Last Updated: January 21, 2024, 16:00 IST
Nadella has been busy handling Microsoft’s shift into AI with OpenAI and other tools
Microsoft chief Nadella is impressed with a new AI device that aspires to replace smartphones in people’s lives.
Microsoft has been in the thick of AI action over the past few months and the company is clearly in the mix for anything unique that comes to the market. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was speaking in an interview, where he talked about the influence of CES and which products caught his eye at the CE 2024 event earlier this month.
Nadella went on to credit one product and even compared it with the launch of the first-ever iPhone by Steve Jobs back in the late 2000s.
The Microsoft chief was impressed by the Rabbit R1 AI device, which he claims could be the future of a natural interface. “I thought the demo of the Rabbit OS and the device was fantastic. I think I must say, after Jobs and the launch of iPhone, probably one of the most impressive presentations I’ve seen of capturing the vision of what is possible going forward for what is an agent-centric Operating System (OS) interface,” Nadella was quoted saying by Bloomberg.
It is interesting to hear Nadella talk up the R1 AI device, especially when his company is heavily involved in this field and almost got OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as its Chief of AI division in a whirlwind sequence of events last month. AI is definitely shaping up the future of the tech industry, which is invariably going to come at the cost of job losses, something we are seeing recently at Google, Amazon, and Meta among others.
So what is Rabbit R1? It is a $200 (Rs 17,000 approx) device that performs in-app actions on your behalf. The device uses a Large Action Model to do the tasks for you, such as ordering food or cabs. The R1 hope to replace the smartphone for people. The device has a 2.88-inch touch screen that’s housed in a handheld console-like body. It reminds you of the PlayDate console, which plays retro-style games.
It is powered by a 2.3GHz MediaTek processor, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. It also has a rotating camera for optics. To use it, you have to press the “Push-to-Talk” button and this activates the Rabbit OS, and it starts listening for prompts.
