My main takeaway: They're creating a thing called fusion (will be renamed) which will allow you to spin up a rethinkdb instance with a single command which you then can connect to directly from your browser/JS-frontend, no backend needed (kind of like meteor with insecure/autopublish but with rethinkdb instead of mongo and no backend what so ever). The benefit of this is that you very quickly can create an app I guess, just create a frontend and you're good to go.

I suppose you can also setup rules as to what operations should be allowed from the clients, so you they just loop an insert to destroy the DB, but not much was said about security/auth etc.

I think he said they plan to release a first version in two months.

EDIT: Firebase is actually what he compares it to! But since I've worked a lot in meteor that's my first association :)