(June 2024) AI Drive Thru's Failed But The Rollout Continued

a month ago by Canaconda to c/fuck_ai

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.

volore 92 points a month ago

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.

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Canconda 39 points a month ago

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ToiletFlushShowerScream 59 points a month ago

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?

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cRazi_man 19 points a month ago

The have solid intel to suggest the girls took the burgers.

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Canconda 5 points a month ago

Worst part about having a dark sense of humor is thinking up punchlines to jokes that are only funny until you get them.

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bedwyr 3 points a month ago

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.

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a_non_monotonic_function 1 point a month ago

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.

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dangling_cat 34 points a month ago

“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!”

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Canconda 10 points a month ago

If only they could cool data centers with coca cola /s

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CascadianGiraffe 8 points a month ago

That's what they are using the ice cream machine for.

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Canconda 4 points a month ago

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.

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heartSagan5 0 points a month ago

Diary Queef doesn’t sell ice cream; it’s a frozen dairy product.

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Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In 4 points a month ago

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.

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JeeBaiChow 21 points a month ago

Just 2 more years!

/s for those of dilatory cognitive ability

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chuckleslord 12 points a month ago

Ain't gotta be slow to need a sarcasm tag, but thanks regardless!

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Canconda 1 point a month ago
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ivanvector 21 points a month ago

Handily demonstrating, again, that frontline customer service is skilled labour.

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kingofras 19 points a month ago

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?

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Eq0 18 points a month ago

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.

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SaharaMaleikuhm 5 points a month ago

Yeah, but it worked as a marketing stunt, did it not? And that guarantees more events like this in the future.

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Eq0 3 points a month ago

You are right, I forgot this as a reason for my hate. And how it will drastically affect mathematics for the years to come

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DeathsEmbrace 6 points a month ago

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.

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OrteilGenou 4 points a month ago

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.

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kingofras 1 point a month ago

It’s time we shift into higher gear while there’s still space

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Almacca 18 points a month ago

It's hard enough to get a human to understand your order through those crappy microphones.

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Duamerthrax 8 points a month ago

Remember when they tried outsourcing that to India?

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Almacca 7 points a month ago

No, but it doesn't surprise me.

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Duamerthrax 4 points a month ago path: 0 25767624 25768187 25768770 25769146, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 3
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In 1 point a month ago

Do you remember why this failed?

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razzazzika 16 points a month ago

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.

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KingPorkChop 14 points a month ago

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?"

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Canconda 7 points a month ago

I mean what can you say that doesn't risk getting you fired?

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Tartletboy 14 points a month ago

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.

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PalmTreeIsBestTree 17 points a month ago

I stopped when they started charging sit down restaurant prices for food barely higher quality than what prisoners eat.

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Test_Tickles 6 points a month ago

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.

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mrgoosmoos 3 points a month ago

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

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jabeez 6 points a month ago

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.

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Canconda 7 points a month ago

AI saving lives by failing to sell McRibs was not on my bingo sheet

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internetisnotthesame 5 points a month ago

+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.

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mangobanana 3 points a month ago

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.

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Buddahriffic 2 points a month ago

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.

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Almacca 3 points a month ago

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.

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mangobanana 14 points a month ago

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

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Almacca 7 points a month ago

I'm sure they're putting all those costs onto the franchisees. McDonalds the corporation won't feel a thing.

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ouRKaoS 6 points a month ago

This is why McDoubles are like $3 instead of $1.

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Canconda 4 points a month ago

McSchadenfreude

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Pyr_Pressure 13 points a month ago

Can't do a minimum wage job yet they expect it to take over $90k+ salary jobs

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CascadianGiraffe 7 points a month ago

There are a lot of salaried people out there that also wouldn't be able to get my order right in the drive thru

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dreadbeef 11 points a month ago

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

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Canconda 13 points a month ago

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.

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altkey 3 points a month ago

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.

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Canconda 2 points a month ago

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.

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Grimy -1 points a month ago

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)

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tempest -3 points a month ago

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.

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DarrinBrunner 9 points a month ago

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

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dejected_warp_core 2 points a month ago

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.

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altphoto 8 points a month ago

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.

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Canconda 3 points a month ago

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.

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boonhet 4 points a month ago

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

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cantstopthesignal 3 points a month ago

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.

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minorkeys 8 points a month ago

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.

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Canconda 2 points a month ago path: 0 25764412 25764499, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0
nul42 6 points a month ago

Just proves that serving at mcD takes higher levels of cognition than writing code.

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NikkiDimes 5 points a month ago

Honestly, human communication is insanely complex, we just happen to be heavily optimized for it.

