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The rise and fall of AI at the McDonald’s drive-thru
Ray Choi
June 19, 2024
Welcome, AI enthusiasts.
Bible Verses of the Day
8 Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. 9 What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you. [Philippians 4:8-9, ESV]
What's in this week's issue?
🍔 The rise and fall of AI at the McDonald’s drive-thru
👀 NVIDIA presents latest advancements in visual AI
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The fast-food industry has been turning to AI for years in the hopes that it might improve efficiency, cut down on labour costs, and, ideally, make customers’ lives easier. One of the pioneers was McDonald’s, which in 2021 teamed up with IBM to test an AI system for voice ordering at around 100 drive-thru locations throughout the US.
Customers were supposed to be able to drive up, loudly state their orders into the drive-thru microphone, and then have an AI record all of that, instead of a human crew member.
Yet McDonald’s is already giving up on the AI drive-thru feature just a few years after introducing it. Viral videos exposed the system as overwhelmed with more simple orders, taking requests from the wrong cars and recommending peculiar food couplings, like ice cream and bacon. Following these public failures, McDonald’s declared that it will no longer use IBM for the partnership after July 31, 2024.
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NVIDIA researchers are presenting new visual generative AI models and techniques at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference this week in Seattle.
The advancements span areas like custom image generation, 3D scene editing, visual language understanding, and autonomous vehicle perception.
Among the over 50 NVIDIA research projects being presented, two papers have been selected as finalists for CVPR’s Best Paper Awards – one exploring the training dynamics of diffusion models and another on high-definition maps for self-driving cars.
Easy Cloud News
Listen or read the following transcript as Kent Hughes focuses on the story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac. Hughes emphasizes God’s provision and faithfulness, demonstrating that God ultimately provides the necessary sacrifice, foreshadowing the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
The following unedited transcript is provided by Beluga AI.
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AI Tools
🤖 Nando: Experience ChatGPT on steroids (link)
📈 Tome: The leading AI-native research and presentation platform (link)
🐋 Beluga: Christian sermon and lecture transcripts, translations and more (link)
📹️ Unscreen: Produce background-free video (link)
✍️ Bertha: AI content generator for your WordPress website (link)
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