McDonald’s is removing artificial intelligence (AI) powered ordering technology from its drive-through restaurants in the US, after customers shared its comical mishaps online.
A trial of the system, which was developed by IBM and uses voice recognition software to process orders, was announced in 2019.
It has not proved entirely reliable, however, resulting in viral videos of bizarre misinterpreted orders ranging from bacon-topped ice cream to hundreds of dollars’ worth of chicken nuggets.
McDonald’s told franchisees it would remove the tech from the more than 100 restaurants it has been testing it in by the end of July, as first reported by trade publication Restaurant Business.
translation: we tried to replace the functions of yet more of our employees and can not yet, effectively, automate more of them out of a job. But we’re working on it.
You mean the thing that misinterpreted orders from a small list of choices would potentially identify and bomb an all girls children’s school if used by the military?
The have solid intel to suggest the girls took the burgers.
Worst part about having a dark sense of humor is thinking up punchlines to jokes that are only funny until you get them.
I don’t believe it was ai’s fault at all. I believe they hit that girls school on purpose to kill the kids of a bunch of their leaders and elites.
That sort of thing is right up Israel’s alley, killing the families of people they don’t like. Our president endorsed the same thing at one point campaigning too.
People keep blaming ai, but I think it’s much easier to just blame the fact that we have a drunk moron in charge of the military.
“Because it’s 2024. 2026 models are way better!”
“What do you mean each order costs $3 in tokens? We pay those employees $6 per hour!”
If only they could cool data centers with coca cola /s
That’s what they are using the ice cream machine for.
How? It’s broken.
LOL I know for a fact when the “ice cream machine doesn’t work” it either ran out of ‘milk’… cuz refilling requires pouring a 2 gal bag of sugary milk into the top end the chances of spilling and making a massive mess are pretty high.
Or they didn’t do cleaning cycle and it’s won’t turn on until they do.
Go to Diary Queef if you want ice cream.
Diary Queef doesn’t sell ice cream; it’s a frozen dairy product.
I thought it was neither liquid or solid but gas?
Datacenters is why their coffee is so hot.
…
Actually it is interesting why scalding coffee is better for the fast food business
Slows cooling: High heat buys time for commuters.
Masks bitterness: Extreme heat numbs taste buds temporarily.
Hides cheap beans: Lower-grade coffee tastes better when hot.
Prevents complaints: Customers rarely complain about coffee being too hot.
Reduces returns: Cold coffee gets sent back.
Reduces refills: Customers cannot chug boiling liquids.
Handily demonstrating, again, that frontline customer service is skilled labour.
Just 2 more years!
/s for those of dilatory cognitive ability
Ain’t gotta be slow to need a sarcasm tag, but thanks regardless!
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Oh come on that is simply beneath the power of the Altman! His machines just completely solved a 90 year old math problem!
It’s so solved no mathematician has been able to verify it or peer review it, but who needs them?
The more I sit on it, the more enraged I am about the news.
They most likely stole the result. They dropped a massive proof with no human understanding it (come on, how many can understand math at that level? 5 world wide? And definitely none at OpenAI), they dropped hundreds of thousands of line of validation (see above), burned a significant fraction of the metaphorical Amazon in the process, dumped more money than most math departments yearly budgets, and claimed victory.
Yeah, but it worked as a marketing stunt, did it not? And that guarantees more events like this in the future.
You are right, I forgot this as a reason for my hate. And how it will drastically affect mathematics for the years to come
Technically a team was already working on it and they lied by making A.I look better. That’s just a marketing stunt it didn’t do shit.
Add to that, we have found the Altman, but we are still in danger until we discover the whereabouts of the Controlman and the Deleteman.
It’s time we shift into higher gear while there’s still space
It’s hard enough to get a human to understand your order through those crappy microphones.
Remember when they tried outsourcing that to India?
No, but it doesn’t surprise me.
I also found an article from 2006, but it’s paywalled.