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ilinamorato 6 points a month ago

If you cannot get the right burger from an Al customer service bot, it is not an appropriate tool for education, tutoring, or any other high-stakes task.

It's not an appropriate tool for those things, no. But this is a fallacious statement. These companies are not utilizing good AI models in their drive through software, they're using the cheapest, most bare-minimum models they can possibly get their hands on. But even if they use good models and do solve AI food ordering, even if they do manage to make it as good as a human for the task, it will still not be an appropriate tool for education or tutoring.

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porous_grey_matter 3 points a month ago

It's not a fallacious statement. You're correct that it would still not be an appropriate tool, but that statement doesn't claim it would be.

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ilinamorato 2 points a month ago

It suggests that it would. It is suggesting that the quality of the models' ability to correctly understand a fast food order indicates its fitness to be used in teaching, but I would say that even a model which can flawlessly take a cheeseburger order—even a model which can flawlessly mimic the action of teaching—wouldn't be appropriate for the task. The quality of its output is unrelated to its fitness to the purpose.

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DaleGribble88 2 points a month ago

That last sentence is interesting to me. Care to expand further?

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i_love_FFT 3 points a month ago

Not Op, but fitness for the purpose of education is as follows: being human.

A non-human cannot teach to be a human to others, just like a non-cheetah cannot teach s cheetah how to be a cheetah. It applies to every social animal...

Emotions, hormones, dealing with our body's health, that's all stuff that ai model will never be able to understand and teach correctly.

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kopasz7 2 points a month ago

(I'm not OP)

If we accept that facts are justified true beliefs (as per epistemology), then someone needs to have a belief (a proposition) which corresponds to reality and a justification to link the two (otherwise it is merely a correct guess). Looking at it like this we can see why AI is unfit for the purpose of teaching, which needs to be factual.

I assume he could also mean the fundamental problem of induction. For the purpose of teaching, it is required to be truth-apt, but AI can at best be truth-like. Just as it can't tell apart instructions from data it can't tell apart facts from fabrication due to its stochastic nature.

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ilinamorato 1 point a month ago

The other two answers are excellent: only a human can teach anyone how to be a human, and AIs are structurally incapable of understanding any concept sufficiently to teach it.

I might further add: the current structure of AI as a wholly for-profit enterprise adds a level of cynicism and a susceptibility to corruption that even a for-profit human educator is not subject to; that is to say, do we want any corporation (really, any single entity) to be responsible, not only for the structure of education, but for its entire expression?

Even if a hypothetical perfect AI were completely benevolent, and owned by the people, it would still represent a bottleneck of thought and idea that would heterogenize our society. But we don't live in that world, so it's almost a certainty that education would be for sale to the highest bidder. You think historical revisionism is bad now? What if BMW could pay OpenAI to downplay the role of Germany in World War II?

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JasonDJ 2 points a month ago

They don't want to replace teachers.

They want to replace mandatory reporters.

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ilinamorato 1 point a month ago

Ehhhh, I think there's a simpler explanation: educated people tend to vote Democrat.

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JasonDJ 2 points a month ago

I think there's an even simpler explanation: people with zero empathy over other people are more likely to fuck kids.

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Toga77 1 point a month ago
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melsaskca 5 points a month ago

They shoulda tested it in the corporate offices instead of on the front line. Everyone knows the front line work is way harder and way more stressful than preparing and filing the TPS reports.

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Saapas 5 points a month ago

Surprised simple speech recognition haven't been done. Then you confirm your order

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Canconda 6 points a month ago

I mean, ultimately it would be slower than just having a person. Serving less customers per hour is part of it, but also people may go elsewhere if they see a lineup.

Just speaking as someone who worked drive thru at mcdicks for a year. Not saying I endorse it.

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tempest 3 points a month ago

At this point I'm surprised they have not just replaced the speaker with the screens like they have inside. Maybe they have I've not been through a drive through in a long time.

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captain_aggravated 2 points a month ago

Possibly something about a capacitive touch screen left out in the weather?

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Canconda 1 point a month ago

I doubt they will before full automated kiosks become a thing. Even then I could actually see them keeping a human order taker / maintenance person there and having the food made by robots.

But the main issue is that customers would take too long without someone prompting them. When I worked drive thru I said a lot of "hurry along" things. Like when people named a sandwich I'd interject "Combo?" and "Coke with that?" as well as "Is that everything". Even please drive ahead.

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Grimy 1 point a month ago

I don't see this working because of car height and arm length differences. I hate the drive thru at banks since I usually have to open the door and half get out of the car if I forget to slide in as close as I can to the thing.

