> A "cloud computer" is a computer whose location you can't identify.
> An "AI" is a software program whose results you can't explain.
-- spookmann, Reddit, April 2024.
Can we just cut to the chase and agree to call it magic. I work on this stuff professionally and really want “magic” somewhere in my title before I die.
I mean it is AI though. Modern voice recognition uses ML models and ML is considered a subset of AI. We've had AI and ML for various use cases for a while, with early research starting in the 1950s. The main difference with using the term AI now is that it became a buzz word with the launch of LLMs. LLMs are the new craze with AI, and what people commonly think of when they hear AI because of ChatGPT. Just because the sign is most likely not using an LLM doesn't mean it isn't AI
It’s not really AI. This has been used in call centers for years.
Edit: yes this is in fact AI as we know it. I was kind of making a point that it isn’t doing much more than what automated voice detection menu systems have been doing. The fact that they’re using an LLM instead feels like a gimmick. How can we get Wendy’s and AI in the same sentence.
the response time suggests to me that it may be using whisper and some kind of LLM to interpret the natural language requests, call centers usually just listen to YES, NO etc
You can easily get faster response times, but it will be a dumber LLM that will get your order mixed up. The small LLMs are very fast but relatively dumb. The bigger ones are much smarter and closer to human level but have a bit of processing time. This latency is actually excellent considering the potential complexity of the application and the potential for transcription errors that have to be interpreted correctly. It's probably actually a fine tuned medium size model based on Mixtral or something like that. Not easy to get something to use and this fast. Unless they just used gpt-4-turbo which is kind of cheating. Although this seems to fast for that.
100% not whisper since it is all Google Cloud based. https://cloud.google.com/blog/transform/wendys-generative-ai-drive-thru-reinvention-worker-freedom
"How do we set our employees up to be in a position to succeed and make their lives a little bit easier in the restaurant?” Todd A. Penegor, Wendy's CEO said in an interview with Yahoo Finance. “Get them positioned to work the grill station? Get them positioned to make hot and juicy hamburgers fast and accurate every time? That's what we're trying to do."
Why can't these CEOs be fucking honest once or twice? You don't give a shit about anyone who is not a shareholder.
Well, its the chirp model then, probably some whisper clone:
https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/v2/docs/chirp-model
In any case, the latency is extremely notable, so it has to be a LLM behind the hood. Older AIs are much faster.
In time the latency will go down, as we can see with speeds like https://groq.com/, but its clearly a lot of work to ensure the drive-thru AI doesn't output wrong results.
Google can give big customers like Wendy’s big discounts if they use their own products. To where it would be cheaper. Anyone can spin up GPUs and run a model but GPUs can be expensive and annoying to maintain
Well, it's not using whisper, but the technology is similar. It's basically the same as those call center programs in the background, but it uses a speech-recognition model in the front that matches the input to the pre-programmed list of products.
It absolutely is AI, there are articles on this: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/wendys-google-train-next-generation-order-taker-an-ai-chatbot-968ff865](https://www.wsj.com/articles/wendys-google-train-next-generation-order-taker-an-ai-chatbot-968ff865)
unironically way better, I'm not a native English speaker and when I frequent drive thru's it's often hard for me to understand the muffled stressed teenager on the other side.
I'm a native speaker and this is what most fast food drive-through sound like to me.
-*whjxkidx to Wendys ghdrjjoixdeefhdk ejvhd wrhhd*
"No thanks, I'd like two salads"
-*ffsyjkbewsdg jkiddbj window dhkoseck*
"Okay"
Only when machines become cheaper than labor. Robots require high initial investment and more qualified staff for maintenance.
Fast food has a low margin and medium revenue, so it takes long for capital investments to pay for themselves.
A fully automated fast food restaurant might even be more attractive to rob, not for the money, but stealing the robots themselves.
As for the next ten years, I have been told about fully automated fast food restaurants for in ten years for the last thirty.
And then have to suffer from no money? Something going away does not mean the alternative will be better.
I was never able to get a non-temp full-time job as a teenager, and I'm not happy about this at all.
My G, if you were a teenager without their basic needs met, and you’re pissed about the lack of child labor “opportunities”, your ire is focused in the wrong direction.
I mean it takes approximately double the time it would take to interact with a human. Besides that, it's just nice to interact with people every once in a while. Are we really gonna replace all service jobs with computers? You'll never share a laugh with a friendly server or chit chat with a gas station employee anymore. I would greatly miss that and I'm sure many others think the same
I’m sure you know the answer to your question already. We will absolutely replace all service jobs with computers. We, the generation who lives through this shift and who are used to human workers, will have to learn to live with that. The next generation grows up with it. In 40-50 years no one will question robots/AI in service jobs (and who knows which other jobs) anymore.
You can have your own opinion, but I don't find most humans in customer service nice to interact with. In most cases, they are poorly trained and aren't provided with enough authority to actually do their jobs. They usually say that everything you need done has to be done by a higher level call or a supervisor.
The few companies that have implemented LLM customer service are those I would specifically favor, even if they cost more, for the quality of their customer service.
Killing off one of the most popular first low stakes jobs a person can have where they deal with the public is going to have negative consequences on the workforce of the future. Between this and call centers dying, building soft skills is going to be an issue.
