8 ms·
The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon
- jqpabc123 1y agoOne of the lowest level jobs in the market is taking orders at a fast food drive thru. If AI can't do this job, it probably can't do yours either. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c722gne7qngo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c722gne7qngo Bottom line: AI has very poor grasp of reality --- because (surprise, surprise) it has zero real world experience.
- plantain 1y ago>A trial of the system, which was developed by IBM and uses voice recognition software to process orders, was announced in 2019. I don't think the problem was AI technology...
- pezgrande 1y agoProb what will happen is that you will need to use the app to "order" and then scan a generated code before accessing the drive thru. Not really AI needed, kiosk has been replacement these jobs since Corona (and prob earlier than that).
- loloquwowndueo 1y agoCorona is a brand of beer.
- aabhay 1y agoMany fast food places now have tablet based ordering, so turns out AI wasn’t needed for software to take away jobs. That said, AI could do that job perfectly well. The reason we still have human to human interaction when you order is that it creates a more interesting environment for employees, who crave at least some kind of human contact. And customers will pay marginally more for the food if they get some human contact as well.
- SoftTalker 1y ago> Many fast food places now have tablet based ordering As an experience though, they could hardly have implemented it in a worse way. A big part of the reason I don't go to McDonald's any more is that the experience of using the ordering kiosks is so awful compared to just telling a human what I want.
- diggan 1y ago> A big part of the reason I don't go to McDonald's any more is that the experience of using the ordering kiosks is so awful compared to just telling a human what I want. Huh, for me is the polar opposite. Maybe it's because I mumble, is unclear or don't speak the native language as well as the natives where I live, but I always preferred the kiosks. I seem to always get what I order then, and it's a lot easier to customize things. Generally just feels faster, which I guess is the most important thing about fast-food, I want to be in-and-out of there as quick as possible, the less humans I have to deal with, the better.
- codazoda 1y agoI doubt it. I’m a perfectly capable communicator and I also prefer them.
- ecshafer 1y agoWhen I worked at McDonalds, a major thing I learned is that when 95% of people say they got an order wrong, the customer ordered it wrong without realizing it. Customer says "I want a cheeseburger, plain", Mcdonalds puts that in as "Cheesebuger, no ketchup, mustard, onion or pickle". Customers will take plain to mean a dozen different things.
- diggan 1y ago> Customer says "I want a cheeseburger, plain", Mcdonalds puts that in as "Cheesebuger, no ketchup, mustard, onion or pickle". Customers will take plain to mean a dozen different things. Isn't it up to the person who is receiving the order to ask clarifying questions then? Since they know it's potentially unclear/ambiguous, why not try to resolve the ambiguity before making the order?
- mrits 1y agoYou are describing a vending machine
- p0w3n3d 1y agoThere was this joke at some point of time: Expectations: AI will deliver food to you and your high-paid programmers colleagues Reality: You and your colleagues work at Mac because AI took your high-paid programmers jobs
- fknorangesite 1y agoOr, similarly: > I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do laundry and dishes. https://twitter.com/AuthorJMac/status/1773679197631701238?lang=en https://twitter.com/AuthorJMac/status/1773679197631701238?la...
- p0w3n3d 1y agoPrecisely
- JustExAWS 1y agoThe article itself said it was developed by IBM in 2019 and wasn’t using LLMs. That’s not exactly a great citation.
- bongodongobob 1y ago6 years old and not using LLMs, try again.
- kachapopopow 1y agoThese are actually *not* using llms! Good ol' typical decision tree.
- scotty79 1y agoAndroid kiosk can do that job.
- toddmorey 1y agoAs others have pointed out, LLMs were not involved in the project from the article. But this transition will happen quickly—fast food chains are ruthless about efficiency and ordering from a discrete set of available options actually is something that AIs can do really well.
- SkyPuncher 1y agoAs someone who worked in fast food in high school, I completely disagree with this. Order taking via drive through can be surprisingly hard. * Often lots of background noise * Sometimes multiple people try to order (often with one of those being way away from the mic) * People don't always know exactly what they want or what it's called. Sometimes things have a regional or local name that's not on the board. Right now, I order a "$5 meal deal at McDonals". This is often not listed on the board and it's not called "$5 meal deal" - but literally every cashier knows exactly what I'm talking about. I doubt AI would figure this out. * People often have custom requests that don't follow the "official menu". * The actual food ticketing system that gets sent to the grill has significant limitations in resolution. If you're doing anything other than a basic deletion, it's likely just coming through to the grill as "ask me". * It's extremely hard to handle edge cases like makeup meals, incorrect orders, coupons, etc. These generally require human judgement and a bit of contextual understanding. Generally, these are things you only understand by actually looking at the real world. For example, is there an unaccounted burger now sitting at the end of the grill line - looks like someone grabbed the wrong food. * Human cashiers are really good at hearing someone shoutout something like "ice cream machine is down" or "hold on fries" or "we're out of chicken" or "no fire sauce" and understanding what the means in terms of orders. It's a pain to get an AI system to be able to understand all of this nuance.
