The rise and fall of AI at the McDonald’s drive-thru

McDonald's declared that it will no longer use IBM for the partnership after July 31, 2024. Source: Unsplash

The fast-food industry has been turning to AI for years in the hopes that it might improve efficiency, cut down on labour costs, and, ideally, make customers' lives easier. One of the pioneers was McDonald's, which in 2021 teamed up with IBM to test an AI system for voice ordering at around 100 drive-thru locations throughout the US.

Customers were supposed to be able to drive up, loudly state their orders into the drive-thru microphone, and then have an AI record all of that,...

19 June 2024 | Artificial Intelligence

Apple is reportedly getting free ChatGPT access

Apple's newly-announced partnership with OpenAI – which brings ChatGPT capabilities to iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia – comes without any direct money exchange.

According to a Bloomberg report by Mark Gurman, "Apple isn't paying OpenAI as part of the partnership."

Instead, the Cupertino-based company is leveraging its massive user base and device ecosystem as currency.

"Apple believes pushing OpenAI's brand and technology to hundreds of millions of...

13 June 2024 | Apple

Musk ends OpenAI lawsuit while slamming Apple’s ChatGPT plans

Elon Musk has dropped his lawsuit against OpenAI, the company he co-founded in 2015. Court filings from the Superior Court of California reveal that Musk called off the legal action on June 11th, just a day before an informal conference was scheduled to discuss the discovery process.

Musk had initially sued OpenAI in March 2024, alleging breach of contracts, unfair business practices, and failure in fiduciary duty. He claimed that his contributions to the company were made "in...

12 June 2024 | Apple

DuckDuckGo releases portal giving private access to AI models

DuckDuckGo has released a platform that allows users to interact with popular AI chatbots privately, ensuring that their data remains secure and protected.

The service, accessible at Duck.ai, is globally available and features a light and clean user interface. Users can choose from four AI models: two closed-source models and two open-source models. The closed-source models are OpenAI's GPT-3.5 Turbo and Anthropic's Claude 3 Haiku, while the open-source models are Meta's Llama-3...

7 June 2024 | Applications

Arm unveils new AI designs and software for smartphones

Arm unveils new AI designs and software for smartphones

AI models are rapidly evolving, outpacing hardware capabilities, which presents an opportunity for Arm to innovate across the compute stack.

Recently, Arm unveiled new chip blueprints and software tools aimed at enhancing smartphones' ability to handle AI tasks more efficiently. But they didn't stop there - Arm also implemented changes to how they deliver these blueprints, potentially accelerating adoption.

Arm is evolving its solution offerings to maximise the benefits...

31 May 2024 | Artificial Intelligence

Google ushers in the “Gemini era” with AI advancements

Google has unveiled a series of updates to its AI offerings, including the introduction of Gemini 1.5 Flash, enhancements to Gemini 1.5 Pro, and progress on Project Astra, its vision for the future of AI assistants.

Gemini 1.5 Flash is a new addition to Google's family of models, designed to be faster and more efficient to serve at scale. While lighter-weight than the 1.5 Pro, it retains the ability for multimodal reasoning across vast amounts of information and features the...

15 May 2024 | Applications

GPT-4o delivers human-like AI interaction with text, audio, and vision integration

OpenAI has launched its new flagship model, GPT-4o, which seamlessly integrates text, audio, and visual inputs and outputs, promising to enhance the naturalness of machine interactions.

GPT-4o, where the “o” stands for “omni,” is designed to cater to a broader spectrum of input and output modalities. “It accepts as input any combination of text, audio, and image and generates any combination of text, audio, and image outputs,” OpenAI announced.

Users can...

14 May 2024 | Applications

The market size in the AI market is projected to reach $184bn in 2024

We can often get very excited about breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence and how there will be seismic changes in the way in which it shapes the future. However, as those interested in AI know, the technology is very much already embedded in so many of our day-to-day transactions that it is already transforming the ways in which we work, rest and play.

For decades, the media has jumped on the big tech stories, including human-like robots that will do all the basic household...

14 May 2024 | Applications

OpenAI set to unveil AI-driven challenger to Google Search

Google's long-standing supremacy in the search engine arena may soon be challenged as OpenAI, boosted by its partnership with Microsoft, is reportedly stepping up to launch its own AI-driven search product.

According to two sources familiar with the matter who spoke to Reuters, OpenAI is scheduled to unveil its AI-powered search tool on Monday. The introduction of this product coincides closely with the timing of Google’s annual I/O conference, which starts on Tuesday and is...

10 May 2024 | Applications

Coalition of news publishers sue Microsoft and OpenAI

A coalition of major news publishers has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, accusing the tech giants of unlawfully using copyrighted articles to train their generative AI models without permission or payment.

First reported by The Verge, the group of eight publications owned by Alden Global Capital (AGC) – including the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, and Orlando Sentinel – allege the companies have purloined “millions" of their articles without permission...

1 May 2024 | Applications