Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu on launching the R1, future of AI hardware, and going viral at CES | E1885

38:12Anything search up to date information, that starts to slow down. If you try OpenAI in the first beginning, I haven't tried recently, I think recently improved again, but you already were talking about two to three seconds instead in comparison of 500 milliseconds. But I figure the visual part is where the most delay came from. We're talking about somewhere around, you know, eight to 10 seconds. But that's not us. That's the fastest in the industry right now. and we're working restlessly to try and figure out a way to further cut it down. But really, right now, the delay is really just search up-to-date information and vision.

38:51That's it. If you just trigger LAM stuff, that's fast. That's a no-brainer. That's very, very fast. But frustrations, let me tell you the frustrations. So, yes, number one, I don't want to carry two devices. No one wants to carry two devices. I'm not trying to convince people that this is just sexy so that maybe you want to carry No. What we can do for now, we know it cannot be an app. So same footprint as your iPhone. It's actually very, very light. It's only 110 grams. So what's 110 grams? Go to your fridge, grab two eggs, uncooked eggs. That's it. And it's light enough so that every single time I put it in my pocket, I forgot about it.

39:35And then I appreciate myself for the design of the analog push to talk button because I don't really need to take it out and look at the screen. I reach out to my pocket and I feel that button. That's actually how I use it most of the time. I just connect to my AirPods or whatever Bluetooth devices or car systems and I don't really need to look at it. I reach and feel. But still, there's a lot of things I would rather go to the phone, at least for now. First of all, heavy social features. This was not designed, at least for this generation, This was not designed for connecting all your friends and chit chat and figure out what's going on.

40:15This is more focused on task solving. So that part, unfortunately, I have to go back to the phone. Another part is... For your group chats. If you want to get in your group chats on Signal, WhatsApp, whatever your jam is, iMessage, it's not going to replace that just yet. But you could. We could. I mean, it got a tray. It got the same card. Yeah. It is a phone. I mean, come on, it is a phone. We're not trying to be a phone, but it is capable of doing all the features of your phone. Another thing is, which is, I'm not sure if it's just the fact or if it's just my angle, but phone is actually a content consuming device, right?

40:55Like if you think about a high scrolls apps on the app store right now, it's Netflix and stuff. It's TikTok, Netflix, Instagram, and all that stuff. That, you know, I mean, come on, iPhone has a better screen. Yeah, big screen, big screen, better, much better screen. I have to say that. Yeah, I, that's why, you know, when I start thinking about laser projectors, I'm like, I'm not sure, you know, like, because I showed I saw I saw the humane demo that they do the gestures to send a message. I'm like, No, I probably wouldn't do that here. You know, I know it seems crazy, like forcing it. Right now, startups have to do more with less.

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42:11If you're watching, you can see it on the screen right now. Here's the brass tacks. Wizard is going to help you go from idea to mockup in minutes. So if you're creating a product from scratch, this is going to save you so much time. Start building products today faster with 25 % off Wizard Pro at wizard.io slash twist. That's uizard.io slash twist for 25 % off. Stop wasting time and start shipping faster. The voice recognition is getting better and better. And these LLMs seem to correct errors in real time when it's transcribing. So I'll talk a little bit about that. The ability to transcribe and translate voice to text really accurately and how that's changed things because when you were running raven the speaker right it was kind of janky right wasn't it terrible voice to text yeah when i started raven that was 2013 i was actually working with sri a couple of folks in sri stanford institution that that institution later uh started nuance and nuance incubated theory so it's a long history um but i remember very clearly the first time i paid a visit to SRI, the dictation was roughly at 73%, 74%, native English, which is very, very bad.

43:31But it went up very, very quickly. Another problem is not the dictation. The problem is intended understanding. And then again, we're talking about pre-transformer era. And then back at Raven, we worked really hard on natural language processing or NLP. That was the best technology before GPT can understand you. I guess the idea is not because we didn't thought of we could design an algorithm in such a way, it's just back then we don't have strong enough computation power like GPUs, like NVIDIA GPUs to be able to run that so if you talk about intent recognition it's really really painful it's heavily human consuming because essentially all these smart speakers that I created and Alex and every previous generation, when we first started to create that, it's like you're assembling a menu to this quote-unquote AI, and you're basically hard-coding that be like, hey, here's 70 ways that you talk to the speaker.

