Would you believe that it is the favorite “Mexican” restaurant in the country?

It use to be the spot when you had 3AM cravings and only $6 to spend. Now it’s overpriced meat-hose garbage.

Love kiosks. Can usually get hyper specific about order in a way you just can't typically pull off in person.

The mcdonalds thing was because the model they implemented was misinterpreting people and incorrectly placing orders. Yeah, obviously the thing wasn't working right so they pulled that. Sounds just like early personal assistants on phones and other devices, hell my wife still struggles with those. They clearly needed more time developing and testing it with a diverse range of customers from all over. I don't know if they trained it using recordings from real drive throughs from all over, but they should have.

The 18000 water example probably didn't cost anyone anything. Regardless of if it was intentional or not, it wouldn't have been fulfilled as part of an order. They mention it "crashing the system" - whatever that means in this context is impossible to know. Did it take down all of taco bell? Did it cause the LLM to stop responding on JUST this one site? All of them? Did it eventually time out and start working right? it's impossible to know because the details just aren't there and we have no insight as to the system architecture. I always assume there is a method to rely on traditional ordering where a person listening in while the chatbot talks to the person can take over and fix the problem. It's not like there aren't drive through workers still there.

Really the only cost here is the impact to consumer attitudes towards taco bell and AI because the video and news of this is circulating. One error is whatever, but public perception doesn't typically involve much critical thinking.

People are still irrationally terrified of all manner of technology even though science backs it up, like vaccines.

I don't understand how taco bell survives in my city when I'm surrounded by dozens of real mexican restaurants and food trucks.

Taco bell is one the the few fast food joints that still has decent cheap options.

They have a $7 luxe box ( if you use the app you can customize it.) That actually gives a worthwhile amount of food.

And as far as I can tell it's an all the time deal, not some shitty limited time promotion like mcshit offers trying to get people to come bsck to their overpriced garbage. ($6+ just for fucking "large" french fries)

Taco Bell doesn't compete with mexican food, it competes with Jack in the Box and Taco Johns, perhaps anywhere that has a salad bar.

Taco Bell isn't Mexican food. It's shitty American fast food with a Mexican slant.

Edit: Downvote all you want but Taco Bell is to Mexican food like McDonalds is to a burger house. It's low tier fast food.

ai is taking jerbs, despite the fact that it cannot perform them at all, and the cost is being externalized to the customers. its not about whether they can do what they're meant to do, its about giving corporations excuses to further drive down human wages.

“Sometimes it lets me down, but sometimes it really surprises me," he said.

That’s what I want from a drive through. To be surprised or let down.

The mcdonalds thing was because the model they implemented was misinterpreting people and incorrectly placing orders. Yeah, obviously the thing wasn't working right so they pulled that. Sounds just like early personal assistants on phones and other devices, hell my wife still struggles with those. They clearly needed more time developing and testing it with a diverse range of customers from all over. I don't know if they trained it using recordings from real drive throughs from all over, but they should have.

The 18000 water example probably didn't cost anyone anything. Regardless of if it was intentional or not, it wouldn't have been fulfilled as part of an order. They mention it "crashing the system" - whatever that means in this context is impossible to know. Did it take down all of taco bell? Did it cause the LLM to stop responding on JUST this one site? All of them? Did it eventually time out and start working right? it's impossible to know because the details just aren't there and we have no insight as to the system architecture. I always assume there is a method to rely on traditional ordering where a person listening in while the chatbot talks to the person can take over and fix the problem. It's not like there aren't drive through workers still there.

The elitism surrounding ground beef, cheese, beans, and tortillas is always amusing.

I bet you also think less or more of people based on how they like their steak.

Why would this cause them to rethink anything?

If someone trolls an order of thousands of something, a worker isn't going to just make that thing. I get that retail workers are treated like shit and are paid shit so have zero shits to give. If someone rolls up to the drive through window asking for their thousands of waters or whatever, the people working there are gonna escalate it to a manager or just tell the guy to go pound sand.

Anybody today can go to any drivethrough and ask for whatever and then simply drive away. I'm certain it happens from time to time, even from legitimate orders when someone discovers they leave their wallet at home. If it was a great problem though these businesses simply wouldn't order drive through service, or would require payment before cooking anything.

Trying to guess others’ motivations is a good way to show your own biases.

I hate the copyright lobby, I just hate AI grifters even more.

Taco Bell did win the restaurant wars...

I just don't agree man. It won't do what most people want it to do, it doesn't at all work like some kind of science fiction "AI" that we classically think of. It's great at organizing patterns and helping create models to do a specific use case, but when you try to do some real convoluted multilevel thing it just doesn't.

We've been using ML for a ton of tools in tech for a long time. Crowdstrike, Darktrace and Abnormal are all very successful in the realm of what they do thanks to ML (aka "AI".)

OCR has been used for so long and has gotten really fucking good, thanks to ML.

I don't think we're gonna replace humans for thinking, but we can definitely replace them for boring repetitive actions.

Why would this cause them to rethink anything?

If someone trolls an order of thousands of something, a worker isn't going to just make that thing. I get that retail workers are treated like shit and are paid shit so have zero shits to give. If someone rolls up to the drive through window asking for their thousands of waters or whatever, the people working there are gonna escalate it to a manager or just tell the guy to go pound sand.

Anybody today can go to any drivethrough and ask for whatever and then simply drive away. I'm certain it happens from time to time, even from legitimate orders when someone discovers they leave their wallet at home. If it was a great problem though these businesses simply wouldn't order drive through service, or would require payment before cooking anything.

I'm gonna guess you have never worked in fast food.

Window times are the metric they die by. Generally speaking, they start making your order the SECOND you order it, before you ever leave the ordering screen. Yes, even if the order changes mid order. Yes, they make, and throw away lots of food that is not paid for, forgotten, etc ... TONS of food (literally) is thrown away daily.

As for the water order? I would 1000% start making that order. If the higher ups think the AI is working correct, well then who am I to question it? Nobody who works fast food is paid enough to give a shit.