The Rabbit R1 will receive live info from Perplexity’s AI ‘answer engine’

CES 2024 darling Rabbit has announced a partnership with Perplexity that will link the “conversational AI-powered answer engine” to the R1, a $199 Teenage Engineering-designed AI gadget that’s already sold through 50,000 preorders. Unlike LLMs that can only reference data up to a certain date in the past, what they’re pitching for the R1 is a built-in search engine with “live up to date answers without any knowledge cutoff.”

According to Perplexity co-founder Aravind Srinivas, who announced the deal in a live Spaces broadcast with Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu, the first 100,000 Rabbit R1 purchases will also come with one year of its Perplexity Pro subscription. The plan includes access to newer LLMs like GPT-4 and normally costs $20 per month.

In a post on X, Rabbit said that Perplexity will work behind the scenes on its device “along with other leading LLMs” that are so far unnamed, all without a subscription.

Featuring a 2.88-inch touchscreen, scrolling navigation wheel, and a rotating camera, the R1 is pitched as a pocket-sized universal controller for your various apps, capable of everything from sending messages to selecting songs to making online orders thanks to “Large Action Model” AI.

Perplexity AI, meanwhile, combines search with LLMs like OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 to face off with Google, Bing, and all of the other new AI-powered challengers.