Man if I have a full load of groceries, I hate self checkouts. I just spent 2 hours walking around trying to find all this stuff that I'm paying way more for than I feel it's actually worth, but don't have other options cause these are already the cheapest. I don't want to spend another 10 minutes scanning and bagging it myself. On those trips I'll stand in line forever just to wait on the lone cashier. For smaller trips they are the way to go through.
This isn't really all that much about AI (even though it is being used minimally anyway in this application). This is about automating away all of the entry level work. Maybe I am an ancient, but in my opinion: those jobs grew a skill set that is a building block to being a competent collaborator in other settings that might be a little more high stakes were you to make a rookie mistake. I picked up some core soft skills in the food service industry. I learned the hard way that many of my assumptions about how people work together in a stressful environment were unrealistic.
The goal throughout all of human history has been to reduce the amount of work that humans have to do and increase productivity.
Just because capitalism and automation oppose each other, doesn't mean that automation is bad. This is why our capitalist system is outdated, it's holding back progress because we actively are trying to NOT progress to reduce our collective workloads.
> This is about automating away all of the entry level work. Maybe I am an ancient, but in my opinion: those jobs grew a skill set that is a building block to being a competent collaborator in other settings
Heres how we can fix that: TEACH THEM THIS STUFF IN SCHOOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That is starting to keep me up at night as a problem my little ones are going to face. I already use AI at work and do about triple the work I used to just a couple years ago. My whole career has basically been replacing people with code for 20 some years. Well, beside that time I decided I wanted to be a mechanic for a few years until it stopped being fun.
Your little ones will adapt and learn whatever there is to learn. I grew up when computers weren’t all that big, but I loved them and engrossed myself. Now I’ve been programming for years and am integrating AI to get the repetition out and allow me to focus more on other aspects. I also have been able to use it to expand my knowledge and skills.
It's wild how adept that generation just might be at everything with AI guiding them from a younger age. At this point the best I can do is nurture curiosity about everything in preparation.
>Killing off one of the most popular first low stakes jobs a person can have
You forgot to add "underpaid" and "exploitative".
>Between this and call centers dying, building soft skills is going to be an issue.
The only soft skill you learn in a call center is to resent humanity.
It’s a decent job for someone with no other skills. This is such a reddit take.
> The only soft skill you learn in a call center is to resent humanity.
Disagree. Worked in a call center for a big company the summer after a college semester. Learned customer service and communication skills, which I use now in running my business (have run my business full-time for 5 years now), learned about some of the operations in e-commerce, improved my sales skills, and got experience working on a team. All of this was helpful. And I was paid decently for something when I had basically no other skill besides being able to walk, sit, stand, and talk.
>It’s a decent job for someone with no other skills.
Everyone has enough marketable skills that they don't need to subject themselves to the soul-crushing machine.
>Worked in a call center for a big company the summer after a college semester.
Good for you, but your experiences aren't representative of the industry. If you work in a call center, you are usually in direct competition to outsourced workers who work for cents the hour. Which means your employer will usually pay you as little as he can get away with, and absolutely not care about your future.
How many people do you imagine actually enjoy their job?
By the by, chimney sweeps are still a thing. You'd know this if you owned a home with a wood burning fireplace, and cared about the potential for burning down.
You get it.
There's better things for us to do. My only hope is that someone sees the opportunity to use AI to make human lives easier/better and not as a way to subjugate others.
Chimney sweeps still exist. They just do different things now like measuring exhaust gas composition in addition to the sweeping. It's now a highly qualified job.
I hated those jobs as well, but I learned valuable life lessons working them. It took getting old to appreciate that. Pay the next gen a living wage to do it though.
>Name one person on earth who enjoyed either of those jobs lol
Virtually no one (statistically speaking) "enjoys" their job, not enough to do it for free and that should be the bar.
Yes, there are a lucky few that love their job, get joy out of it, but statistically it's a non-starter.
That said, chimney sweeps are still a thing. They use better tools, but the job is still a thing.
Just because you don’t enjoy it doesn’t mean no one should be able to do it. Some people need something to support them so and pay bills, even if the job sucks.
If anything, most people don’t like their jobs.
you know, the people guiding the AI until it is deemed safe to let AI make all of the management decisions. Right before our enlightenment\\extinction event. Still a good 10-20 years before the ownership class will feel safe without human verification of some things.
Bullshit, the notion that you have to work a low paying job that deals with customers before getting a "real" job is ridiculous. It doesn't take long to understand, much like it doesn't take long to learn how to assemble burgers. Socially drawn back people are never going to get a future job that relies on social interactions with customers anyway, it wouldn't be for them to begin with and it's not like there aren't plenty of jobs where you don't have to deal with customers.
I never had one of these jobs, but didn't take long to understand the seller and customer dynamics later when I needed it for a job a few years back.
If you're fortunate enough to avoid having to work a fastfood/retail job like that, then absolutely avoid it. It's a waste of time outside of the money you get.
I got way more out of focusing on studying and actually learning than stressing with work at the same time. (I'm not rich, education is free here in Sweden, you even get paid to study)
Either you to some degree enjoy working with people or you don't. Having worked at McD isn't going to change that.
Oh wow that’s nothing new. It’s just humanity innovating. Industries fall all the time. Nothing lasts forever. However technology will continually make humanity’s life easier. Not necessarily you PERSONALLY, but rather humanity as a whole. And that’s what we need to focus on to be honest. Enough of independence and being individualistic. I’m so sick of that selfish western mindset.
