I don’t think that’s the pudding. The device had a high bar for entry with its price and was a very novel tech device. Most people interested in the concept likely were reticent to pre-order and wanted to wait for early adopter reports to surface. I maintain that there is a viable market and sufficient enthusiasm for the technology / concept that the company promised, but obviously not the one they delivered.
I mean, sure. Several startups are making bank selling AI, not to individuals, but to companies. There is no money to be made long term on mediocre chatbots. No matter in what form factor they come, and unfortunately, this and the rabbit thing poisoned the market and clearly marked anything AI as a scam on buyer’s minds.
Edit: also, if the hype were really that high for such a device, then the rabbit should’ve sold a lot more units, since it was the budget version of the humane pin. But that wasn’t the case either. And now everyone knows both companies were just pump and dump scams.
Rabbit r1 garnered $10million in pre-order sales. How many should it have sold to impress you? The first 5 batches I think sold out within a day or days, production of the units appeared to be the bottleneck until people actually got a hold of them and reported on how awful they were.
You just seem bent on this whole issue. Is there a point you want to make? Or are you just upset about AI stuff in general?
My point is that the hype is very intense, but not massively distributed. I just try to promote critical thinking and reasoning by calling out bullshitters and retconners. Rabbit r1 sold 50000 units in a few days, that is in fact impressive, and a sign of a core audience that is very passionate about a concept. Of course, before it came out that they were in fact a scam company.
But, let’s look at the big picture. Worldwide, over 4 000 000 cellphones are sold…every day. Even if we look at just the US market, we are talking about 300 000 cellphone sales per day. This puts things in perspective. Tech enthusiast, compulsive buyers and obsessive nerds might hype up things to the moon and back. But the fact of the matter is that they are not representative of the market. The whole market of potential buyers of a computing device as a whole were at best mildly curious, and at worst entirely oblivious of the existence of the r1 and the humane pin.