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Saapas 3 points a month ago

Wouldn't need to be if the speech recognition was good. Then the workers are free to do something else. Theoretically of course

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Canconda 5 points a month ago

So when I worked drive thru I said a lot of "hurry along" things. Like when people named a sandwich I'd interject "Combo?" and "Coke with that?" as well as "Is that everything". Even please drive ahead.

So like it's not the voice to text that's the only potential source of delay.

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Saapas 1 point a month ago

Okay, that makes sense

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you_are_dust 4 points a month ago

Look at that. A little bit of positive news to start the day. I know that other companies have tried to implement AI into drive thrus as well and hopefully they follow McDonald's here. AI has real uses but every company seems determined to use it in the worst way possible.

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DupaCycki 4 points a month ago

Let's be clear here. If politicians aren't competent enough to make burgers or serve orders, they're not competent enough to run countries.

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Greymattertripp 4 points a month ago

Precisely. Take that clunkers.

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nullspace 3 points a month ago

It's not satisfying at all to yell at a chatbot. They'd rather yell at an authentic minimum wage worker.

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Canconda 4 points a month ago

IKR? The staff at rage rooms keep insisting I'm only allowed to hit the inanimate objects. SMH.

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Rhaedas 3 points a month ago

I wonder how much of this was because of AI, and how much because the voice recognition just sucked. Hearing and understanding all sorts of different accents and voice levels alongside the background noise on a good system is a difficult thing for a human, so for a computer it's a hard problem to solve. Ask anyone who has messed with setting up voice recognition on their personal system for something like dictation, and that's in a much quieter and controlled environment. Or the infamous voice tree on the phone, still less noise, that usually defaults to a human once you've failed to navigate it.

I don't doubt the AI was also doing stupid stuff. A bad order should be detected just from set parameters and some rational, but AI doesn't have the latter for unknowns and will go with it.

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Trilogy3452 1 point a month ago

There's so many models too, maybe they cheaped out and wasn't viable for the more expensive ones

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glimse 1 point a month ago

The last time I went to Wendy's, the voice recognition and model were both surprisingly good. I had a "natural" conversation when it told me the crispy chicken BLT wasn't on the menu anymore and it acknowledged my annoyance that a computer was offering to add a slice of bacon for $2.50.

That said, the very existence of this new drive through is why I havent gone back. A shame because the 4 for $4 got me through some hard times

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Mouselemming 2 points a month ago

For the moment, you do still have the option of parking and walking in to order and get your food from a person.

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glimse 2 points a month ago

It wasn't the experience of using the automated drive through, it was that they had one at all

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Mouselemming 1 point a month ago

I get that. But if you like the food but want your disdain for AI known, voting with your feet could be done either way. These companies keep a close eye, and will notice if it's driving customers to the walk-up counter. Along with the errors, it could induce them to switch back. I don't care about Wendy's or any fast food personally, but you expressed regret.

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grue 0 points a month ago

Frankly, I doubt the problem was even the software at all; I think it was doomed to failure simply by shitty speakers and microphones.

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Mouselemming 3 points a month ago

But a human would have realized bacon on ice cream or thousands of chicken nuggets needed "Are you sure you meant what I think I just heard?" as a response rather than "Excellent order! Pull up to the next window!"

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callouscomic 3 points a month ago

You also can't get the correct orders from humans.

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Imgonnatrythis 12 points a month ago

Doing significantly worse than McDonalds humans is pretty bad though.

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HeyJoe 3 points a month ago

Great. Now how long until they try again? It's so crazy how much they want it to work despite all the evidence proving that its going to be a bad idea and in the end cost more than the people you hired at the lowest cost possible. For a company that loves power its crazy to think they are just ok handing over a decent chunk of that power to another company that will dictate how much it costs and unlike employees that get no raises or maybe a dime, these AI contracts will absolutely have clauses were every year they will rise 5%. It's not a hard decision here yet for some reason they really won't drop it. If that wasn't enough nobody likes talking to a bot! Your hurting your company every step of the way...

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Canconda 1 point a month ago path: 0 25761434 25761966, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
Almacca 1 point a month ago

For a company that loves power its crazy to think they are just ok handing over a decent chunk of that power to another company

While at the same time fighting unions every step of the way.

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korazail 3 points a month ago

I don't do fast food all that often, but if I'm in the mood for a burger or taco or whatever, I'll sometimes visit one.

Many in my area are still humans on the other end of the drive-through, but I sometimes get a chatbot.

I haven't done this, because I don't want the fallout to hit the underpaid human workers on the other end, but I have a fantasy of ordering 1000 tacos or chicken nuggets or something and then just driving away. Honestly, this is a likely root cause of the "misinterpreted orders" that others have seen: they were behind someone like me who was fed up enough to go through with it.