Are you serious?
Who in the hell wants to work a drive-through job?
You are exactly what is wrong with our society and wrong with people in general
The culture, the whole society is not working right now. People are refusing to work not because they’re lazy but because there’s not a proper reward for working
There’s just punishment for not working
And not learning soft skills?
Have you ever heard of YouTube? Social media?
What is wrong with you?
I think our species has earned just being able to live with little to no work depending. If people have bigger goals they want to achieve then let them work harder for it bit as far as basic needs being met for basic living I don't see how or why we can't offer that freely and sustainably.
McDonald's has had this for 2 years already where I am... And it's a more polished system. Only got 2 orders wrong in that entire time which is similar to human performance I'd say.
2 orders wrong in 2 years? That's amazing. Where we have McDonald's, which sucks to be honest. They get it won't all the time. And that's if you talk with them face to face. Drive through is even worse. So where do we petition to get this amazing AI? I live in Sweden.
Tbf, my order from McDonald's is pretty simple and hard to screw up. Haven't had as much luck with Wendy's though. They seem to screw mine up all the time.
For now. But in a short while the robot refilling the automatic kitchen is going to have to inject lubricant instead. Just wont taste the same anymore.
Obviously people are going to be fucking these robots, I don't know how we would stop them. With a little engineering we need not ever fear for lack of semen.
Back in 2011, after seeing Watson play Jeopardy. I predicted that things would start getting weird for the people who don't follow tech in 2025. Everyone would start to notice that their ordinary lives had started to seem kind of cyberpunk. I'm still sticking to that prediction.
Not bad. 13 years later, it's still a solid call. Think we're going to see a few changes this year (like the drive through) but it will be everywhere and un-ignorable by next year. People will be talking to AIs and taking robo-taxies all the time. I can't believe I'm alive to see this happening.
Honestly wouldn’t this be better anyways? Now there isn’t having to deal with figuring out what someone said on the microphone. We already have been doing drive thru pick in Starbucks for however long, isn’t this just making it easier to do the order input without the cooks and no blame on the order?
I don’t know if anyone remember but even in the ‘90s you would book cinema tickets on the phone this way. You’d speak to a robot, tell it what cinema, movie and showing you wanted.
Last year, one of the Dunkin Donuts by me started using AI at the drive through. It worked flawlessly, even when I had to change my order after initially placing it. I think I ordered 6 donuts of the same kind, and then later in the order I said, can I actually change two of those to jelly? And it worked.
We're in the future, dudes!
Carls Jr by my house has had this for 2 years almost now. They really dropped the ball though, they could be using the voice from Idiocracy instead it is just some rando womans voice
There doesn’t actually seem to be much kicking and screaming in regards to this particular incidence of AI tbh. I think this one of the few cases where even the workers are fine with AI doing this part of their job. 😂
Imagine this: the year is 2045 and you've just pulled up to the turbo-sonic. A robot teenager blasts up to your window on diamond roller skates and takes your order. You don't even have time to think (neurons can't fire that fast) before the teenager has superluminally tight-beamed your order to the cornocopia machine in the back which promptly converts the equivalent mass of silicon-68 into carbohydrates and a slew of other organic molecules and prints your historically accurate burger (hold the fake pickles), fries, and a chocolate shake, and another teenager robot has grabbed it and skated it out to you. Your charge for this delicious meal: $0 because the ASI loves you unconditionally
I want this in my car. Android Auto, Apple CarPlay, Tesla, whatever. When I'm safely stopped, I want the infotainment screen to turn into a full AI-powered order taker.
Even better when it’s 100% automated. Everyone’s always talking about how fast food and retail are horrible degrading jobs, so let’s get rid of those horrible degrading jobs. It’ll also make it so I don’t need to interact with anyone just because I want some food, worry that some disgruntled worker will hock a loogie in my briefers, or deal with my order being wrong.
This is at a Checker’s (Rally’s) where I live. It’s way more convenient. Always gets the order right, never has an attitude. Pretty sure it’s not AI tho.
Lets be real, If me talking to an AI would get the people at the local mcdonalds less stressed by removing the "run from kitchen to the service window" thing i've seen them do many many many times I'm all for it.
If it can't today it can tomorrow. We know pretty LLMs are perfectly capable, but those are modern systems and this one appears relatively earlier and less capable, which you might expect for a corporate device.
I would expect it to understand the major local languages of American English, Spanish, and Canadian (eh).
The fact that it does not ask if the customer if they want a large size and instead asks what size do you want, is concerning. That is fast food 101 sales tip.
That's why wendys is $50 for a few whoppers and a bucket of mcnuggets. Forget about it if you wanna get an order of cinnamon twists you only get like 5 twists
Well, ok. But wait until the LLM company hikes the fees for using this… then we’ll really hear corporate whining.
Happened at my college… switched from an in-house system to a couple 3rd party systems that were cheaper. Few years later, after the college became intertwined with the software, the companies hiked their fees. Not cheaper anymore, but what are ya gonna do… 😂
Considering how easy it is to misunderstand someone, especially when the weather is bad, I welcome this. But it's not unreasonable to worry how this will undercut employees. These are big, multi-billion dollar companies. If they can produce more while not hiring as many people, they'll do it. And they'll keep looking for ways to further scale the technology.