44:29That means you want to listen to this track. Like, I want to listen to play to get it on. You know, like, there's a cluster of sentences you can describe towards the same intention. And NLP is for us to figure out that, to assemble that menu. So a lot of things were really really not ideal and i totally get a skepticism towards r1 be like hey it's a voice first device i saw i saw that i saw that that's no go i get it because we are all the same generation of consumer that still share this ptsd from early days of the very poorly exactly siri has been so frustrating for people and alexa was better but not available on your phone to the same extent google was yeah assistant never really caught on yeah and so we just assume it sucks and exactly the truth is it's much better now even using the chat gpt4 app yeah um i took my um you know the iphone 15 now has the action button yeah which is similar to what you're doing on rabbit i connected that to chat gpt4's voice interface right so i actually when i press that it goes to that uh what are the conversational i guess mode yeah in the app and it's quite nice it's a little bit slow um it's like the hardware seems to be working against it yeah whereas in yours it's going to work quickly when do you know you will have made a product that is ready to challenge the phone in your pocket and you will win the which device i go back home for if you forget your phone row you go back for it if you forget your wallet you don't go back for it you're like i forgot my wallet i got some payment options on my phone when will your device you know if you leave home without it you got to go back and get it when will you hit that milestone of i gotta turn the car around and go back and get my rabbit yeah um uh first of all it's it's such a ambitious task to challenge i'd say uh we never set up self at least mentality wise we never set it up ourselves to be like oh the whole purpose of Rabbit is to do this.

46:37It's to kill iPhone, whatever that is. But on the other hand, we understand deeply, especially given by my experience, you know, my company sold to Baidu and we were at a very exclusive working relationship that Raven still keeps Raven. But I have seen enough, not only Baidu, but Microsoft, all the other companies, how big company works. You know, I think we're at a point that we don't think we're confident to challenge right now, but we don't want to wait either like like yes you can be the user right you i i posted this on twitter i said okay you would you want to rather be the wave itself or the best server in town or that floating body in middle of the ocean right because you can only be three of those things so i think what we are is that we're not saying oh we are so ambitious and so dilutional at the same time that I have a very clear master plan.

47:32This is going to work. That's just not the nature of startup. I mean, you've seen enough of startup things. You know, you never think like that way. You're like, okay, I want to do it. I want to do it now. That's how it works. But I don't think that one thing I have strong confidence is that for all these current generation of application-based operating system, it's impossible for them to improve because technology is not, it's always not, I mean, fundamental operating OS shifts. It's not, it's never be an improvement. It's always rerun. It's always revolution. And the problem is not about technology.

48:07I think a lot of engineers having a different opinion towards engineer perspective would be like, oh, you know what? They just do this and that and Siri becomes R1 and Siri become Rabbit OS. It's not like that. The problem is their incentives behind how they make money. You know, they set up this entire application store with billions of developers, billions of apps. And all of a sudden they said, you know what, guys, no apps. How does that even work? I don't see a very smooth transition how that can happen so quickly to the point that we think we should wait a bit and further lower our risk. We cannot do that.

48:44We just start right away. But I think, consider R1 is iPod. you know it's it's it's a good form factor for a certain niche amount of requests we're talking about a slightly wider request than ipod because ipod really just to replace walkman right but but with in the ipod era you still have your blackberry phone i do that yes i i have my blackberry 800 8900 i have my ipod um but two back pockets you put one in each back pocket right exactly and it It kind of like fixing the shape, you know, especially if you're wearing jeans, you don't even want to swatch. You just, you know, keep it there. But, you know, we have our one.

49:25This is our first attempt or approach towards a future structure. You know, the future, how software will work with human, how you interact with software. But I think maybe in next year and a half and two years, we'll have a better answer. Yeah. uh and for now you're going to go after you know people who are early adopters the avant-garde people want to try it people who want to invest in the time and give you really good ideas have any of the app developers come to you directly and said oh can i just you know make stuff directly for your lamb yeah your large action model can we have an interface where you know you have your language action model, you expose us to it and Uber engineers and your engineers can be in the same space, you know, you know, collaboration space, making it operate flawlessly.

50:23It's actually happening from both sides, Jason. It's one side, yes, you know, you saw the propensity deal. That's, that's a new way. We literally handshake on Twitter. We have no, no pre communication, we just decided to do it. And now we offer the first 100 ,000 units with$200 credit per practice. If you think about the device itself, it's just$199. So it's happening from this side, company to company. But more importantly, I think the most underrated feature of RabbitOS, which is kind of experimental right now, but we're confident to roll it out, at least for the beta version, where soon after people start receiving their device is a teach mode.

51:03and how the teach mode is it works is that you actually explained that uh before is that as if monkey monkey like you go to this web portal right the rabbit hole you turn on teach mode you decide today i'm going to teach you something and it's like if you're teaching your eight-year-old children you'll be like hey come to daddy sit right here and watch exactly what i'm doing and learn from it so so if you think about neurosymbolic same metaphor and there's a psychological factor behind it is that, Jason, if I ask you to teach me Oli on skateboard, would you rather do that or not? Yeah. There's two decisions.