This isn't to discount the various other ways LLMs can screw up.

McDonald’s told franchisees it would remove the tech...

I suspect this is also a franchisee option. Even if the brand isn't forcing it, I think the local stores can implement their own independently. It'd be neat if a brand put no-ai in their franchise agreements. I'd give that brand more attention.

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kirao47 2 points a month ago

Wanted a technical tweaking guide based on other hardware specifics, which had an anti-AI license on it, basically every model:

"Reworking this specific text through an AI service is exactly what that license carves out, so I can't use this document as the basis for the new guide. What I can do is write you a fresh, original guide"

Some high level dribbling and bullshittery lol... have fun as an enterprise burning down ur business cause that trillion dollar clanker doesn't care lol

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grue 2 points a month ago

Of course it wasn't ever gonna work; the sound quality of typical drive-thru intercom systems is too shitty even for humans to understand half the time!

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Sibshops 6 points a month ago

That's an interesting point. AI has a current limitation of not knowing that it doesn't know something.

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Jiral 6 points a month ago

This is not a current limitation, this is an inherent and systemic limitation of the underlying technology itself. Future AI might be different but it won't be based primarily on LLMs then.

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grue 3 points a month ago

That's reading more insight into my comment than I actually had, but sure. Overconfident AI that tries to extract orders from an intercom feeding it staticky gibberish could be part of the problem, too.

'Course, considering how many times I've had AI phone tree systems tell me something to the effect of "sorry, I didn't understand that response" even when the audio quality is decent makes me think they might have accounted for that part.

I was mainly just bitching about how drive-thru intercoms suck in general, while assuming that McDonalds probably didn't upgrade them as part of the experiment. I can just imagine the overpaid IBM sales consultant confidently telling McDonalds "sure, you can use the same intercom hardware; the software will correct for it!" while the actual engineers who have to implement the damn thing facepalm in the background.

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VAK 2 points a month ago

McD outside USA: we have good, simple burger and you can order using app or kiosk McD in USA: wow, ibm treats us nice, let's make the franchisees give them some monies

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ThatGuy46475 2 points a month ago

Bacon topped ice cream sounds good

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glibg10b 1 point a month ago

While I agree with the message, the argument is undermined by the fact that it considers a customer service bot to be comparable to the models used by students and tutors. Those people would not find this argument convincing because they know McDonald's is using shitty models to save costs.

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DrSoap 1 point a month ago

Checkers by me is using it now and its 10x slower and so wrong. I always have to ask for a human to get on the line. My little ice cream cone and mozzarella sticks aren't worth it any more, so I don't go.

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artwork 1 point a month ago

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.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c722gne7qngo [2024-06-18]

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myyass 1 point a month ago

Hearing Impaired. ADA compliance. Say it in a robotic voice as well.

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bad1080 1 point a month ago

roll-out continues until morale improves!

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corsicanguppy -3 points a month ago

Thru's

There is so much wrong with this word-like jumble of letters.

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Mouselemming 3 points a month ago

Thru was a legit spelling of thurh before through came along, and although it's now considered informal, it's commonly used on road signs because it's compact, and "drive-thru" is considered a legitimate use. Doesn't confuse meaning or pronunciation, either.

Now, the "greengrocer's apostrophe" being used for a plural is a perfectly reasonable gripe. Can easily confuse meaning, and wasteful of a space/character!

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athatet 2 points a month ago

Wait how is ‘thru’ a word-like jumble of letters but ‘through’ is fine?

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ayyy 0 points a month ago

For someone so interested in language, it’s baffling to me that you don’t seem to understand how language works. People have been laughing at stupid prescriptivists since words have been written down.

Or do you just have a humiliation fetish?

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RagingRobot -4 points a month ago

To be fair the human workers get it wrong most of the time too lol

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neatchee -6 points a month ago

LLMs are being abused by grifters and ruining the world...

... but the false equivalency in this thread is staggering. Y'all really think the McDonald's drive thru was running the same tech as the latest LLM models? You think they hooked every one of em up to the Internet with a GPT-5 subscription?

Quit making it easier for the tech bros to dismiss opposition to shitty "AI". Pointing at this abject failure and saying "see?!? AI can't take a burger order so how could it write good code?!?" is not helping anyone.

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Canconda 4 points a month ago

Pointing out that there were major pilot projects in 2024 by major companies, whose results indicated the 2025 mass rollout of AI into everything would fail, is not making it easier for tech bros to dismiss opposition they were already ignoring.