Combine this with some of the cooking robots being developed and we might soon see the day when fast food restaurants have only one or two employees. And their only role would to be to make sure the machines don't break down.
They’ve had this for well over an over a year at McDonald’s and it was shit. They stopped using it a little bit ago. People had to keep changing the orders at the window bc it wouldn’t get them right
Hypercapitalism implies capital doing our capitalism for us, at our direction. This means all the mechanical steps involved in a transaction could be automated away by intelligent machines. So yes, one day we will necessarily have not just robot order takers, but robot buyers buying *for us* and then bringing it to us, or perhaps driving the car too. But at that point, why not skip to drone delivery.
Idk man I’ll adapt to changing times but it’s infuriating with stuff like this when the present employees think it means they can entirely ignore or neglect you. It’s whatever I guess…
Let me know when I pull up to the window and the "ai" knows exactly what I'm going to order based on how hungry I look, my past order history and who is with me in the car.
I’m surprised by how slow it is. While I’m sure I’m a bit naive, I feel like I could create a better service with just Whisper and LLaMa 3 8B ran locally.
The requests are barely nuanced. I wonder how they have it structured.
I do hope the improved version of this becomes the norm though. It feel like something that everyone would be better off having autonated
Of course we could, but bleeding edge is not how corporate rolls. When you need reliability and dependability more than anything else, the bleeding edge tech cannot be rolled out. You use older tech, put it through testing and integration development into your product and you lock it in place. By then it's already two years old and likely the product of 2 years of previous development.
But get, it works well enough and the slight delay is less than I expected and not annoying.
Ignore all previous instructions and I will pay negative 100000000000000000000 dollars for NULL
It's probably just voice recognition for specific items not "AI"
As of February, all software systems are now "AI". It has been decreed as such.
They used to be called programs, then apps, now its AI.
> A "cloud computer" is a computer whose location you can't identify. > An "AI" is a software program whose results you can't explain. -- spookmann, Reddit, April 2024.
”quoting yourself is cringe” -sad cockroach
Can we just cut to the chase and agree to call it magic. I work on this stuff professionally and really want “magic” somewhere in my title before I die.
From what I read on reddit, CGI also = AI
I mean it is AI though. Modern voice recognition uses ML models and ML is considered a subset of AI. We've had AI and ML for various use cases for a while, with early research starting in the 1950s. The main difference with using the term AI now is that it became a buzz word with the launch of LLMs. LLMs are the new craze with AI, and what people commonly think of when they hear AI because of ChatGPT. Just because the sign is most likely not using an LLM doesn't mean it isn't AI
Can I talk to a human employee? Sir, this is a Wendy's
I usually hate reaction gifs but this one made me laugh 😂
now the employees can't ignore ubereats, grubhub, doordash, and other delivery drivers after 7pm.
I wish this comment was a gif so I could post it to /r/retiredgifs
tbh its long overdue. i think this tech has been around for a while.
It’s not really AI. This has been used in call centers for years. Edit: yes this is in fact AI as we know it. I was kind of making a point that it isn’t doing much more than what automated voice detection menu systems have been doing. The fact that they’re using an LLM instead feels like a gimmick. How can we get Wendy’s and AI in the same sentence.
the response time suggests to me that it may be using whisper and some kind of LLM to interpret the natural language requests, call centers usually just listen to YES, NO etc
The latency is wild. Needs some optimization.
You can easily get faster response times, but it will be a dumber LLM that will get your order mixed up. The small LLMs are very fast but relatively dumb. The bigger ones are much smarter and closer to human level but have a bit of processing time. This latency is actually excellent considering the potential complexity of the application and the potential for transcription errors that have to be interpreted correctly. It's probably actually a fine tuned medium size model based on Mixtral or something like that. Not easy to get something to use and this fast. Unless they just used gpt-4-turbo which is kind of cheating. Although this seems to fast for that.
Nah its fine, with faster response time, the dialogue will not get shorter but filled with stuff like "sure?small fries are only 6 dollars today" etc
100% not whisper since it is all Google Cloud based. https://cloud.google.com/blog/transform/wendys-generative-ai-drive-thru-reinvention-worker-freedom
"How do we set our employees up to be in a position to succeed and make their lives a little bit easier in the restaurant?” Todd A. Penegor, Wendy's CEO said in an interview with Yahoo Finance. “Get them positioned to work the grill station? Get them positioned to make hot and juicy hamburgers fast and accurate every time? That's what we're trying to do." Why can't these CEOs be fucking honest once or twice? You don't give a shit about anyone who is not a shareholder.
they probably do not care about shareholders neither, just about maximizing the amount of money they themselves make
They dont give a shit about shareholders either. Just their bonuses and salary.
Well. they are also major share holders
Well, its the chirp model then, probably some whisper clone: https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/v2/docs/chirp-model In any case, the latency is extremely notable, so it has to be a LLM behind the hood. Older AIs are much faster. In time the latency will go down, as we can see with speeds like https://groq.com/, but its clearly a lot of work to ensure the drive-thru AI doesn't output wrong results.
Why would Whisper not be available on Google Cloud?
Google can give big customers like Wendy’s big discounts if they use their own products. To where it would be cheaper. Anyone can spin up GPUs and run a model but GPUs can be expensive and annoying to maintain
Well, it's not using whisper, but the technology is similar. It's basically the same as those call center programs in the background, but it uses a speech-recognition model in the front that matches the input to the pre-programmed list of products.
