Technology

Over the past few years, restaurants from White Castle to Wendy’s have been investing in artificial intelligence tech for drive-thrus… [E]fforts have ramped up recently, with two announcements in May. CKE Restaurants (owner of Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.) said it will roll out AI ordering capability more broadly after a Read more…

Y Combinator founder Paul Graham last week took to Twitter to lament those who use AI or other excuses for not learning to code. “A generation ago some people were saying there was no point in learning to program because all the programming jobs would be outsourced to India,” Graham Read more…

Quanta magazine thinks there’s a better alternative to the artificial neural networks (or ANNs) powering AI systems. For one, ANNs are “super power-hungry,” said Cornelia Fermüller, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland. “And the other issue is [their] lack of transparency.” Such systems are so complicated that no Read more…

Clarify Capital, a small business lender, asked 250 investors and 250 business owners to rate a set of human-created and GPT-4-generated pitch decks without letting the participants know that AI was involved. To make matters more interesting, the human-generated pitches were successful ones that had secured funding in the past. Read more…

Mercedes is adding OpenAI’s ChatGPT to its MBUX infotainment system. “U.S. owners of models that use MBUX will be able to opt into a beta program starting tomorrow, June 16, activating ChatGPT functionality,” reports TechCrunch. “This will enable the highly versatile large language model to augment the car’s conversation skills. Read more…

Scientists have created synthetic human embryos using stem cells, in a groundbreaking advance that sidesteps the need for eggs or sperm. Scientists say these model embryos, which resemble those in the earliest stages of human development, could provide a crucial window on the impact of genetic disorders and the biological Read more…