51:41One, you want to do it, or two, even if you want to do it, you probably wouldn't be willing to. But more importantly, if you don't know how to do Oli at all, you would just say no. Right. Correct? So you go to the teach mode as user, you know exactly how you're going to teach. Right. You're not going to teach how to use a skateboard if you've never been on it or skiing but if you said hey how do i carve skiing on it and if i opt into that it's going to be good training data is your point exactly so if there's an app that people aren't using like let's say you haven't trained twitter yet i could say hey let me train twitter of i like to go to my replies i like to go to my mentions and i like to read these out loud yeah please read me five of them very quickly but i don't need you to read me the date i just want you to read the content of it and just read me the first 200 characters not the whole thing exactly you're already using the teach mode that's the powerfulness of it so the psychological factor is you go there teach under the impression of you know exactly what you're doing so the data you connect the the you uh of course you we don't record on your local device we go we bootstrap the virtual machine and the virtual machine is like old technology so you go to virtual machine choose whatever platform you're not teach on and you go teach and that recording is very very clean so that the rabbit os can get one shot in just one shot so you're letting the entire community teach the rabbit os to build your own rabbits amazing that's how we make money by the way ah answer your question got it so i could make a rabbit which would be my way of interpreting say tiktok or social media app like we talked about and i could sell those i could sell my own rabbits to other users.

53:24Yeah. So we're not reinventing any business model. It's classic Apple App Store or Google Play Store logic. But we're not worried about making money for now because making money... Well, you just raised$10 million from Vinod. Congrats on that. He believes in it. And how big is the team? How big of a team do you need to make a hardware device like this and build this stuff out? Because we see a lot of people doing more with less. I'm curious. Yeah. So we had a full headcount, roughly around 17 people to date, but we're hiring. But I'm also working with good ODM, OEM. I had resources over the past Raven career.

54:01So it's the same team, plus, you know, Design Armand, Teenage, that helps us really a lot. But we're hiring. Yeah, we're working on the future version of LAM. So consider this is LAM 1. We have a LAMP 2 in design, which that's going to be much more interesting next year with different phone factors. But the general idea is that I've worked from my past companies that I know that if you're aiming to make money on day one, you're probably not going to be a consumer hardware company anyway. You become more like a, how do I put it, like Oracle. Well, you seem to have been very inspired by the iPod.

54:48Yes. And if you think about the iPod, my favorite iPod was the clip on I don't know if you remember the second generation of the shuffle. Yes. Oh, I mean, that was I believe. Yeah, like peak Apple insanity. It was a clip. Yes, you could it was almost like a tie clip and you could use it as a tie clip with a shorter head Airbus with a shorter headphone cable. Yes, they have to change that to its loop. Yeah, I remember that. to have it was a short headphone cable because they knew you were going to put it above your waist you didn't need to like run it to your pocket but it also had physical controls on it yes so it was very elegant in that way but it you know it was for other people who love to have a large collection you know the the classic ipod the fat one you know the original ipods you know those were amazing just in terms of having a flywheel on it with that physicalness to it right?

55:40Then you have that you have that scroll wheel. What is this? Well, we'll do on this. Exactly. We're working on different ideas that I couldn't share much, but I can share one idea for working on. Yeah, this is how you're gonna this is how you're gonna unlock your device. Ah, so your passcode will be like a lock when you're in high school, two turns to the left two turns to the right. Ah, that's super clever. Was right. I was happy to clips on it was happy. So I go one two three push in down one two push in up push in boom three two one whatever it is yeah that's super clever and no one's ever gonna know that right because you don't it's not even it's not even a text or anything it's just that's sick yeah yeah and so there could be different sizes of this you said like you don't actually need the screen um do you need to make your own responsive headphones or do you use bluetooth because one of the things i have a problem with is you know i have my airpod third generation it works so elegantly but i prefer uh the pixel buds i don't know if you use pixel buds but they're flush flat they're much more elegant device they work better with a ski helmet work better if you're sleeping and you want to listen to a podcast before you go to bed or an audiobook like i do yeah how do you think about that because if it was a unique headphone man would there be hardware gains or user interface gains yeah that you could achieve so definitely if you if you customize from kernel perspective you can further lower down the latency the latency is an issue especially if you if you try in car system you know that's that's why all the car series doesn't work because the car system latency is very outdated so it has a very long latency but right now it's bluetooth 5.0 which is which is by default work with any different default airpods and third-party manufacturer i'm more interested in maybe we can do a rabbit airpods but it's fully standalone that's fascinating so you put them in and it's your version of the rabbit i just talked to it and i authenticated so i just leave home with my air my rabbit airpods yeah and say hey order me an uber it says okay uber black or uber x right you say uber x i'm alone or uber you know suv and it's okay yeah boom we have oh wow that's sick and that that challenges came from one you you're waiting for a smaller chip with more power because it's little room to wiggle with you know if i do a airpod uh max i can do it now i can do it now but if you want to do it right uh there's some challenges on the base station your your case would have to have a sim card or e-sim or whatever battery life starts to come into play here yeah a lot of different issues i mean that's a sick idea though if you had over the ear headphones and the rabbit was built into it yeah then you just have those and oh my lord that'd be incredible what has anybody ever put uh a gp a cpu inside of headphones i've never seen that that would be amazing there must be some in shan shan or akihabara we could go find theoretically i mean shenzhen i already checked you know i i called my buddy i i checked uh there's there's there's yeah there's there's qualcomm there's there's apple there's two big different parties are working on that uh we're not only talking so they might come out with it you think they might come out with uh i think i think that's where everyone's working towards too but so i would put on my just what it's good i put on my apple air max whatever they call those over the ear ones.