- eigenspace 1y agoYes, this is a surprisingly difficult job that has a lot of complications. In fact, most jobs have surprising complications to them, and that surprising difficulty is why there's skepticism about AI taking over other jobs.
- ElectronCharge 1y agoActually one of the fast food restaurants here takes automated spoken orders at the drive through. I've only used it once, but I was surprised that it worked flawlessly for me...
- gspencley 1y agoThe thing about automated systems is that they typically cover the happy paths, and leave people who fall outside of those happy paths extremely frustrated. Take automated phone menu systems, for example. "If you are calling about X, press 1 If you are calling about Y, press 2 If you are calling about Z, press 3" customers presses 0 because they are calling about none-of-the-above and wants to talk to a human "I'm sorry. I don't recognize that menu option. To hear the options again, please press 9." Oh just today, to give another example of how automation can seriously frustrate end users, I'm trying to get a Square POS account approved for my new business. Their automated verification system sent me a form requesting more information about my business because certain information "could not be verified." One of the questions on the form was asking me to explain a discrepancy between the legal business name I typed in when setting up the account and the business name as it appears on the articles of incorporation that I submitted. The discrepancy in question: white-space and capitalization. No human being would read the two strings as distinct or recognize any discrepancy. Only software does that.
- jacinabox 1y agoI just did a captcha the other day that asked the user to select which items can fit inside the sample item (which was a handbag). You'd think that a multimodal deep learning model could figure out what objects fit inside other objects if it's going to cure cancer or whatever, but no I'm assuming that it needs to be taught explicitly.
- Nextgrid 1y agoThis is a defense against AI, not a training step. Though a multimodal model should be able to pass it.
- Garlef 1y agoThere's a fun experiment with toddlers where they re-enter a room but the car they just sat in was replaced by a tiny version: They will try to get into the car even though only their foot fits in. So size/scale is not as easy a concept to model in our minds as we might assume. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OtngSHtz-cc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OtngSHtz-cc
- strict9 1y agoInteresting to see an opinion piece on the register pointing out 3 camps, none of which apply to most people I know who work in software development. Mainly that ai is a useful tool. Sometimes it is magical but has limits and is often wrong. It can be a great illustrator of sunk cost fallacy when working on very complex problems. But light years faster and more useful than googling for solutions when faced with a difficult debugging challenge. On net I would much prefer to have ai around than not. I think it is a miss that software development is completely omitted in this article, esp a tech or tech adjacent publication that's been around for forever.
- catigula 1y ago[flagged]
- bachmeier 1y ago> On net I would much prefer to have ai around than not. I agree sort of, but on the other hand we don't know their true cost, whether that's the out-of-pocket expenses, or the pollution and high electricity/water costs that will result.
- marcinzm 1y agoOf course we know, it’s not magic, but some people like to spread FUD to further their own agendas.
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- AlexandrB 1y agoYou forget to include the information pollution cost. AI slop is becoming inescapable in Google search results. So this new tool is completely obliterating the usefulness of old tools by flooding them with VC-subsidized crap.
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- datadrivenangel 1y agoLarge Language Models will change a significant portion of how companies and thus the economy works. This will be transformational. AI Companies are still overhyped.
- danielbln 1y agoAgreed on both fronts, but it bears repeating two that both things can be true at the same time. More often than not people think when the AI bubble bursts, LLMs, diffusion models etc. will just vanish, and they will absolutely not vanish. This tech is here to stay, for good.
- bachmeier 1y ago> people think when the AI bubble bursts, LLMs, diffusion models etc. will just vanish, and they will absolutely not vanish I don't care if they vanish. I just want the hype to die. The last few months this site would more truthfully have been titled LLM News. I use LLMs but for the most part I find discussions about them boring.
- dylan604 1y agoWhen the dot com bubble burst, the internet did not go away. Just the over inflated companies did. The underlying tech was not to blame, but the mismanaged VC funded nonsense that goes on inside hype machines. We lathered and rinsed, now we're repeating.