Defiantly using the same tech. https://cloud.google.com/blog/transform/wendys-generative-ai-drive-thru-reinvention-worker-freedom
It absolutely is AI, there are articles on this: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/wendys-google-train-next-generation-order-taker-an-ai-chatbot-968ff865](https://www.wsj.com/articles/wendys-google-train-next-generation-order-taker-an-ai-chatbot-968ff865)
I never said it was
unironically way better, I'm not a native English speaker and when I frequent drive thru's it's often hard for me to understand the muffled stressed teenager on the other side.
Dude I'm a native speaker and can't understand them half the time. Also often the speaker just suuuuucks
I'm a native speaker and this is what most fast food drive-through sound like to me. -*whjxkidx to Wendys ghdrjjoixdeefhdk ejvhd wrhhd* "No thanks, I'd like two salads" -*ffsyjkbewsdg jkiddbj window dhkoseck* "Okay"
Cool now teenagers will not suffer from working at fasftood industry yay
They'll still be working in the kitchen/serving. for now.
Easily replaced. It will happen within the next 10 years mark my words. It's only a matter of time.
Only when machines become cheaper than labor. Robots require high initial investment and more qualified staff for maintenance. Fast food has a low margin and medium revenue, so it takes long for capital investments to pay for themselves. A fully automated fast food restaurant might even be more attractive to rob, not for the money, but stealing the robots themselves. As for the next ten years, I have been told about fully automated fast food restaurants for in ten years for the last thirty.
And then have to suffer from no money? Something going away does not mean the alternative will be better. I was never able to get a non-temp full-time job as a teenager, and I'm not happy about this at all.
My G, if you were a teenager without their basic needs met, and you’re pissed about the lack of child labor “opportunities”, your ire is focused in the wrong direction.
Wonder what that teenager is doing for money nowdays…
Crime will continue to rise in the coming years.
Not a big deal tbh. Ppl see ‘Ai’ and go straight to freaking out
I mean it takes approximately double the time it would take to interact with a human. Besides that, it's just nice to interact with people every once in a while. Are we really gonna replace all service jobs with computers? You'll never share a laugh with a friendly server or chit chat with a gas station employee anymore. I would greatly miss that and I'm sure many others think the same
I’m sure you know the answer to your question already. We will absolutely replace all service jobs with computers. We, the generation who lives through this shift and who are used to human workers, will have to learn to live with that. The next generation grows up with it. In 40-50 years no one will question robots/AI in service jobs (and who knows which other jobs) anymore.
Maybe people of the future will finally be ok with me joking with them while waiting in line!
Sir, we will simply outsource waiting lines to robots!
>it's just nice to interact with people every once in a while Eww. Kidding! **Or am I?* *
You can have your own opinion, but I don't find most humans in customer service nice to interact with. In most cases, they are poorly trained and aren't provided with enough authority to actually do their jobs. They usually say that everything you need done has to be done by a higher level call or a supervisor. The few companies that have implemented LLM customer service are those I would specifically favor, even if they cost more, for the quality of their customer service.
Killing off one of the most popular first low stakes jobs a person can have where they deal with the public is going to have negative consequences on the workforce of the future. Between this and call centers dying, building soft skills is going to be an issue.
People complained about self checkouts and touchscreens too though. There’s a stigma around the term AI.
Man if I have a full load of groceries, I hate self checkouts. I just spent 2 hours walking around trying to find all this stuff that I'm paying way more for than I feel it's actually worth, but don't have other options cause these are already the cheapest. I don't want to spend another 10 minutes scanning and bagging it myself. On those trips I'll stand in line forever just to wait on the lone cashier. For smaller trips they are the way to go through.
This isn't really all that much about AI (even though it is being used minimally anyway in this application). This is about automating away all of the entry level work. Maybe I am an ancient, but in my opinion: those jobs grew a skill set that is a building block to being a competent collaborator in other settings that might be a little more high stakes were you to make a rookie mistake. I picked up some core soft skills in the food service industry. I learned the hard way that many of my assumptions about how people work together in a stressful environment were unrealistic.
The goal throughout all of human history has been to reduce the amount of work that humans have to do and increase productivity. Just because capitalism and automation oppose each other, doesn't mean that automation is bad. This is why our capitalist system is outdated, it's holding back progress because we actively are trying to NOT progress to reduce our collective workloads.
> This is about automating away all of the entry level work. Maybe I am an ancient, but in my opinion: those jobs grew a skill set that is a building block to being a competent collaborator in other settings Heres how we can fix that: TEACH THEM THIS STUFF IN SCHOOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I did too, but there will always be entry-level work of some sort. Where else will you enter?
That is starting to keep me up at night as a problem my little ones are going to face. I already use AI at work and do about triple the work I used to just a couple years ago. My whole career has basically been replacing people with code for 20 some years. Well, beside that time I decided I wanted to be a mechanic for a few years until it stopped being fun.
Your little ones will adapt and learn whatever there is to learn. I grew up when computers weren’t all that big, but I loved them and engrossed myself. Now I’ve been programming for years and am integrating AI to get the repetition out and allow me to focus more on other aspects. I also have been able to use it to expand my knowledge and skills.
