🚙 Drive-thru becomes intelligent

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Greetings, fellow humans. 👋

This is Not A Bot - the newsletter about AI that was definitely not written by AI. I’m Haroon, CEO of Autoblocks and founder of AI For Anyone, and I share the latest news, tools, and resources from the AI space.

Trivia Tuesday! How many slices of pizza does America eat per second?

The answer, as usual, is at the bottom of the newsletter.

Let’s dive into it…

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🧵 In today's edition:

• 🚙 Drive-thru becomes intelligent

• 🥵 AI Fever Hits Silicon Valley

• 🛫 Travel and AI, sitting in a tree…

• 🤑 AI Fundraising News

🤖 Top AI News

🚙 Drive-thru becomes intelligent

Storytime: I was once at a Taco Bell drive-thru with a couple of friends in college after a late-night study sesh. The line was so long that it lapped the parking lot and almost reached the main road. But I needed to cop those once-a-season “nacho fries,” so I waited in line for 2 hours before managing to get them.

The catch? We almost thought about leaving three times before we got a chance to place our order.

Drive-thrus can be great for business, but only if done efficiently.

Carl’s Jr. is looking to up its drive-thru game using AI, as its parent company CKE Restaurants Holdings is partnering with Presto Automation, OpenCity, and Valyant AI to automate voice ordering at its drive-thru locations.

The goal is simple:

Boost accuracy of order → increase speed → serve more customers per hour → make money💰 (hopefully).

CKE's CTO Phil Crawford noted that Presto yielded positive results, with deployed stores recording significant revenue increases thanks to the technology's ability to upsell customers.

Should be a fun ride ahead.

Read more: USA Today

🥵 AI Fever Hits Silicon Valley

The Gartner Hype Cycle is a fascinating phenomenon we’ve seen with almost every piece of emerging technology that has come out in the past two decades.

Web 2. Web 3. And now… AI.

A good proxy to measure hype today is by looking at investment numbers. In 2018, the total investment in Generative AI companies was $408M. That number reached $4.5B in 2022, and analysts predict this is just the beginning of exponential VC funding into the space.

Don’t get me wrong - investors have all the right reasons to put their money into this space. It’s booming, with Statista predicting a global AI market of $1T+ by 2030.

But this “ChatGPT fever” has investors pouring money into AI startups simply because they have a “.ai” domain, with no real business plan in place.

This seems akin to lighting your money on fire and watching it burn, hoping it rains so you can take back whatever’s left.

Matt Turck, Investor at FirstMark, stated that “it is undeniably a major inflection point, [but] as in prior hype cycles, much of this will not end well. The market cannot sustain a million different companies with half-baked ideas.”

Sorry for making that previous paragraph a quote, but well said, Matt.

Look, history always repeats itself, but we don’t notice it because it’s always under disguise. Need proof? Just talk to any NFT investor from last year.

(you can reach me at [email protected] 😬)

Read more: WSJ (no paywall)

🛫 Travel and AI, sitting in a tree…

I hate booking flights, mainly because “options paralysis” is real - so travel and AI might be a match made in heaven.

MakeMyTrip (MMT), India’s largest online travel booking service, is adding an Open AI-powered chatbot named “Myra” to their platform to improve their customer service game.

Myra can speak English and Hindi, using natural language processing (NLP) to understand and respond to customer queries in real-time. Myra can also help customers with their bookings, check their status, and assist with any travel-related issues that might arise.

With Myra on the team, MakeMyTrip hopes to reduce response times and streamline the travel process. MMT is also looking to add 21 other official languages of India to the system, allowing the company to reach users in India’s smallest towns and cities.

Pretty fire. @Expedia, when are you doing this for the US??

Read more: Yahoo Finance

🤑 AI Fundraising News

OpenEnvoy Raises $15 Million in Series A Funding for AI-Driven Accounts Payable Automation.

Olyns announces $4M funding round for AI-powered recycling tech.

🗞️ Byte size: AI article summaries

Disclaimer: AI is (partially) used to summarize these articles.

What is an LLM? [5-minute Tech Challenge] - Hey, team! I wrote this short piece about what a Large Language Model (LLM) is and the promise they hold. It was written together with “5 Minute Tech Challenge,” a publication founded by Junaid Warwani, former Director of Education at “AI For Anyone!" Give it a read here →(Read more)

China races ahead of the U.S. on AI regulation [Axios] - China is ahead of the US in enacting rules for AI, with Chinese officials closing consultation on a second round of generative AI regulation, having agreed on a set of rules governing deepfakes in 2022. Beijing's speedy regulation is achieving three key goals: delivering tighter central government control, building hybrid corporate entities, and boosting consumer trust in AI. (Read more)

🐦️ Tweet of the day

Now this is cool 😎 

Trivia answer: America eats 350-400 slices of pizza per second! 🍕

And that does it for today's issue.

As always, thanks for reading. Have a great day, and see you next time! ✌️

— Haroon: (definitely) Not A Robot and @haroonchoudery on Twitter