Rabbit R1 taps Perplexity for live AI search
Rabbit just teamed up with Perplexity to bring live, real-time web search to its $199 R1 pocket companion, eliminating knowledge cutoff dates entirely. Even better, the first 100,000 buyers get a free one-year subscription to Perplexity Pro, which normally runs $20 a month. It basically turns the quirky handheld into a real-time answer engine right out of the box.
Rabbit is sweetening the deal on its retro-cool AI gadget with a partner promo that technically costs more than the device itself.
Fresh off its viral debut at CES 2024, Rabbit announced a partnership with Perplexity to bake the AI answer engine directly into the R1. In a live Spaces conversation on X, Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu and Perplexity co-founder Aravind Srinivas revealed that the first 100,000 buyers of the $199 R1 will get a full year of Perplexity Pro for free.
Considering Perplexity Pro costs $20 a month, that is a $240 subscription bundled into a sub-$200 handheld.
Plugging the real-time knowledge gap
The Teenage Engineering-designed R1 had already racked up over 50,000 preorders before this announcement.
Its core pitch relies on a proprietary Large Action Model, which acts like an automated finger running around your smartphone apps to book rides, play songs, and order takeout.
What it lacked was a rock-solid way to handle live queries without running into training cutoffs. That is where Perplexity steps in. By routing web queries through its conversational search engine, the R1 can pull down up-to-date answers in real time without requiring owners to purchase an extra subscription.
Rabbit also noted on X that Perplexity will run in the background alongside other leading LLMs that have not been named yet.
Why it matters
For anyone on the fence about dropping $199 on a brand-new hardware category, Rabbit basically just took away the downside. Even if the R1 ends up sitting on your desk as an orange fidget toy, that one-year Perplexity Pro code covers the hardware cost on day one, giving you access to frontier models like GPT-4.
Strategically, this is brilliant for both sides. Rabbit gets instant live search infrastructure without having to crawl the web from scratch, while Perplexity seeds its premium tier directly into 100,000 early tech adopters who actually use AI daily.
The lingering question is execution. Stringing together third-party LLMs, web search, and a fragile app-controlling agent system is an engineering minefield. If the R1 stutters, users will not blame Perplexity’s search index or unnamed model providers; they will blame the cute orange box in their pocket.
Sources (1)
- theverge.com(opens in a new tab)Originaltheverge.com