59:10Yeah. And then I say, Hey, Siri, play me the clash. And I don't need to have my phone with me. And it's got Wi Fi and LTE belt into it. That would be amazing. And Jason, I'm going to show you something. This is the actual board of our one. It just stopped it. Okay, so it's the size of we didn't even try to make it smaller. Because because look at the phone factory fits, right? It fits easily. We didn't even try to make it smaller if i try really hard to make it smaller uh i mean definitely i mean it's half of a playing card if you cut the ace of spades in half that's about how big the the car the the the motherboard is as it were yeah so so so over the air i think we can probably do now but i want to do the airpod version yeah that's going to be a little bit challenge and also because you know you want to set it up to always listening and then the battery on the issue you know so always listening takes uh yeah a little bit more battery yeah yeah so so but i think you know i'm pretty confident in the next you know 48 months uh that's something that we can start figuring out um but another thing i think is very very good to think about and don't quote me on this i'm not i'm not leaking whatever this is just my thinking logic you know like i'm not i'm not trying to say oh this is what we're gonna do next uh this isn't the product roadmap we're just riffing here this this isn't yeah this isn't um i think a watch makes a lot of sense too uh a lot of community members already designed rabbit watch on twitter and tagged me uh amazing work um but if you think about it apple watch is probably the weakest product in their entire product line i have to say apple watch sucked until the ultra yes the ultra battery is better just the battery is better the screen size is better yeah and um i i like when i jump in the water yeah uh that it tells me how many feet i'm underwater right right it's just having the battery life actually last two days yeah it's such a game changer yeah compared to the other one and yeah the screen being i don't know what is the screen 50 bigger than the other ones it's 25 it's very bright and underneath it's very bright and that's a big factor too i mean the way i put it this from my old my own experience that i said maybe apple watch is the weakest in their entire product line is that it's an accessory it's not a standalone device they really haven't focused on it as a standalone device i agree they said it's a standalone device i understand you can make phone calls i understand someone sucks for phone calls some youtubers carry that for a week you know i saw the youtuber challenge that yes i think someone like really like have their apple watch for like a week it works but it's not designed for it um i think there's a good opportunity or ideas in general that because i'm start pay attention to kids and what is that i start to pay attention to how future generation like kids how kids kids yes how kids are using their devices is oh yeah this is one of the community i just wanted to show this while we're on air this is a fan made this so for people who are watching it's the iconic orange and it is gorgeous and then it's got like uh you know the the crown but the the best part about it is it has a pop-up camera and the screen is designed with a little carve out of a pop-up camera completely impractical but awesome yeah it has preserved all the key elements right like the venting grills and all that it's super impressive but how did this community start by the way i just have to stop there for a second because did you goose this community of lunatics in industrial design or is it they follow teenage what is it called teenage um engineering engineering is it that teenage engineering inspires p other engineering students or people because it's nuts to watch how many people have started to make derivative products out of your iconic yeah and i it is iconic i know you don't want to say that but it's such an iconic a device that it's inspiring people to make very refined product extensions for you for free yeah exactly so so i think first of all a huge credit to teenage engineering if you ever ever worked in design or industry design or music for one day they're a god tier they're like the ultimate avatar uh at least that's my opinion i don't care if anyone agrees or disagree with me they're in my heart the god tier um so that's one part another part is jason phones are just too boring now like industrial design is pretty much that like explain that yeah because i can't tell the difference between my last five iphones It's all the same to me.

