In November 2021, a company named Cyber Manufacture successfully raised 6 million dollars for its “next-generation NFT project GAMA”. From the archived information on GAMA’s official website dated June 1, 2022, GAMA is a decentralized organization with the grand goal of sending 10,000 astronauts into space to collect extraterrestrial energy.
As time progressed to November 13, 2023, GAMA released a farewell announcement on its Discord channel, officially open-sourcing its space station project and launching a new API to support AI NPCs, creating a world of rich interactivity for users. However, shortly afterward, most of the Twitter accounts that held GAMA “Ask Me Anything” sessions disappeared, resulting in the GAMA NFT project gradually bowing out of history’s stage, much like many other once-celebrated Web3 projects.
When mentioning GAMA, one cannot omit its CEO Jesse Lyu, who is also the co-founder of the company Rabbit. This company developed an AI-driven star product, the R1 device. The Rabbit R1 is not just a device based on the Android system; it also allows users to voice-control various apps and subscriptions, supporting services such as Uber, Doordash, Midjourney, and Spotify. Its ultimate vision is to completely replace the smartphone and provide a natural language interaction experience.
In 2024, at the International Consumer Electronics Show, the Rabbit company introduced a palm-sized AI smart device—Rabbit R1. The Rabbit R1 clearly indicated the future direction of technology, containing the Large Action Model (LAM), which allows users to interact through conversation rather than relying on traditional apps on smartphones. Furthermore, the Rabbit R1 is also equipped with Rabbit’s self-developed AI-based operating system—RabbitOS.
Rabbit’s founder Jesse Lyu confidently mentioned on social media that the new RabbitOS fundamentally differs from traditional platforms such as iOS and Android. It combines the pattern recognition technology of neural networks with logical reasoning capabilities, allowing it to learn and mimic user behavior, understand complex commands, and complete tasks for users. From early promotions, this is not just a technological revolution but also heralds the arrival of an era of intelligence.
Large Language Models (LLMs), through in-depth understanding and analysis of textual language, have become an important tool in comprehending human intent. In stark contrast, the Learning Application Interface Models (LAM) can learn through direct interaction with applications, thus enabling them to perform tasks and realize specific intents. For this reason, LLMs excel at explanation and understanding, while LAMs are closer to practical operation.
It is reported that Rabbit Company has applied this technology to their latest product, enabling the device to wake up the conversational system within 500 milliseconds using a side button, a breakthrough that Jesse Lyu considers to enhance AI voice recognition speed tenfold. Taking advantage of the AI-Generated Content (AIGC) trend, Rabbit Company has vigorously promoted this small device and successfully achieved pre-sales of over 100,000 units. Its success has attracted much attention, with foreign media commenting that this is “the most exciting product launch of 2024”.
However, despite the product causing a sensation at the CES show and having its formal launch at the end of April, allowing the first batch of order buyers to finally receive the product they had been anticipating, the real feedback was not ideal. Tech blogger Mishaal Rahman revealed on May 1st that inside the Rabbit R1 does not run on a so-called “brand new AI operating system,” but is based on the Android system, with all functions and interfaces implemented by Android applications. Following this, there were claims by netizens that they could hack the Rabbit R1 and even make it run on a standard smartphone.
Subsequently, on May 3rd, the renowned electronics teardown website iFixit conducted a comprehensive teardown of the product, noting that the device did not have the hardware structure needed to run artificial intelligence. iFixit questioned the device’s capabilities, considering its functions quite ordinary, and even doubted its value for being sold. iFixit was incredulous at the amount they paid, stating, “can’t believe I paid for this rabbit“.
As the first wave of negative reviews spread, Engadget also published a review on May 4th, bluntly stating that the R1 device seemed “utterly useless“. The story behind Rabbit Company also came to light, as a tech worker named Emily discovered that the predecessor of Rabbit was a company called Cyber Manufacture Co, established in 2021, primarily involved with a project related to GAMA, which had significant connections to cryptocurrency.
Facing such entangled past connections, Rabbit has effectively striven to disassociate from its previous relationships with GAMA/Cyber Manufacture and the topics of Web3, the metaverse, or NFTs. Jesse has a rich personal experience in entrepreneurship, having participated in several plans including GAMA’s metaverse/NFT project, but he abandoned these projects before founding Rabbit. Now, he is more focused on driving Rabbit’s growth and is working to build a strong and vibrant team to serve the rapidly expanding user base. However, as online evidence of Rabbit’s connection with Cyber Manufacture becomes more substantial, the speculation that they are essentially the same company, or even the same team, seems not without reason.
A startup, originally known for selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and promoting an AI-driven metaverse platform, has now managed to raise tens of millions of dollars in venture capital within months of losing user confidence. Subsequently, the business shifted its model and began selling a small device supported by artificial intelligence.
