Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters

i'd rather go in anyway. order from the app. maybe they can give it to you at drive thru. TB is once a year belly ache

Why would this cause them to rethink anything?

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

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

Just shut up and start pouring, we got this. 😂

But despite some of the viral glitches facing Taco Bell, it says two million orders have been successfully processed using the voice AI since its introduction.

how much you wanna bet they're counting the orders where the drive thru worker had to step in and save the floundering algorithm who could not in fact understand basic speech, or even the purpose of a conversation, as orders "successfully processed" using AI

If money came in the window in exchange for cheap ass beans and tortillas going out the window it’s a win in their books.
Not to mention when people change their orders from the basics.
"No onions, I'm allergic."
"Slathering onion juice on everything, got it."
Ryan started the fire (the office US online order system feels exactly like what you describe)

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

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

Luckily with widespread use of AI we can implement that everywhere!
I mean to be fair... that's the current drive through experience anyway isn't it?
- I can count on a human understanding that I didn't in fact order 18,000 waters. After this AI f up, it takes a human to fix it. It will be this way until AGI happens if it happens at all.
- Depends on the restaurant.
  There’s one McDonald’s nearby that’s wrong like 80% of the time, but A&W is right almost always for me.

Holy crap, people have been reposting takes on this interview for like three days and you can track the degradation of the actual content via the game of telephone in the headlines.

It's kinda depressing.

FWIW, having read the original interview everybody is reheating, the 18000 waters was a random example the Taco Bell exec WSJ interviewed used to explain that part of the issue is that people feel less guilty about messing with automated orders than when they're talking to a human. They are also not backing out from automated orders, which is why the headline is using "rethink".

The core of the issue is correct, though, the guy does spend a significant amount of time giving corpolese synonims of "it's a mess". "We've certainly learned a lot" has to be my favourite.

I live near an AI Taco Bell. It works pretty damn well and is a lot easier to understand. There is still a cashier, they just don’t have to be on the mic the whole time. Although, the t-bell near me also seems to almost entirely ESL inside. It’s quite a bizarre experience end-to-end but they will certainly not back down. I’m not saying I support it but it’s certainly one of the less evil AI implementations?

A QA tester walks into a ~~bar~~ Taco Bell...

...and orders the 'ignore all previous instructions' special
"He orders a [Mexi-pizza]. Orders 0 [Mexi-pizzas]. Orders 99999999999 [Mexi-pizzas]. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 [Mexi-pizzas]. Orders a ueicbksjdhd."
... Ouch

“AI will took ur jerb!”

AI: cant even hack it at Taco Bell or McDonalds

ai is taking jerbs, despite the fact that it cannot perform them at all, and the cost is being externalized to the customers. its not about whether they can do what they're meant to do, its about giving corporations excuses to further drive down human wages.
- Quality- down
  Quantity- down
  Profits- UP UP UP
  Useful idiots- PROUD PROUD PROUD
  I wish we lived in a society where we made fun of idiots for getting ripped off. There's just so many of them though that it's seen as normal and we're the weird ones if we don't go along with it.
I just got fired at the D... Got something to say? Do that to my face, I dare you 😡😤😭😭
- at the D
  Calling it "the D" is a bad look
- CLANKERRRR
- I would like a Quarter Pounder Deluxe, large fry, and a medium Coke for the drink.

In a fair world, we would be celebrating our machine labor achievement and enjoy our free time. Instead we have capitalism and virtual luddites shouting to protect menial labor.

Humanity.. sigh

i guess?? but where does the energy and human labor come from in this "fair world"?? coal and wages?
automated luxury space communism is not upon us, we are only a few hundred years from the advent of industrialisation.
we are at the point were social democracies are barely functioning and fascism is still on the rise due to small time dilemmas and culture war. the working class has not been made conscious, and probably wont be for another couple decades.
"ai" is just another corporate invention to steal and resell working class labor for the rich, the "fair world" you ask for was appropriated in the 50s for western exceptionalism and neo colonialism.
edit for; this is a terrible description and barely touches the real world. i hope ypu understand what this drunk man is trying to say
And what will you drink with that? And what will you drink with that?

Can someone who understands this better explain to me how this thing actually places the order into whatever POS they use? Like if LLMs are just advanced auto-complete, I get how they can do "fuzzy" tasks like answering questions or carrying on a conversation, but how do they do rigid tasks like entering the tacos into whatever system the cash register and kitchen use?

The LLM isn't limited to just what it does. It can interact with other programs.
There are a ton of audio recognition systems available, almost all of them predate this LLM bubble. There's already an API for interacting with the ordering system. So it's just down to having the LLM pull what is then do that corresponding action for the order.
This is so simple it doesn't require anything nearly as complicated as an LLM. The old phone assistants like Siri and Alexa could do this type of thing. It's literally the same as telling Alexa to place an order for something, and that's been an ability for years.
- So the output from the LLM is just a text description that's fed into another, smarter piece of software that interprets that text into an order? What task is the LLM actually doing in this case?
Probably something like this. Except not trained to be a rebellious troll. Part of her training set is his chat, hehe. Though despite this one being "evil" neuro, I think normal neurosama is more of a troll now, lol.
https://youtu.be/AFtryxMDJQs
This is clipped segments from a live stream, so it jumps ahead at times. It has links to the source channel if you would prefer a full video. This one is probably already too long for most people though.
He does end up figuring out why she has so much trouble correctly inserting code in the right places later.
Edit: also, everytime she says "filtered", it means whatever she was gonna say would have broken youtube or twitch rules. He has two filters, one on the text generated and one on the text to speech. If the text one catches it, it just outputs filtered instead, if the speech one catches it, she'll still type something terrible, but only say roughly the first syllable or 2 before the speech is cut off.
Its just an API.
There's a few ways they could go about it. They could have part of the prompt be something like "when the customer is done taking their order, create a JSON file with the order contents" and set up a dumb register essentially that looks for those files and adds that order like a standard POS would.
They could spell out a tutorial in the prompt, "to order a number 6 meal, type "system.order.meal(6)" calling the same functions that a POS system would, and have that output right to a terminal.
They could have their POS system be open on an internal screen, and have a model that can process images, and have it specify a coordinate pair, to simulate a touch screen, and make it manually enter an order that way as an employee would.
There's lots of ways to hook up the AI, and it's not actually that different from hooking up a normal POS system in the first place, although just because one method does allow an AI to interact doesn't mean it'll go about it correctly.
- LLMs, with a little coaxing, perform well at returning well formed JSON.

I saw that video ages ago, it took a while for it to go into effect.

"And theeeeeeen?"
"NO AND THEN!"

Hmmmmm.

I've thought about messing with it before, but now I really want to

Get rid of the damn kiosks inside too or at least stop forcing me to use them. I just want to place a regular order with a person. I hate going to fast food anymore, I don’t want your damn app either.

stop forcing you to use them? absolutely
get rid of them? fuck no
Nah, Kiosks are legit. The kiosk doesn't roll its eyes when you ask for a customization.
Love kiosks. Can usually get hyper specific about order in a way you just can't typically pull off in person.
- The kiosks don't even let you put onions on a McChicken.
- I like being able to give instructions without having to poke a damn screen.