrilled to announce our partnership with Rabbit: Together, we are introducing real-time, precise answers to Rabbit R1, seamlessly powered by our cutting-edge PPLX online LLM API, free from any knowledge cutoff. Plus, for the first 100,000 Rabbit R1 purchases, we're… pic.twitter.com/hJRehDlhtv
— Perplexity (@perplexity_ai) January 18, 2024
The $200 r1 made rounds at the CES show as an AI-first gadget that saves you the hassle of taking your phone out for tasks like performing web searches, playing a song on Spotify, and ordering a cab. The device doesn’t have a monthly subscription fee at the moment.
The device, designed by Teenage Engineering, has a 2.88-inch touchscreen, a push-to-talk button, a camera, a speaker, and two mics.
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The company has already sold 50,000 devices in pre-orders. Earlier today, it opened pre-orders for the 6th production batch with another 50,000 devices. Rabbit said that customers living in the EU and UK will all receive their device by the end of July even if they just pre-order a device from the 6th batch.
The 5th batch of 10,000 rabbit r1 devices has sold out. Pre-orders for the 6th batch, totaling 50,000, are available now at https://t.co/R3sOtVWoJ5
Expected delivery date for the 6th batch is June – July 2024.
For all addresses in the EU and UK, batches 1-6 will be shipped by… pic.twitter.com/D3l8q1Zdu6
— rabbit inc. (@rabbit_hmi) January 19, 2024
Perplexity uses a mix of its own AI model as well as third-party models — Google’s Gemini, Mistra 7B, Anthropic’s Claude 2.1, and OpenAI’s GPT-4 — to get accurate information from the web. The tool has a chatbot interface on the web and mobile apps to let users ask questions in natural language. While Perplexity’s solution is different than traditional search engines, it competes with Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Copilot along with You.com in the GenAI search space.
Earlier this month, Perplexity AI raised $73.6 million in investment — at a $520 million valuation — led by IVP with additional investments from NEA, Databricks Ventures, Nvidia, former Twitter VP Elad Gil, Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke, ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch, and Jeff Bezos.