1:04:01Exactly. Like phone companies, they set on their current phone factor. Usually, let's think about a phone time, right? Let's think about sidekicks, N-Gage. Let's think about those things, you know, like flipping Nokia, like spinning Nokia. I think it's been so long. If you look at the past, especially past five years, I think a very good example from Samsung and Apple. you know now it is iconic i saw an iphone i know it's iphone i saw a galaxy i know it's a galaxy phone yes but i also can tell you 100 the next generation will be look like the same absolutely with a new different color and this is because of manufacturing these things are so expensive to start a new version it's exactly like cars yes you know once you make the toyota prius every time you redesign it yeah you're basically restarting like a whole production line and you don't get any of the scale so there it's a scale business they're trying to get massive margin in a competitive space so they don't change it yeah but i guess steve jobs doesn't give a he does not give a you can be sure he did not give a it just it just that the spirit is generally dead and i think we're not helping we're not we're not we're not basically doing this it's just it's a common feeling towards all of us as consumers that that's that if you bring something new and fresh yes it is it is relatively cheap yes we're a new company but people see the joy of it by looking at it and then then that inspired them to create their own iteration of it which is another round of ripple and this ripple just start getting bigger and bigger and i really really understand why call pay started nothing in the beginning we have a couple chats you know his his whole company's position is phones are boring that's it that's why there's and i mean the nothing phone is wild what what do you love about the nothing phone what is it that uh inspires you about it i think i think they are probably the most engineering uh and industrial design uh invested company come you know given by the fact they're start they're still a startup most of the startup wouldn't invest this much into both of these fundamental areas to make a product i think i give you i give them huge credit for that yeah um and you know i i haven't developed directly you know uh involved in in their management or anything like that but you know being with teenage seeing this company from beginning uh it's quite a journey it's quite a journey it's very challenging you know their stuff is isn't cheap you can tell it isn't cheap so it's not cheap it's a luxury item and they're trying to make it's it is a luxury item or not uh well it's still a little bit cheaper a hundred dollars cheaper than the flagship android phones you know okay but but it's not as cheap as like shenzhen stuff yeah so so i guess you know the younger generation if you think about younger generation like all the all the kids that born after 2000, they, when they grow up, have the first access to the phone.

1:07:30And then for the past five years, it's the same boring stuff. How crazy is that? And think about when we started to have our phones. We have 200 different things to choose from. Right? And we're getting a phone just because it's cool. That's it. I think that part is mostly gone. And you're right, it's because of what's behind the the the manufacturer logistic stuff um but i think it's good for us because we're so small and so in the beginning that we can take this you this massive risk yeah you can take the risk we can take this uh but but also you have nothing to lose you know like if you make this form factor and it sucks you change it and you try the next one and you try the next one until the audience response if apple screwed up an iphone 15 the stock would lose 500 billion dollars yeah in fact when they've had problems shipping problems etc something gets screwed up they lose 100 billion dollars in market cap and then everybody loses their mind i mean this is one of the great things about being small yeah yeah and that's exactly the reason why i don't think syria and google assistant or alexa can catch up so quickly i think they have to throw it away i mean honestly i i think the technology has moved so fast that siri and alexa need to be thrown in the garbage and they should just start a new project it would actually go faster yes yes yes i agree with that the technological debt of siri must be insane the entire paradigm has shifted right to lambs and llms and they're not built on that yeah i mean it's a 10 year old product you know so toss it in the garbage i mean that's i mean this is what you know if you look at what elon's doing with self-driving yeah i think he doesn't have that fear of saying hey we built this software to stay in the lane but it's not you know there's new technology that's going to disrupt it we need to move to that now the hardware stack may not change right right you know the hardware stack could be the exact same for the iphone yeah but siri has to die you know one thing i i want to give huge credit to elon is that you know there's certain ways he thinks that i think really really resonance with me uh one example is that if you look at the all the cables in a cybertruck i'm not sure if you ordered one but i have one coming in yeah if you if you look at how they redesign the cables it's crazy because all the cars have like what like now like 10 miles long of cables all around all wrapping in different pillars and he just doesn't like that he said okay that's too complicated let's make one big fat cable and with two plugs and that's it um i think this is this is this is some thoughts that really pushes a lot of innovations and and you know from where we are benefiting from it is that like you said we're small we take the risk but this is how we want to think about things you know like like we're not saying oh maybe we wait for two more years there's more api we can work with maybe we can you know suit up and walk into four apps offices talking to their executives and maybe we can get a deal we're like okay how about we get rid of that all that we don't work with apis we don't work with with apps we just do something from ground up i think we hugely benefit from thinking like that yeah the cyber truck went to this 48 volt system um which reduced the what the total wiring was reduced like i think it was 80 percent in the car yeah yeah it's bonkers and you know now i guess the only downside to that is if you lose that cable yeah the car is done right you lose so much but then the upside to that is if there is a problem it's easier to diagnose you swap the cable out yeah i mean but it's hard to lose the table because you got bulletproof panels, right?

