🧪 ELIXR of life

PLUS: Toyota and Pony.ai team up to produce Robotaxis in China

Author

Haroon Choudery
August 07, 2023

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Happy Monday, fellow humans. 👋

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🧵 In today's edition:

  • 🚗 Wendy's steers into the AI Fast Lane

  • 🧪 ELIXR of life

  • 😱 Who’s worried about AI?

  • 🤑 AI Fundraising News

🤖 Top AI News

🚗 Wendy's steers into the AI Fast Lane

Every year, Wendy's feeds millions in its 7,000 global restaurants, with 75% to 80% of its customers choosing the drive-thru to order and pick up food.

To continue this power run, Wendy’s is partnering with Google to pilot AI tech at an Ohio drive-thru.

Wendy's has a history of innovation, from pioneering drive-thru pick-up windows 50 years ago to embracing tech today.

Yep, you read that right. Wendy’s introduced the first “modern drive-thru” to the world.

CEO Todd Penegor states, "AI creates a huge opportunity for a frictionless customer experience so employees can focus on great food and service.”

I guess that’s left to be seen.

Overall: 

  • In adding AI to its drive-thru, Wendy’s joins a long list of restaurants, including Mcdonald's, Carls Jr., and Taco Bell.

  • This Wendy’s x Google collab is just an extension of their previous relationship. Since 2021, Google has provided Wendy’s with advanced analytics and cloud tools to help them provide a better customer experience.

It’s now only a matter of time before every fast-food chain experiments with AI drive-thru service.

Read more: Yahoo Finance

🧪 ELIXR of life

Last week, Google released an interesting paper talking about Multimodal Medical AI.

In it, they spoke about ELIXR (Embeddings for Language/Image-aligned X-Rays), an AI tool that brings multimodal capabilities to medical imaging.

What does Multimodal mean? It essentially aligns text and image models to enable tasks like disease classification, image search, and report verification.

Simply put, it would allow users to input an X-ray image and ask the program questions about it.

ELIXR demonstrates the potential of multimodal AI in medicine because it’s trained on medical images paired with corresponding radiology reports, allowing it to learn nuances beyond binary labels.

And while this is an amazing advancement, Medical AI systems like ELIXR can become 100x more useful if the precision of expert systems is combined with the flexibility of generative models. 

But the question of how to combine them remains unanswered. Some approaches are being studied, but a lot more work needs to be done before real answers are found.

Overall: If done responsibly, multimodal systems like ELIXR could enable technologies to aid clinical care, research, and consumers.

But rigorous testing and evaluation are critical first steps. ELIXR is an exciting advance, but much work lies ahead to integrate AI safely and effectively across modalities.

Read more: Google AI Blog

😱 Who’s worried about AI?

Can AI steal your job? Hollywood's worried. So is the rest of the US.

With SAG-AFTRA actors and WGA writers striking over AI concerns, the general public is starting to notice and question AI’s role in society.

A poll conducted by Leger showed nearly half of Americans — 45% — are worried about AI affecting their work. That fear peaks among 18-34-year-olds at 57%.

Interestingly, only 38% of the over-55 crowd are anxious about AI.

Maybe Gen Z senses the AI job apocalypse coming. Or maybe boomers just don't get the tech.

Either way, the public stands with creatives, as almost two-thirds agree that unions should make AI rules a bargaining priority.

The concern isn’t just over job security, though. 73% of the respondents also agreed that AI-created content should have a disclaimer on it.

We predict this number will most likely hit 100% as the election season comes along.

Overall: The entertainment biz may be first up to bat, but it likely won't be the last. With billions pouring into AI, professions from law to trucking are staring down a robotic future.

It will be interesting to see how industries adapt to them. Blatantly letting folks go won’t be the answer - but learning to incorporate AI alongside people in day-to-day workflow might be.

The rise of thinking maceveryone'sveryone's problem now.

Read more: LA Times

🤑 AI Fundraising News

Tenstorrent Powers Ahead with $100M in a convertible note funding round to accelerate the training and inference of AI models via Te’storrent's technology.

Inworld AI Raises $50 Million for an open-source version of AI Character Engine, bringing valuation to over half a billion dollars.

🗞️ AI Quick-Bytes

What else is going on?

  1. Let AI help you find a job with this $30 résumé builder

  2. Taj Mahal to Gateway of India: Celebrations of Chandrayaan-3's landing as imagined by AI

  3. Toyota and Pony.ai team up to produce Robotaxis in China

  4. AI will bring 'carnage' to wealth management, strategist says

  5. This Borges-Inspired AI Model can create poems based on iPhone photos

  6. New Dungeons & Dragons sourcebook features AI-generated art

  7. IGN launched an AI chatbot for its game guides

  8. An AI search engine for the U.S. government contract maze

🐦️ Tweet of the day

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

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

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