One of the standout gadgets at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the rabbit r1, will use Perplexity AI technology to answer user queries, both companies said in a statement.
Perplexity noted that the first 100,000 r1 buyers will receive a free year of Perplexity Pro.
The $200 r1 made the rounds at CES as an AI-first gadget that saves you the hassle of pulling out your phone for tasks like performing web searches, playing a song on Spotify, and ordering a taxi. The device does not have a monthly subscription at this time.
The device, designed by Teenage Engineering, features a 2.88-inch touchscreen, a push-to-talk button, a camera, a speaker, and two microphones.
The company has already sold 50,000 devices in pre-orders. Earlier today, it opened pre-orders for the 6th production batch with another 50,000 devices. Rabbit said that customers living in the EU and the UK will all receive their device by the end of July, even if they just pre-order a device from the 6th batch.
Perplexity uses a combination of its own AI model as well as third-party models—Google’s Gemini, Mistra 7B, Anthropic’s Claude 2.1, and OpenAI’s GPT-4—to get accurate information from the web. The tool has a chatbot interface on web and mobile apps to allow users to ask questions in natural language. While Perplexity’s solution is different from traditional search engines, it competes with Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Copilot along with You.com in the GenAI search space.
Earlier this month, Perplexity AI raised $73.6 million in investment — at a $520 million valuation — led by IVP with additional investment from NEA, Databricks Ventures, Nvidia, former Twitter VP Elad Gil, CFO Shopify advisor Tobi Lutke, ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch and Jeff Bezos.