1:11:20Yeah, exactly. You can't I mean, Joe Rogan tried to hit it with an arrow and it didn't work. And he's a pretty good shot. So you're good. You're good. Listen, Jesse, you're like an amazing guest. I want you to come back when it ships. When are people going to get these in their hands? Do you think what's the best estimate? Okay, so we will have our promise date is Easter, which is March 31st. That's where we start shipping. where we're working with local compliance and legal teams to get international orders shipped as fast as we can. Easter seems reasonable. Easter seems reasonable. Knowing that we said, okay, the international batches could be June, July, but we're trying to move everything faster than it should be.

1:12:01But we can allocate maybe up to 50 to 100, somewhere in that range of media test devices. Great. Thank you for including me. I'm super excited. Yeah, you already signed yourself up. I know that. So that's expecting somewhere mid-October. So in the next two, three weeks. And I will start rolling out all the demos as I showed on a keynote starting from next week. I already showed a couple bunch here and there. But like I said, latency is something that we want to really, really focus on. How many years have you been working on this, by the way? I think this is something people don't appreciate. that this is not something you've been working on for six months no um the original idea like i said rabbit is basically raven 2.0 it carries a lot of the it's the same original passion and carries a lot of the legacy but if you want me won't have me today you know backtrack to day one i actually had my yc application video that community members put up from from my my like youtube channel and that was dated as nine years ago, nine years ago, when you started this journey, two companies ago, and then this company you formed a couple of years ago, right 2020 or something?

1:13:152020. Yeah, it's just it just, you know, the idea was always right. I guess the direction was always correct. But unfortunately, like I said, 10 years ago, we don't have all these cards on the table. Like the intention wasn't soft. There isn't there isn't GPU for us to or CPU for us to use utilize at this current rate. So I feel like I just waited till till you know the hardware the infrastructure had to catch up to the vision and that's basically it exactly and and yeah i will say that you know it's it's been sticking with my hand for so so long and that that also explains jason that we're moving so fast we're not we're not starting from nothing and in two months and and build a hardware that's impossible right yeah the the ability to create a hardware startup today is much different than when you started 10 years ago exactly yeah i mean the sophistication level in shenzhen as just one example when i went to shenzhen for the first time i think it was 2006 or 7 okay it was i it was so rare to see a an american a white person that when i went there yeah i i kid you not 20 school students surrounded me to touch me and take a picture with me because they'd never seen because they had come down from the north there's a there's a famous um um amusement park in shenzhen and it's not for american tourists it's for chinese you know native uh nationals and i went to it just to check it out and i literally got stopped you know 10 times just people wanted to touch me and take a picture now there's a lot of americans there's a lot of startups there and literally when i was there in 2007 it's 15 years ago i guess there more there were maybe like a tall building 30-story building yeah yeah and for four blocks around it were all parking lots yeah and you would drive from one building to another you could see the building you were driving to but it was like driving through the desert and you know what you see that in um the middle east now some of the regions there were like boom a tall building comes up boom another tall building comes up and in between it there's no infrastructure just like a road but nothing else it was great now you go over there my lord i i left my i was originally born in china but i was raised on you know what where western style family uh you know like my parents be like once you're 15 you're on your own i started learning right after i i where did you grow up i grew up in xian where the terracotta warrior is but i oh yeah but my parents start teaching me english on day one and uh and then they're like once you're 15 you're on your I literally left my house at the age of 15.

1:15:56I got a transfer opportunity, briefly started at a high school in Singapore, and then I went to UK. So I graduated from University of Liverpool, mathematics, and then spent another year and a half in London. And just to hang out with a whole bunch of artists, UAL. so I don't really understand China now I've been living the country so long but I believe you it's crazy and the heavy ODM OEM infrastructure that they set it up over the past decades is still at least serving Apple all the iPhones were made there but you know I think a lot of things are start shifting a bit because i think um what i can see from hardware perspective is that a lot of things are become modular but on the other hand uh core chips are become centralized so the core chips are being centralized t uh tswc uh yeah tsmc semiconductor yes and nvidia are locking that down or, you know, arm and other folks are locking it down.