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neatchee 0 points a month ago

And if that's what people on here were doing then I wouldn't have commented.

but every other reply in here is some form of "it can't handle this and they want it to X?" or some other ridiculous thing

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aaaa 2 points a month ago

They shouldn't be using a general LLM. They should be training a model explicitly for fast food restaurants

Or perhaps they should pay a proper wage to human employees who can do a better job

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SorryQuick -11 points a month ago

You do realize LLMs couldn’t even reason in 2024 right? Using sometimg that happened multiple eras ago (at the speed this is going) to push a narrative is a bit disingenuous.

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chaogomu 13 points a month ago

They still can't reason, because that's not how they work.

It's glorified auto-complete that cannot tell the difference between training data and input commands.

Albuquerque New Mexico.

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Thorry 6 points a month ago

Stop drinking the kool-aid my man, just because the AI companies label things as "thinking" and "reasoning" doesn't it's the same thing as those terms when applied to humans. There is an argument to be made the analogy works well enough with some terms, but especially with reasoning it's pure marketing BS.

Internally reasoning is called "internal recursion" and it's more of a scratch pad. It allows the model to split up tasks into smaller bits, where it would choke if it tried to tackle the whole thing at once. It goes through the question, tries to come up with results and writes those down in its scratch pad. That whole scratch pad including everything that came before (system prompt, prompt, context etc) gets put into the model again to produce the final result.

Not to be confused with Chain-of-Thought, which is similar but different. That's where multiple passes get made and the tasks are actively broken up with different system prompts. This especially helps in tasks where the context would run out, but doing the same thing in smaller steps does work.

It's very annoying how AI companies heavily anthropomorphize everything related to LLMs, right down to calling it AI instead of just an LLM and leave the intelligence out of it. This easily dupes and confuses people into thinking the tool is something it's not. People think because they use terms like reasoning and thinking that these models have motivations, internal dialog, actual thoughts and even do things like planning, anticipating and predicting. This simply isn't the case, it's a mathematical model, you input numbers and it spits out numbers. When you input the same numbers, the same numbers come out (although parts can apply randomization, usually controlled through a parameter called temperature). It isn't alive, it isn't thinking or reasoning or smart. It doesn't have motivations or evil intentions. It's just numbers.

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SorryQuick -7 points a month ago

Well I’ll be damned, someone who actually understand how LLMs work, on this platform? That’s a first.

I wasn’t talking about the marketing, I read the papers.

The thing is, we’re pretty much doing the same when we think. There are plenty of convincing papers and theories that tie advanced intelligence to language. I don’t understand why everyone assumes that “predicts next tokens means it can’t be intelligent” when in reality humans do just that when they talk and think.

If you’re ever learned a second language through immersion you’ll know the feeling of stringing a sentence together just from having seen enough similar ones, even if your sentence is technically brand new. That word right there feels just right, even if you don’t know the logic why. How is that any different from an LLM?

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chaogomu 5 points a month ago path: 0 25760779 25761404 25762583 25762795, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 1
SorryQuick -5 points a month ago

I’m not sure how that’s related to what I said. Please bring an argument or something.

As for your videos, this is obviously using the dumb models, they wouldn’t have the budget to use decent ones, so not sure what’s your point here either.

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NotASharkInAManSuit 1 point a month ago

The thing is, we’re pretty much doing the same when we think.

The thing is, we have literally no idea what a thought even is nor how they work. You cannot replicate a concept you have no working understanding of. Your brain does not work the same way a computer does, point blank.

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SorryQuick -3 points a month ago

Well, we know two things for certain:

  • LLMs and neural networks as a primitive are trained like an optimised version of a human. Because we do know how we learn: positive and negative reinforcement. That’s seemingly how all animals learn, though there is supposedly some genetics at play too.

  • Verbalizing our thoughts (eg. rubberduck technique) improves reasoning

This is what LLMs are built upon. Specifically because language makes reasoning much easier, LLMs are the best current form of AI we have at it.

Besides, saying “we have literally no idea” is just straight up not true, just because you don’t know doesn’t mean nobody does. There have been a lot of papers on the subject lately, though it’s true we don’t fully understand it.

What we can easily figure out from black box analysis of our brain is this: when making a decision or when thinking, there is the initial input that causes us to have that thought, context, memory and previous thought progress (or CoT to keep things simple) bring used.

LLMs replicates all this, and given the same input, produces the same output as a human at an ever-increasing rate, these days often better in specific and limited fields. What does it matter if the internal algorithm isn’t the exact same?

Besides, you do know you can run an AI on human brain cells, right? Saying “your brain doesn’t run the same way a computer does” when we can literally put a computer in a brain…

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"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"

A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.

AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.

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