Do you remember why this failed?
Crappy mics + crappy connections = consumer rejection. Logistical nightmare. Someone reported having their order taken when the restaurant wasn’t open yet.
The same reason cold calling doesn’t work anymore.
The amount of insurance company calls I get since I have to renew my car insure is absurd. They can go fuck themselves and I will never give them a dime.
“John” with a thick Indian accent on the phone isn’t someone I would trust honestly. It’s not a racism thing, it’s the I don’t want to give any information about myself to someone in another country especially when they specialize in scamming people.
My friend who works at McDs says people at the drive thru dont believe he’s a human no matter how much he tries to reassure them.
He should embrace it.
“Hello. I’m Jake your burger… assistant. I’m here to take your order… I’m here with you until the end. Let’s do this. Would you like… fries… or a large refreshing soft drink… with your order?”
I mean what can you say that doesn’t risk getting you fired?
I hope it cost them a lot of money to implement and then to remove it. As long as it ate into their profits I don’t care
I’m sure they’re putting all those costs onto the franchisees. McDonalds the corporation won’t feel a thing.
This is why McDoubles are like $3 instead of $1.
McSchadenfreude
I stopped going to fast food restaurants when they added these dumb AI bots. It barely could function when you wanted to do a simple modification to an order and it basically couldn’t answer any questions about the menu you may have. Seemed like seasonal items or promotions were outside of its training data as well.
I stopped when they started charging sit down restaurant prices for food barely higher quality than what prisoners eat.
Taco Bell has entered the chat.
There’s a Mexican restaurant near us (not a taqueria but an actual sit-down full service restaurant) that was the same price or cheaper than Taco Bell for years.
and when the menu started rotating so that you would awkwardly stand there waiting for the 10-second window to check out a set of items and then have to wait for it to come back around
This seriously makes me crazy, whoever thought/thinks this makes any sense whatsoever as a menu design is out of their skulls. Please, PLEASE just a simple list of menu items with prices, these flashy changing menus offer nothing but frustration and slow things down.
AI saving lives by failing to sell McRibs was not on my bingo sheet
+1, I also stopped shopping from any market that forces self-checkouts. I waste more time, I scan my own stuff, and for what exactly? So the company can earn more money by kicking out their employees? Why the fuck don’t we even get a discount for “working briefly” in their market? Nothing these companies pull off ever benefits the society.
Offering the option is one thing, forcing it down your throat is another.
You know I’ve had this argument with people so often but yet they’re so ignorantly adamant that they are so much more efficient at scanning and packing their own groceries and plus they don’t want to talk to anybody. It makes me rage. I really hate the direction that society has taken when it comes to communicating to other human beings. Like we live in a society where we’re supposed to be social with each other.
I bet some amount of that was deliberate. Kinda like how they started charging extra for value items “dressed like a mac” when people realized the only real difference between a McDouble dressed like a mac was the central bun and it was much cheaper. So they started charging most of that price difference for a squirt of sauce that replaced a squirt of ketchup because McDoubles were for people too poor to afford a Big Mac, not for people who could afford a Big Mac but thought it was a rip off. At least that’s what I remember from the time before I realized McDonald’s wasn’t ever worth going to. I can’t think of a single fast food place with burger patties as pathetic as McDonald’s (though I have a feeling the US has other chains competing for that spot).
When you’re dealing with a human, they can make customizations that might upset the greedy little piggies at the top that would rather gouge people for any improvements and hate when employees give out freebies even if they cost nothing and generate good will for the business. Hell that might have been the difference between then and now for my willingness to go there at all, as it felt less human and more corporate hellish when they started charging for it.
I can’t think of a single fast food place with burger patties as pathetic as McDonald’s
It doesn’t even smell like food. To my shame, I occasionally crave a double quarter-pounder, as awful as I know they are. I usually eat it in the car, but last time, I took it home and left it on the table while I went to the loo, and the smell filling my flat when I came back was not appetising in the least.