1:17:12Yeah. But the components, anybody can make them and just plug them into those CPUs and anybody can anyone can make it. But I think no one still beats the shender speed. That's a cool part. That's a cool part. Yeah, they can they can fabricate something for you that's brand new in days and have it back to your office in America. Exactly. Iterate. I mean, the iteration cycle used to be months. Yeah. Now it's weeks. Or is now it's definitely weeks. And if you have some special resources, you can make it happen in days for sure. Which is wild when you think about the it used to be like quarterly, you could yes, get your product, you know, iterated on I know, because I have a bunch of hardware startups, I tried to invest in 10 years ago, and it was just the iteration process was too slow.

1:18:00And you couldn't be nimble. Now you can get it done in weeks, maybe even under a week. That's extraordinary. Right? Yeah. But but I see the the chips are getting centralized, which is not very good for startup, to be honest. Why? Oh, because you know, you're gonna work with only selected partners. And then they have so many big clients to work with. And then they're like, Okay, if you don't sell more than this number, we don't even talk to you. Got it. So yeah, if you want to get the attention of Nvidia in the age where Facebook's buying 10 ,000. Yeah, you know, each 100 is going to be hard. What do you think about risk and the open source chip movement?

1:18:39Is that going to have an impact at some point in the future? risk for and stuff? I think I think it's more from how you want to design a system. A lot of people are debating, you know, I've been debating myself and be debating with my own community on this court. A lot of people are like, like, hey, can we make a local LM? Right? Can we can we run x amount of features on device instead of in the cloud yeah um for me i get it from the privacy reasons i get it i think that's that's probably the only valid reasons but why why are you even willing to run it on local because yeah and how many people care about that very small number of people if you encrypt my instructions do them in the cloud and then delete them yeah what's the i mean or you delete them every whatever 60 days or something you may need to have them for some historical purposes.

1:19:28It's just there's a huge dispute between academic perspective and consumer perspective. Consumers have voted. They don't care. They don't care. Exactly. But I think the way I bring this case is that there is one way that we can work further towards like Chromebook ways, right? Like even the operating system is in the cloud. If we go that route, then we don't worry about chips because you don't need that chip to run locally to heavily do the tasks it's a terminal right you turn the device into a terminal it's a terminal uh i'm actually pro that route you know uh just because from consumer perspective why the heck do i need a cpu in my car leader box yeah why the heck do i need that and i think you know everything is smart the tv is smart and everything's smart uh i i actually i was setting up a little apartment because I'm getting too busy.

1:20:23I stayed out of office. I was setting up the TV and then I need to do the airplay thing from my content of computer. So I went by, I bought a Apple TV and then I bought a smart TV from Samsung and they both have Netflix. Yes. And so now you have two remotes and one of the Samsung remote has the Netflix logo on it. It's like, why did I buy the Apple TV? Exactly. And then Samsung had their own way of Chromecast or whatever. Yes. I think, you know, then if you think about what's happened behind is that, do we need all that? And trace further down, do we need all that chips? You know, do we really need a Qualcomm in your TV if your TV can just project things?

1:21:08And that's the TV should do, right? Yes. So I think, you know, it's a funny, it's an interesting trend to watch, especially in the next couple of years. I always see who can get upper hand, you know, the local guy versus cloud guy and how that works. But yeah, I do agree with Elon Musk and a couple of other folks that we will have a power shortage if the AI runs like that. Oh, we'll have a shortage of actual power to homes, to data centers. We're going to need much more power because these things run hot. Yes. And also, we don't really have like, transistors and transformers to be able to handle the cluster of the GPU.

1:21:49If we keep the current pace. So a lot of basic infrastructure to look at. But for us, you know, for now, now this will get people interested in nuclear again if we start having uh an energy crisis because of so many h100s and then eventually 200s whatever being deployed people are going to say you know what we just need to start building some nuclear reactors next to these data centers and putting in massive solar farms and really having much more much cheaper energy right um which you know people haven't had to think about it all that much because we we've been able to keep up but if all of a sudden we can't solve cancer because we don't have enough energy we have enough chips to cure cancer yeah we have that software we have the chips we don't have enough energy to put at this because of custom medicine or something you know for me it's how far away if you're a consumer how far away from the actual problem right if you're very very far away you don't you don't care but if you're if you're next next to it and then and then all of sudden become a problem so so i think you know like i said we are we don't know whether this is the correct phone factor you know we don't know but we know this is the lowest risk we can pull off and we know the lamb is most important yeah i mean the lamb is like a sniper shot you can just very easily get accomplished the task and you know when we started in the industry i remember in the 90s there was a company called general magic oh yeah and they were making a device that had agents and you would tell the agent i want to fly to paris yeah and i mean it would know you're in new york and it would go out try to find tickets for you go to uh literally go to a human yeah uh um travel agent and then get try and get the results back and then put them into some format that you could say okay i like that itinerary yeah yeah um and it now here we are uh 2005 2015 2025 yeah it took 30 years basically to have that work yeah funny enough general magic was a internal apple project that apple don't really understand and spin it off and their logo is a rabbit in a hat ah right i remember that and the rabbit would pop its head out in this little animation this was i remember sony made the first actual hardware for general magic and it was some early iteration of the pdas and stuff yeah yeah personal digital um assistance they were I remember when the palm came out in New York, right, right around 97 98 99 people had a StarTac phone, and they would have a palm you take these two devices out, and you learned palm script, you learn how to do script on the touchscreen.