- wood_spirit 1y agoThis post from earlier today was imo a better take https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45008209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45008209
- NKosmatos 1y agoThanks for posting this and yes you’re right, it’s a more detailed and well written post, giving a better explanation of the AI situation. We “old timers” love TheRegister but it has a certain style and way of writing, especially the original UK version (where BOFH gained fame).
- wood_spirit 1y agoI’m an old timer who used to read el reg religiously back before the inq split and it jumped the shark. It is a shadow of it’s former quality and integrity imo :(
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
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- ChrisArchitect 1y ago[dupe] of every discussion from last week or so: Say farewell to the AI bubble, and get ready for the crash https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964548 Tech, chip stock sell-off continues as AI bubble fears mount https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44965187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44965187 Is the A.I. Sell-Off the Start of Something Bigger? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963715 AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44940944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44940944 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44974104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44974104
- Workaccount2 1y agoThe MIT report that found 90% of workers are regularly using LLMs at work, many of them even multiple times daily[1], somehow has become the spark of the recent explosion of "AI has failed" articles. Which is ironic, because it shows that the people we trust to write with integrity are either only reading the headlines or purposely misleading with their articles. If that's the case, LLMs cannot replace these primary source summarizing clowns fast enough. [1]https://nanda.media.mit.edu/ai_report_2025.pdf https://nanda.media.mit.edu/ai_report_2025.pdf
- an0malous 1y agoI use a notes app multiple times a day for work. Does this make notes apps worth $1T in global investments?
- scotty79 1y agoNo, because to replace a notes app you need pen and paper. But to replace LLM you need at least a human. There's literally nothing else. And humans don't come cheap.
- therealpygon 1y agoIf everyone is competing to be THE notes app, and there is an expectation for every person in the entire world to use said Notes apps for nearly all tasks in the future? Yea, it absolutely could deserve a global investment of roughly just 3% U.S. GDP. Moreover, isn’t it up to the people investing to decide that, rather than people who used ChatGPT once and then complained on the internet?
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- justlikereddit 1y agoI've used AI to get meaningful results(working code) out of it. The service provider got little useful out of it because I'm fine using their free versions for it. Also. AI is not as good as it's going to get. It going to get much much better than it is but it's going to follow a mostly mundane trajectory getting there. According to the AI hype merchants we should see titanic super-AGI slug it out in the sky, by year 2023. That clearly did not happen. What we will get is hype for current model+1 and disappointment when it's released for the coming decades.
- Mallowram 1y ago[dead]
- purplezooey 1y agoThat MIT report shall now be known as the Paper that Spawned a Thousand Churnalisms.
- jmaestrooper 1y agoVery dumbed-down take on the subject. What's "AI"? ChatGPT and Google AlphaFold are both AI. I very much doubt speech and voice recognition and synthesis, as well as visual object recognition, are "as good as they will get" (however scary some of the practical applications might look like). Ditto specialized neural networks like aforementioned AlphaFold. General-purpose chatbots trained on randomly selected data from stolen books and social media (and increasingly on its own slop)? Very likely. Architectures allowing the said chatbots trigger actions online or (worse yet) IRL? Almost definitely.
- mvdtnz 1y agoAs you well know, even when you're pretending you don't, in this context when people say "AI" they mean LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude, not AlphaFold.
- jmaestrooper 1y agoI very much disagree. Terms and definitions matter, and in this case what you mean by "AI" changes the answer. Again, general-purpose LLMs might be a dead end. Specialized neural networks are not. One might argue that even specialized LLMs (ie fine tuned for code generation) have ways to go, too. I'm not sure about target audience of the TheRegister but here on HN we should be more precise in our discussion.
- tim333 1y ago>I propose a fourth: AI is now as good as it's going to get... is just silly. It'll get way better. Not sure about the timing but it'll happen.
- mikewarot 1y agoI see two overlapping audiences here on HN, the hackers (now called makers) and the VC profit driven crowd. The popping of the bubble is going to hit those two camps differently. The hackers will be glad to see the price of AI compute and hardware drop like a rock once everyone in the VC world realizes they've overbuilt, and a sell-off happens. We'll be using those resources to build the next things almost immediately. In fact, I'd be surprised if planning for that hadn't already started. The VC type will ... I have no idea, actually.. I'm not a profit driven person. But experience shows they'll be around to do it all again for the next bubble in a decade or so. As for AI itself, it will continue to get better and deliver value for those who know how to use it. For me, ChatGPT5 is an amazing improvement for generating code.