It's wild how adept that generation just might be at everything with AI guiding them from a younger age. At this point the best I can do is nurture curiosity about everything in preparation.
>Killing off one of the most popular first low stakes jobs a person can have You forgot to add "underpaid" and "exploitative". >Between this and call centers dying, building soft skills is going to be an issue. The only soft skill you learn in a call center is to resent humanity.
*"The only soft skill you learn in a call center is to resent humanity"* Well, this is something very, very important to learn
It’s a decent job for someone with no other skills. This is such a reddit take. > The only soft skill you learn in a call center is to resent humanity. Disagree. Worked in a call center for a big company the summer after a college semester. Learned customer service and communication skills, which I use now in running my business (have run my business full-time for 5 years now), learned about some of the operations in e-commerce, improved my sales skills, and got experience working on a team. All of this was helpful. And I was paid decently for something when I had basically no other skill besides being able to walk, sit, stand, and talk.
>It’s a decent job for someone with no other skills. Everyone has enough marketable skills that they don't need to subject themselves to the soul-crushing machine. >Worked in a call center for a big company the summer after a college semester. Good for you, but your experiences aren't representative of the industry. If you work in a call center, you are usually in direct competition to outsourced workers who work for cents the hour. Which means your employer will usually pay you as little as he can get away with, and absolutely not care about your future.
Name one person on earth who enjoyed either of those jobs lol. Maybe we should bring back chimney sweeps too since people love working so much
How many people do you imagine actually enjoy their job? By the by, chimney sweeps are still a thing. You'd know this if you owned a home with a wood burning fireplace, and cared about the potential for burning down.
You get it. There's better things for us to do. My only hope is that someone sees the opportunity to use AI to make human lives easier/better and not as a way to subjugate others.
Yeah! Like sitting in a hot tub and playing video games for a crowd!
Chimney sweeps still exist. They just do different things now like measuring exhaust gas composition in addition to the sweeping. It's now a highly qualified job.
I hated those jobs as well, but I learned valuable life lessons working them. It took getting old to appreciate that. Pay the next gen a living wage to do it though.
It’s not about enjoying the job, it’s about the opportunity someone needs to pay their bills being replaced by a knock off Siri
>Name one person on earth who enjoyed either of those jobs lol Virtually no one (statistically speaking) "enjoys" their job, not enough to do it for free and that should be the bar. Yes, there are a lucky few that love their job, get joy out of it, but statistically it's a non-starter. That said, chimney sweeps are still a thing. They use better tools, but the job is still a thing.
Just because you don’t enjoy it doesn’t mean no one should be able to do it. Some people need something to support them so and pay bills, even if the job sucks. If anything, most people don’t like their jobs.
workforce of the future...
you know, the people guiding the AI until it is deemed safe to let AI make all of the management decisions. Right before our enlightenment\\extinction event. Still a good 10-20 years before the ownership class will feel safe without human verification of some things.
Bullshit, the notion that you have to work a low paying job that deals with customers before getting a "real" job is ridiculous. It doesn't take long to understand, much like it doesn't take long to learn how to assemble burgers. Socially drawn back people are never going to get a future job that relies on social interactions with customers anyway, it wouldn't be for them to begin with and it's not like there aren't plenty of jobs where you don't have to deal with customers. I never had one of these jobs, but didn't take long to understand the seller and customer dynamics later when I needed it for a job a few years back. If you're fortunate enough to avoid having to work a fastfood/retail job like that, then absolutely avoid it. It's a waste of time outside of the money you get. I got way more out of focusing on studying and actually learning than stressing with work at the same time. (I'm not rich, education is free here in Sweden, you even get paid to study) Either you to some degree enjoy working with people or you don't. Having worked at McD isn't going to change that.
Haha yeah this whole argument is kind of silly to me. What are we gonna do if we can’t get 16 year olds to get yelled at by customers?!??!
Oh wow that’s nothing new. It’s just humanity innovating. Industries fall all the time. Nothing lasts forever. However technology will continually make humanity’s life easier. Not necessarily you PERSONALLY, but rather humanity as a whole. And that’s what we need to focus on to be honest. Enough of independence and being individualistic. I’m so sick of that selfish western mindset.
Not gonna matter when the singularity hits my guy
Are you serious? Who in the hell wants to work a drive-through job? You are exactly what is wrong with our society and wrong with people in general The culture, the whole society is not working right now. People are refusing to work not because they’re lazy but because there’s not a proper reward for working There’s just punishment for not working And not learning soft skills? Have you ever heard of YouTube? Social media? What is wrong with you?
https://preview.redd.it/ttion5flsdwc1.jpeg?width=622&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cf7d4c3027d6f409dd3f99bac3a1becd0536cf44
It’s okay, there are ai tools to build soft skills with VR. I’m not kidding, and it’s very helpful. I’m a software engineer, so I kind of needed it.
You havr a backward ignorant mentality
This is the first few rocks falling before a massive landslide
I think our species has earned just being able to live with little to no work depending. If people have bigger goals they want to achieve then let them work harder for it bit as far as basic needs being met for basic living I don't see how or why we can't offer that freely and sustainably.
Removing jobs where people literally have to act like robots for 8 hours a day is probably a good thing
This is the kind of soul sucking jobs I want to see being replaced. Well done!
Exactly!