Can’t do a minimum wage job yet they expect it to take over $90k+ salary jobs
There are a lot of salaried people out there that also wouldn’t be able to get my order right in the drive thru
This one has a clear economic issue as well: AI synthesized speech burns a shitton of money but somehow replaces minimum wage work. No idea how they imagined it would work. And tokens only getting more expensive since they’re currently heavily subsidized
What annoys me is that automating order taking doesn’t require a full LLM. They could easily program a voice to text system with a library of food items, basic voice commands, and have the outputs display on the screen so that the user can verify and correct the order verbally.
Like smart tech doesn’t need to know anything beyond it’s job. But they’re trying to normalize these massively superflous systems because the economics of big corporations has completely decoupled from reality. && Fascism.
I recall pretty reliable hotlines with just that, and when their schematic script was failing you, they refered you to a human operator. But it doesn’t have an AI buzz around it, and on paper it isn’t as simple and universal as a chatbot that can verbally answer any question by spending tokens on 3rd party’s servers. I can see why this idea sells and why technical, ethical, economical and usability issues get overlooked by linkedin managers, but it doesn’t make it less frustrating.
It’s basically the hologram from i,Robot. https://youtu.be/ZKxr0wyIic4
The main thing is that a human with subject matter knowledge designed the phonetic library. AI sloppers are leaving that for the LLM to hallucinate.
Naw, audio doesn’t take much, definitely not as much as a full time employee. The text models probably don’t need to be very large for this, the whole thing can probably run on a modern phone.
With all the optimization that has been done, everything can be done pretty efficiently except for video and good image gen.
The main issue with all this is probably audio quality (wind + car running + garbage microphones)
Inference is actually relatively cheap. A company the size of McDonald’s could also negotiate a deal.
Tokens are expensive for you but for the labs tokens are cheap, training is expensive.
Nah, bro. AGI is just around the corner, fr fr. Hear me out, bro, it’s gonna be so lit for everyone! Come on, bro! Fucking utopia!
/s as if I really need it
Even if AGI was “just around the corner”, it’ll be built on the bones of the broken-ass LLM situation we have now. The optimism doesn’t just cover our ability to iterate towards it, it extends to the ability of said AGI’s ability to unlearn bluffing, gaslighting, and just fabricating things. I’m super doubtful about all of it, especially the latter part.
Altman could be taking billions by offering a CEO, CFO, CIO, CTO and management AI.
It’s a crazy idea, I know. But in the office of office of redundant redundancy redundancy, management tends to be too thick and ineffective and inefficient. If we could just replace those hard to do things with AI, the management team might be free to learn other things and do other things.
I have very limited experience in LARGE corporations. But it seems to me those are all “putting out fires” positions requiring some level of rapport with key individuals and usually privileged knowledge.
Not saying it justifies the exorbitant salaries they get. Just explaining why in a “shareholder profits first” system we’re not seeing AI’s running corporations.
Especially given the results of AI run vending machines / stores.
I’ve often said this, the CEO’s compensation is because he’s to take blame if shit goes sideways and they need the stock price to stop falling. Though in recent times they don’t get fired nearly as easily
And most of the comp tends to be in stock to motivate them to make whatever decisions raise the share price the most, including things that a normal person would find unethical. If you’re paid a flat salary, you don’t really care
We don’t see AI’s taking executive positions because the executives are the ones making the decisions. US executives are inefficient compared to their compensation, for example, in Japan they make far less and yet some of the most successful companies in the world are controlled by Japanese management, but they are the ones who decide their own salaries.
Our children aren’t a concern of their’s. Saving money and resources is. What do you think is going to happen to education quality if they get what they want and AI takes over mental tasks throughout the economy and bureaucracies across society? What actual value with mass education have at that point?
They won’t see the value in educating anyone at all and they’ll push for the cheapest option, filled primarily with lessons on how important it is to do what you’re told.
