Rabbit was once an NFT company that it wants you to forget about

The Rabbit R1 is a pocketable AI assistant that’s arrived alongside questionable reviews at best. Criticized for its slow responses, poor battery life, and an existence that’s made defunct by modern smartphone capabilities, many are wondering what the point behind it, and by extension the company, actually is. Things are now going from bad to worse for Rabbit, as it’s now been revealed that the company was once an NFT company that pulled the entire project that people had invested thousands of dollars into.

Emily Shepherd took to X (formerly Twitter) to dissect the history of Rabbit, and how its history began as a company called Cyber Manufacture Co. We have independently verified many of the claims made here, including the existence of these past sites and the people involved. Aaron Li, one of the people listed on the original GAMA site and one of the developers behind GAMA, has confirmed on X that it’s the same team, too.

The history of Rabbit

Cyber Manufacture Co focused on the metaverse

Source: Cyber Manufacture Co

[crypto-donation-box]

Remember NFTs? Non-Fungible Tokens? They were a Web3-based fad for a while that had inherent ties to cryptocurrency, but many lauded them for the potential technical impact they could have. Alongside genuine adoration from some tech enthusiasts were a number of individuals and companies that saw an opportunity to make a lot of money, and so many Web3-based start-ups took to the internet to try and cash in on the trend. Naturally, the bubble eventually burst, and most companies built around Web3 are gone now. And that includes Cyber Manufacture Co.

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To rewind a bit to the premise behind Cyber Manufacture Co, its main project was “GAMA”, an Unreal Engine 5-based metaverse, playable by purchasing a GAMA NFT. You paid in Ethereum and purchased a character based on the role you wanted to play, and anything from an engineer, a cook, or even a captain was fair game. The higher the rank, the higher the cost and a captain could set you back one whole Ethereum. For context, at the time, a captain could have set you back upwards of $2000.

Jesse Lyu, current CEO of Rabbit, was at the forefront of the project, giving progress reports in the GAMA Discord and answering questions from people. On May 10th, 2023, he promised that “The Quantum Engine” would come to GAMA, where the Quantum Engine website that he linked now redirects to Rabbit’s current website.

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Source: Quantum Engine

Later, in August 2023, the “Quantum Engine” became OS2, a personalized operating system that could do things for you like order groceries. There was a demo you could try out, but at the time, GAMA members weren’t told anything about what was happening. The AI engine that was supposed to supercharge their metaverse experience had seemingly disappeared and gone elsewhere, In November, the company then announced that GAMA was going open source in order to keep “GAMA living forever.”

However, two weeks before that announcement, Cyber Manufacture Co. had already submitted filings to rename itself to Rabbit Inc., and again neglected to tell GAMA’s customer base. Jesse Lyu was also spotted telling users that “we are still here building and nothing will stop us,” in one of his last messages in the GAMA Discord in 2023. Since then, the entire GAMA project has more or less disappeared, with all social media accounts wiped from the internet, all official videos removed, and official sites either re-directing to Rabbit or being taken down entirely.

To make matters worse, Lyu, when asked by Shepherd what happened to GAMA, gave the following response in the Rabbit Discord.

it was fun during covid that i work with couple of folks to build a unity project and i made a decision to disconnect from it and open sourced the project on github and once the initial training result from LAM came in – i immediately focus only on rabbit. for the record rabbit has nothing todo with any crypto/web3 and never will.

Given that people had given their own money towards the GAMA project, I imagine that many of them would take issue with the framing of this response from Lyu. When Shepherd mentioned Lyu’s response in the GAMA Discord, it was the first that some members had heard conclusively that the project was apparently dead.

Since then, Aaron Li has told Protos “I believe removing videos promoting GAMA is the right thing to do… It sends a message on what the team wants to do and reduces the risk of scams in the name of Rabbit or GAMA.”

What this means for Rabbit

A recent outage spells what can happen if Rabbit does this again

While this is a cautionary tale for people who are interested in NFTs and Web3, it also spells a potential disaster for early adopters of Rabbit’s R1. As demonstrated recently, any outage renders your Rabbit R1 useless, and given that the company has been very intent on making it clear that the hardware works in conjunction with the cloud, a similar situation would render your $200 investment worthless.

In this instance, you’re getting in on the ground floor of a product that is run by people who have demonstrated they’re not afraid to cut and run if something isn’t financially viable enough. Given that Rabbit is VC-funded, and AI compute is expensive, a $200 cost for an already-niche device, in my opinion, stands a fairly high likelihood of eventually becoming a worthless investment sooner rather than later. I especially feel it given that the company has already demonstrated exactly that in the past, so it’s not as if it’s a worry born from nothing.

Rabbit hasn’t publicly responded to the allegations yet, though Lyu’s Twitter bio mentions that “any crypto relates to @rabbit_hmi or r1 is a scam.” We’ll be sure to update this article if Rabbit responds.

Update: Rabbit responds

A spokesperson for Rabbit has reached out to us with a pair of statements. They are both shared below.

Regarding Jesse’s background:

Jesse has a long history as an entrepreneur and has been involved in a range of projects over his career, including the GAMA metaverse / NFT project. It’s a project he has talked openly about in the past, and he left it before starting rabbit. He is fully committed to rabbit and is building a strong and growing team to serve the company’s growing user base.

Regarding yesterday’s incident:

rabbit has been clear that it works with multiple LLM services, including OpenAI. Yesterday’s incident was related to OpenAI, but impacted only part of the functionality of r1 and was quickly resolved. We are working with our vendors on ways to further mitigate any potential impact of LLM service disruptions in the future.