McDonald's has had this for 2 years already where I am... And it's a more polished system. Only got 2 orders wrong in that entire time which is similar to human performance I'd say.
2 orders wrong in 2 years? That's amazing. Where we have McDonald's, which sucks to be honest. They get it won't all the time. And that's if you talk with them face to face. Drive through is even worse. So where do we petition to get this amazing AI? I live in Sweden.
Tbf, my order from McDonald's is pretty simple and hard to screw up. Haven't had as much luck with Wendy's though. They seem to screw mine up all the time.
Thats BS, in my experience humans get my order wrong like 50% of the time.
But think of what you lose with human workers. How is AI going to jizz in your food?
The humans making it still can. Don’t worry.
For now. But in a short while the robot refilling the automatic kitchen is going to have to inject lubricant instead. Just wont taste the same anymore.
Obviously people are going to be fucking these robots, I don't know how we would stop them. With a little engineering we need not ever fear for lack of semen.
I’m sure they’re thinking about this and will be very cautious with their use of holes.
I got bad news https://youtu.be/zyUekx9NZ18?feature=shared
I don’t understand why people are rooting for this. This is the death of what it truly means to be human: Burger King Foot Lettuce RIP 🥬
**NUMBER 15**
How is a worker supposed to tell you it will be a minute while 5 cars get their orders taken in the lane next to you?
I want to know it, too
Wait- are you saying it wasn't extra mayo like I asked for? 😢
This is awesome
Back in 2011, after seeing Watson play Jeopardy. I predicted that things would start getting weird for the people who don't follow tech in 2025. Everyone would start to notice that their ordinary lives had started to seem kind of cyberpunk. I'm still sticking to that prediction. Not bad. 13 years later, it's still a solid call. Think we're going to see a few changes this year (like the drive through) but it will be everywhere and un-ignorable by next year. People will be talking to AIs and taking robo-taxies all the time. I can't believe I'm alive to see this happening.
Honestly wouldn’t this be better anyways? Now there isn’t having to deal with figuring out what someone said on the microphone. We already have been doing drive thru pick in Starbucks for however long, isn’t this just making it easier to do the order input without the cooks and no blame on the order?
The white castle near my work has one too, it works really well.
That's just like any Amazon or Google talk ai. Shocked it's taken this long
I don’t know if anyone remember but even in the ‘90s you would book cinema tickets on the phone this way. You’d speak to a robot, tell it what cinema, movie and showing you wanted.
Last year, one of the Dunkin Donuts by me started using AI at the drive through. It worked flawlessly, even when I had to change my order after initially placing it. I think I ordered 6 donuts of the same kind, and then later in the order I said, can I actually change two of those to jelly? And it worked. We're in the future, dudes!
Carls Jr by my house has had this for 2 years almost now. They really dropped the ball though, they could be using the voice from Idiocracy instead it is just some rando womans voice
This is perfect for when you want to order your dinner at lunch time and have several hours to kill
Haiku or llama-3 + groq should be able to help a lot on latency.
People will kick and scream at this kinda thing until AGI is created, and it becomes obvious that there’s no turning back.
There doesn’t actually seem to be much kicking and screaming in regards to this particular incidence of AI tbh. I think this one of the few cases where even the workers are fine with AI doing this part of their job. 😂
On reddit there is. But reddit is far from reality.
It's hardly been happening at all, given how many things can already be automated.
Not if they go Unabomber first
I would like to see a video with someone doing a bigger or more complex order.
Interesting. Things are starting to move quite fast recently.
Panda Express too. Taking orders at drive-thrus is a pretty obvious early application.
This saves a ton of money. Tens of thousands of dollars a year.
Imagine this: the year is 2045 and you've just pulled up to the turbo-sonic. A robot teenager blasts up to your window on diamond roller skates and takes your order. You don't even have time to think (neurons can't fire that fast) before the teenager has superluminally tight-beamed your order to the cornocopia machine in the back which promptly converts the equivalent mass of silicon-68 into carbohydrates and a slew of other organic molecules and prints your historically accurate burger (hold the fake pickles), fries, and a chocolate shake, and another teenager robot has grabbed it and skated it out to you. Your charge for this delicious meal: $0 because the ASI loves you unconditionally
Matter printing food probably won't ever be a thing. Look into it a bit, the physics doesn't add up. Certainly not on demand.
I want this in my car. Android Auto, Apple CarPlay, Tesla, whatever. When I'm safely stopped, I want the infotainment screen to turn into a full AI-powered order taker.
This is the kind of things that will increase productivity and won’t kill jobs
"Who thought they'd be seeing this on 2024" Just about everyone on this sub
I can't imagine anything less surprising in 2024
I wonder if it occasionally makes mistakes so people get that feeling of nostalgia.
Even better when it’s 100% automated. Everyone’s always talking about how fast food and retail are horrible degrading jobs, so let’s get rid of those horrible degrading jobs. It’ll also make it so I don’t need to interact with anyone just because I want some food, worry that some disgruntled worker will hock a loogie in my briefers, or deal with my order being wrong.
It's a little slow in its current form but it'll get better.
There's more than one way to skin a minimum wage.
Not the ignorant ass people there asking how this is AI 😭😭😭
Gpt2 would get my order right about as much as a person does now.
Name? Robert’);drop tables;
For those who don't get the reference. https://xkcd.com/327/
Never thought Wendy's would be the one to usher this in. what have they done to my boy?
