Following in Steve Job's footsteps and Rabbits?

An AI Store

What happened?

A few days ago OpenAI (the company that makes ChatGPT) finally announced they are going to release a GPT Store - their marketplace for what are called custom GPTs.

Why does this matter?

Up until now the meteoric rise of OpenAI and chatGPT has been solely down to the products they have built and taken to market, which has worked incredibly well as they have built something completely game-changing. However, if you are OpenAI right now and your goal is total world domination to leave an even larger mark on the world how might you do it?

Well, they’ve chosen to create an ecosystem for other people to use the technology they have built and do interesting and creative things with it, and then launch it through their own app store.

This is exactly what Apple did after launching the iPhone. Up until that point, almost all the software that was running on Apple devices was made in-house, but when they released the iTunes store (who still remembers when it was called that!?) it meant that anyone in the world instantly had access to millions of people’s app creations. Apps like Snapchat, TikTok, Whatsapp and millions of others are all primarily accessed through the app store.

This is and has been fantastic for Apple ($85 billion in revenue in 2021) but also great for users of iPhones who now have almost infinite choices on what they can do on their devices. If you'd have said to Steve Jobs in 2008 that people would be pointing their phones in the sky and tracking the exact location of planes, or put the entire financial banking system on notice with the rise in neo-banks (Revolut, Monzo etc), he probably would have said “yes, what were you expecting”. Ok well, the generational visionary Steve Jobs probably wouldn't be the right person to ask, but anyone else would have been at the very least incredibly surprised.

What might the future hold?

The genius of the app store is not in any given app but the power of having 1000s of them. In the tech world, we call this a network effect. It is when a new additional user adds value for all existing users; marketplaces like app stores have powerful network effects. Why?

Because to date, all OpenAI can launch is what they build but with the GPT store, that changes. Now millions of developers worldwide can contribute their code to OpenAI’s platforms, bringing new value to millions of existing users and all the people yet to sign up.

This might be one of the ways OpenAI entrenches its domination, but with that said, this still feels early with a lot more to come from other players. In other words, watch this space.

Will

Rabbits

Last week we had CES, one of the world’s biggest tech conferences. It’s held in Vegas and plays host to some of the biggest tech announcements of the year. The product that took the internet by storm last week was from a company called Rabbit.

What the f*ck is the Rabbit R1?

An LLM-powered operating system (OS) on a small piece of hardware. But what is it really? The founders of Rabbit have the conviction that your phone is the wrong interface for modern-day existence. They believe that the concept of the app-based OS on a 7-inch screen doesn’t make sense given the rise of LLMs. The other way to think about this is that the most normal form of interaction for humans is natural language. It is how we understand the world around us but we are forced to conduct our lives on apps, through buttons and multiple screens. Rabbit R1 is meant to fix that.

How does it work?

The theory goes that the LLM can sign into all your services and then learn how to interact with Uber’s, Airbnb's, and Instacart’s web pages and then, as a result, do the things you need - i.e. you take a picture of a recipe on the R1 and tell it to order those ingredients on Instacart (US version of Ocado). It won’t be using any of the APIs or data hooks, it just learns to use it as a human would.

I am incredibly dubious of how smoothly this will function but here is the keynote (Skip to 12 minutes for the demo):

Why does it matter?

I think the Rabbit R1 is symbolic of a broader and more interesting theme. In every platform shift, whether it was the internet, cloud or mobile, people first started to adapt these technologies for their existing use cases and then began to build fundamentally new things from the ground up.

And we are seeing this with AI. First companies try an bake LLMs into their existing products; everyone is launching a new chatbot or AI-powered feature. However, at some point, a company will come along and have built not an “AI-powered” process or app but a completely new foundation with AI. Rabbit isn’t just an iPhone with a better Siri but maybe the first glimpse at something else.

In 2003, a few years before the iPhone, Sony Ericsson released the P900 with a flip keyboard and a stylus; one of the first hints at a touch screen. Apple would go on to eviscerate both Sony Ericsson and Blackberry a few years later, completely rethinking what it means to build a phone. Could the Rabbit R1 be a hint of the past to come?

Jack