I can’t take this company seriously after all the R1 nonsense. I get that no product is perfect in its first version but it sure feels malicious how they fooled everyone with what they promised vs what they delivered.
Fwiw Teenage Engineering is a design firm who was originally contracted by Rabbit to design the physical device. I don't think they had anything to do with the functionality.
While Rabbit Inc is a separate entity, they are more deeply intertwined than a mere design contract. Rabbit's CEO, Jesse Lyu, is on TE's board of directors. TE's CEO, Jesper Kouthoofd, is employed by Rabbit as "Chief Design Officer".
That’s a good point, I guess they didn’t have any hand in the software…just seems icky to me.
I trusted the product mainly because of their name, it’s hard for me to understand how they didn’t see what the underlying product was when they attached their name to it.
Teenage Engineering use a type of design that is intended to obfuscate the functionality of the device. For example, their Pocket Operator series use LCD displays which have very little utility to the experience of music-making. The OP1 has an OLED display which mostly displays non-sequitur nonsense.
Those of us who despise Teenage Engineering are reacting to a design ethos which devalues the users knowledge and understanding of what they are doing, over whimsical non-sequitur. You're not getting a musical instrument - you're getting a device, which despite itself, can nevertheless be used to make some kind of music.
That's the beauty of music, not the device. You can make music with anything.
So the feeling among those of us who also make musical instruments is that Teenage Engineering are packaging up an inherent feature of music and selling it to people in a fancy way - they don't really care about the music-making features, which are almost secondary to their effort to design aesthetically appealing, moderately functional, expensive toys.
And in that light, it makes complete sense that they would involve themselves in the Rabbit R1. The impression is that Teenage Engineering kind of despise their customers, who they think are dumb, and they therefore invest in non-sequitur aesthetics in lieu of smart design that pushes the industry forward. Teenage Engineering ship exploitation and ridicule - they don't make finely crafted instruments for musicians to hone their skills. Most great musicians who play with an OP1 and make music with it, do so despite the devices' many roadblocks to creativity.
Wow love it, great work on this! I think you've tapped into a nice market, trying to reproduce marketing dept. designs into HTML templates are always a pain.
Wow, some of those shots are so close to being unnoticeable. That one of the eye close up is insane.
It’s interesting reading all the comments, I think both sides to the “we should be scared” are right in some sense.
These models currently give some sort of super power to experts in a lot of digital fields. I’m able to automate the mundane parts of coding and push out fun projects a lot easier today. Does it replace my work, no. Will it keep getting better, of course!
People who are willing to build will have a greater ability to output great things. On the flip side, larger companies will also have the ability to automate some parts of their business - leading to job loss.
At some point, my view is that this must keep advancing to some sort of AGI. Maybe it’s us connecting our brains to LLMs through a tool like Neuralink. Maybe it’s a random occurrence when you keep creating things like Sora. Who knows. It seems inevitable though doesn’t it?
One of things I've loved about HN was the quality of comments. Whether broad or arcane, you had experts the world over who would tear the topic apart with data and a healthy dose of cynicism. I frequently learned more from the debate and critique than I did from the "news" itself.
I don't know what is it about AI and current state of tech, but the discourse as of late has really taken a nosedive. I'm not saying that any of this conjecture won't happen, but the acceleration towards fervor and fear mongering on the subject is bordering on religiosity - seriously, it makes crypto bros look good.
And yeah -- looks like some cool new tech from OpenAI, and excited when I can actually dig in. Would also love it if I could hire their marketing department.
Many people here have a lucrative career in traditional fields, big tech, etc.
Working in those fields is good. Building "products" is good (even if that only means optimizing conversion rates and pushing ads). Doing well in the traditional financial sense (stocks and USD) is good.
Humans seems to always find a way to make it work, so I’d tell them to enjoy their younger years and be curious. Lots of beauty in this world and even with a shit ton of ugly stuff, we somehow make it work and keep advancing forward.