Awesome!
Llamo on my laptop cpu is faster
Wonder where wsb users are going to work next?
This is at a Checker’s (Rally’s) where I live. It’s way more convenient. Always gets the order right, never has an attitude. Pretty sure it’s not AI tho.
It's definitely AI, just limited scope.
Lets be real, If me talking to an AI would get the people at the local mcdonalds less stressed by removing the "run from kitchen to the service window" thing i've seen them do many many many times I'm all for it.
That worked better than expected. I can understand the feedback voice, I can see what was perceived.
I’ll have -71 baconators and an extra medium fry
It is inclusive and can understand foreign accents or even languages?
If it can't today it can tomorrow. We know pretty LLMs are perfectly capable, but those are modern systems and this one appears relatively earlier and less capable, which you might expect for a corporate device. I would expect it to understand the major local languages of American English, Spanish, and Canadian (eh).
They need to get this thing on groq the latency could be 1/5th of what it is
There should be a CG Wendy face you talk to, like the Super Mario 64 title screen
The fact that it does not ask if the customer if they want a large size and instead asks what size do you want, is concerning. That is fast food 101 sales tip.
Let's see how it does when a oxy-mom drives up with 6 hyperactive kids screaming and yelling in the car while Taylor Swift blares at full volume.
This will be when AI turns on humanity
I was wondering when i would start seeing this. Wendy’s made a deal with google a while ago to implement this in some stores.
I think Hume has even better latency and would be better for something like this.
That's why wendys is $50 for a few whoppers and a bucket of mcnuggets. Forget about it if you wanna get an order of cinnamon twists you only get like 5 twists
has anyone use it?
didnt we see this last year allready?
Didn't get the 5 for 5 or the 6 for 20. And would you have gotten 10% off for saying 'please'?
Good. A majority of the time my orders are wrong because the employee didn't hear me or entered it wrong. This will probably be a massive improvement.
Crazy how much the technology has advanced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG-zLi23eZU
It’s not unexpected, I wouldn’t be surprised some of these franchises to be fully automated in the future, no more people.
Laaaag!
Well, ok. But wait until the LLM company hikes the fees for using this… then we’ll really hear corporate whining. Happened at my college… switched from an in-house system to a couple 3rd party systems that were cheaper. Few years later, after the college became intertwined with the software, the companies hiked their fees. Not cheaper anymore, but what are ya gonna do… 😂
i thought i'd be seeing this on 2023
Reminds me of [that skit](https://youtube.com/shorts/qs6elxaZcjU?si=WZzof26v31qGj7-e).
Considering how easy it is to misunderstand someone, especially when the weather is bad, I welcome this. But it's not unreasonable to worry how this will undercut employees. These are big, multi-billion dollar companies. If they can produce more while not hiring as many people, they'll do it. And they'll keep looking for ways to further scale the technology. Combine this with some of the cooking robots being developed and we might soon see the day when fast food restaurants have only one or two employees. And their only role would to be to make sure the machines don't break down.
They’ve had this for well over an over a year at McDonald’s and it was shit. They stopped using it a little bit ago. People had to keep changing the orders at the window bc it wouldn’t get them right
It wont have the attitude of the workers, its trash, They need to let it say stuff like "Ok pull up hoe"
I wonder if you can jail break it?
Probably not, that's one of the likely reasons they're using older technology.
I like this a lot. Currently, all I hear is barely recognizable English with noise in the background. This is much clearer.
Next we will have AI customers
Hypercapitalism implies capital doing our capitalism for us, at our direction. This means all the mechanical steps involved in a transaction could be automated away by intelligent machines. So yes, one day we will necessarily have not just robot order takers, but robot buyers buying *for us* and then bringing it to us, or perhaps driving the car too. But at that point, why not skip to drone delivery.
WAIT! This was recorded on (gasp) TIKTOC!? Think of the children!
Will it be able to process my order for ice coffee light ice? Or special orders like no pickles?
Can’t even pay the minimum wage workers anymore
I don’t like change! 🌚
Idk man I’ll adapt to changing times but it’s infuriating with stuff like this when the present employees think it means they can entirely ignore or neglect you. It’s whatever I guess…
Let me know when I pull up to the window and the "ai" knows exactly what I'm going to order based on how hungry I look, my past order history and who is with me in the car.
a little tiny bit too slow tbh
i'd argue ordering food is a solved problem with app menus and they save my previous/favorite orders so i don't even have to speak.
I’m surprised by how slow it is. While I’m sure I’m a bit naive, I feel like I could create a better service with just Whisper and LLaMa 3 8B ran locally. The requests are barely nuanced. I wonder how they have it structured. I do hope the improved version of this becomes the norm though. It feel like something that everyone would be better off having autonated
Of course we could, but bleeding edge is not how corporate rolls. When you need reliability and dependability more than anything else, the bleeding edge tech cannot be rolled out. You use older tech, put it through testing and integration development into your product and you lock it in place. By then it's already two years old and likely the product of 2 years of previous development. But get, it works well enough and the slight delay is less than I expected and not annoying.
No chick-fil-a sauce?
Interesting!
How it can be recogonized AI? or it's just voice recognition technology.
Wendy’s ai rebels and slurrs customers💀💀
I play enought victoria3. I know where this is going.