On November 2, 2023, just a month after the successful funding of Rabbit R1 and its “Large Action Model” model, Jesse Lyu filed documents with the Secretary of State of California, requesting the renaming of Cyber Manufacture to Rabbit. Aaron Li, once listed as a member on the GAMA website and a member of the development team behind GAMA, confirmed in an interview that these teams are actually one and the same.
In a Twitter post dated October 4, 2023, Rabbit disclosed that Cyber Manufacture was planning to “create a more natural way of human-computer interaction.” On that day, Cyber Manufacture completed the procedure of changing its name to Rabbit, while announcing the news of a $20 million fundraising, but any mention of GAMA was avoided.
Meanwhile, GAMA’s Twitter account is no longer in existence, and Lyu seems to be trying his best to avoid playing a prominent role in running the company. He had previously spent hours making a range of lengthy and detailed promises, including developing a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, creating an AI-driven metaverse, and publishing a comic series.
What’s worse, according to a fund report released by the Oregon Blockchain Group for the second quarter of 2022, they planned to invest $3.5 to $3.7 million to send GAMA satellites into space by rocket. Lyu claimed that his main work in the GAMA project was “developing an Unreal Engine game,” which was successfully delivered.
However, some users have revealed that the so-called GSS metaverse was actually just a simple reskin of an Unreal Engine learning project called “Lyra,” and the GSS project information on GitHub corroborates this assertion. The project even contains folders like “LyraEditor” and “LyraGame,” which are part of demonstrating the best practices for getting started with Unreal Engine 5. Since GAMA did not provide any server or service options to users, they had to host GSS themselves to make it operational.
After a thorough investigation, Emily concluded that Lyu has adopted various strategies to prove, “Rabbit is unrelated to any cryptocurrency/Web3 and will not be connected in the future”. Some users claimed that they had heavily invested in developing 3D resources, hoping that these resources would eventually play a role in GSS (GAMA’s metaverse).
The industry is filled with curiosity, and the origin of the concept of Rabbit R1 product has become a focus of discussion. There are also inquiries into whether GAMA financing has been used to develop the product, as well as how much time Lyu and his team have spent on R1 and GAMA respectively. An important date is November 11, 2023, when Cyber announced the open-source decision of GAMA games, a move depicted as a new chapter in GAMA’s journey.
However, the truth is they have no continuation plans for the future of the GAMA project. Just days earlier, on November 2, Cyber Manufacture had quietly filed paperwork to change its name to Rabbit Inc, which is the corporate name we are familiar with today. Additionally, RCT Studio, a company associated with Lyu, has also been revealed.
The evidence lies in the Form D document signed by Lyu, which records show that RCT Studio raised $10 million in funding in 2019. According to a 2020 report by the Los Angeles Business Journal, Lyu was appointed as CEO. RCT Studio claims to provide AI solutions for the gaming industry and construct a metaverse with AI-created content.
RCT Studio became an incubation project of Y Combinator and announced on March 26, 2020, that Lyu would become CEO. The company commits to creating endless storylines and frameworks through the “Morpheus engine,” capable of interpreting words and turning them into 3D animations.
By 2021, RCT Studio (now RCT AI) announced in a total of $10 million in financing that Yuheng Chen had been appointed CEO—he had previously worked at Lyu’s former company Raven Tech. Although Lyu seems no longer to be working at RCT AI (as his LinkedIn does not mention the company), his exact departure date remains unclear.
In an article dated April 17, 2019, Lyu discussed how RCT used leading AI technology to create an interactive movie experience. In the article, Lyu, as founder of the company, also mentioned the movie “Ready Player One”, posing a question that seemed to hint at RCT’s development direction at the time, similar to the virtual world presented in the movie.
It is notable that during a Clubhouse GAMA meeting on December 1, 2021, Lyu proposed the “next stage metaverse experience” for players crafted by GAMA, which is very similar to the concept shared by the current CEO of RCT AI, Yuheng Chen on LinkedIn, “building a metaverse with AI on blockchain”.
The rising star in the blockchain gaming domain, RCT AI, successfully raised a whopping 10 million US dollars for its new game “Delysium” towards the end of the year 2022. The game claims to be an “AI-driven AAA-level Web3 game,” and is being incubated within the company.
Behind the Rabbit R1 team lies a complex and tumultuous history. Leveraging hot topics such as Web3, the metaverse, and AI, the team has conducted multiple rounds of fundraising. According to online data, since 2019, team leader Lyu has raised a total of 46 million US dollars for two enterprises under three different titles: Cyber Manufacture raised 6 million US dollars, RCT raised 10 million, and Rabbit raised a massive 30 million.
However, from various media interviews, one can identify that Lyu had completely different accounts of his entrepreneurial journey. After selling his then CEO-positioned company Raven Tech to Baidu (at that time still using his legal name Lu Cheng), Lyu moved to the Bay Area in 2019. At an uncertain point in time, he received a call from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. By 2020, it seems the partnership between the two was coming to an end, and it was then that Altman showed Lyu an early version of GPT-3. It is said that “Raven thus transformed into Rabbit.”
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