1:24:27And the number one application wasn't sending money. That was like what Elon and Peter Thiel were going to do, or Peter Thiel was going to do with PayPal. It was to send a business card. And then what's the latest feature of iPhone 15 is tapping the two phones together to send a business card yeah it's hilarious yeah so that's that's actually really really good intake because i deeply believe that you know human are never inventing new demands we have a certain category of demands right we want to yeah when i rest well we want to eat well and drink well and be entertained and you know be motivated and start work but technology is not reinventing new demands technology is solving the same problem over and over again, but each generation in a much more intuitive way.

1:25:14Ah, yes. And that's exactly what you said, with Palm sending that script to name card and verse it now tap to error drop. It's the same thing. It's just much, much more intuitive. And hardware is very interesting because if the hardware is intuitive enough, then the phone factor stays for a very, very long time. I never heard another Tucson company every year claiming to make a better hammer. no why because it's intuitive enough it only take it only takes your force and obey the phase claw that's it intuitively like that but then if you think about computers and mobile devices there's long there's long long way to go long way to go yeah long way to go and and that's why we decided to take a little step forward we're like okay i understand you guys are skeptical about this and that but we have to try we have to do this at least you know like there's something about the instant nature of this that i think you know if you save people i've always felt when i look at startups to invest in is this startup saving people time yeah is it saving people money or is it entertaining them in some way right right and so if you look at your device it's going to save people time and time is the equivalent of money for some people some people have more money than time some people have more time than money yeah but generally speaking i think yours is a time-saving device and then eventually will it be entertaining it could be sure um there could be entertainment services on it but just saving people time yeah and letting them get back to their kids uh or to dinner or whatever and get off their device yeah that is extraordinary and so i think your your recognition that the latency has to change yeah massively was what sergey marissa uh and larry were obsessed with at google is how to get it faster faster faster lower the milliseconds people will search more if they made the search results faster and i think people will use ai more right if you you know can get that uh you know yeah um i can probably get your action lower i can probably get it uh by the time that you have your test device yeah it's gonna be amazing i mean just i can tell you right now the ability to order food faster i do the same order for my family for the sushi rolls that we get those like hand rolls um if i could just reorder that roll boom and the the faster i can do it and it'd be amazing all right listen jesse you're awesome when this thing launches like in three months will you come on again uh of course yeah all right here we go and maybe we'll do it in person maybe we'll do some oh you know what when you when you're ready to launch it save a couple of demos like maybe three and we'll do it live yeah we'll just do live demos why not yeah no no but we'll do it live in person, I'll get a theater and we can just sit there and talk and show a couple of live things demo or die style.

1:28:01All right, listen, if you want to learn more, or if you want to go work with Jesse and do crazy, awesome rad stuff, and cool like Steve Jobs did. How can people find out about your job openings? Oh, simple. We have a career page. We're continuously updating the roles. But just feel free to reach out to me via Twitter or feel free to send a contact at rabbit dot tech email. Okay, just go to our websites, drop out the email. We are website is rabbit.tech. Yeah, rabbit.tech. And make sure to check on the research page for the detailed breakdown of lamb, how it works. Yes, you have a really cool page about how lamb works.

1:28:39Yeah. So yeah, just send us an email. We'll get it there. I mean, what are you hiring for? What positions are like the hardest? Yeah, so it's basically we need to expand most of the product related roles in every aspect because we're trying to catch up with the demand. There's a lot of things that we're trying to build for the future. More importantly, we want to set up a LAM research like small LAM research team just working for the future iterations of LAM. Are you in person now? You're in person in Santa Monica? Trying to get people in an office? Yeah, but if you're good, it can be flexible.

1:29:20flexible but you need to be really good if you're really good flexible but if you're very good let me tell you something living in santa monica there's a lot of great restaurants it's an incredible lifestyle man just move and and hang out with jesse in santa monica it's a great place to raise more money so that we can afford you guys but yeah that's my you'll be fine i think you'll be fine all right everybody we'll see you next time when this week is startups bye bye