[HN Gopher] Taco Bell is going all in on artificial intelligence
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       Taco Bell is going all in on artificial intelligence
        
       Author : EhsanEtezad
       Score  : 5 points
       Date   : 2024-07-31 20:22 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
        
       | cs702 wrote:
       | I expect kids will figure how to inject prompts into Taco Bell's
       | order-taking LLM in no time.
        
         | kjs3 wrote:
         | "What am I going to do with 2500 burritos?".
        
       | benbristow wrote:
       | I would hope AI would advise me to avoid Taco Bell. At least the
       | UK franchises, it's god awful.
        
         | add-sub-mul-div wrote:
         | In the US it was once a decent cheap guilty pleasure, but over
         | the last decade the quality has gone down and the price has
         | gone up (not just from inflation but relative to higher tier
         | food) so I can't understand why it's still around.
        
           | benbristow wrote:
           | It's a Yum brand so explains it. KFC used to be finger
           | lickin' good but the quality is awful now, makes me feel sick
           | every time I dare to give it another chance. Not particularly
           | cheap either.
        
             | kjs3 wrote:
             | With options (in the US; YMMV) like Popeyes and Churches, I
             | haven't taken a risk on KFC in more than a decade.
        
           | JohnFen wrote:
           | My first job as a teenager (waaaaay back when) was at a Taco
           | Bell. Back then it was actually, honestly, good.
           | 
           | The pinto beans were cooked and refried in the store, the
           | cheese was shredded in the store, the taco shells were fried
           | up in the store, the lettuce arrived fresh and whole,
           | shredded in the store. About the only thing we didn't do in
           | the store was grind the beef.
           | 
           | Everything was legitimately fresh and made of quality
           | ingredients, and the food was affordable.
           | 
           | I know it's weird, but it really does sadden me to see Taco
           | Bell of today being a straight-up mockery of what it was.
        
             | lotsofpulp wrote:
             | That whole tier of restaurants decided to cede the market
             | for half decent food to Chick Fil A/Shake Shack/Raising
             | Canes/Chipotle/etc,
        
             | add-sub-mul-div wrote:
             | Yeah people always say we remember the past being better
             | than it actually was, but this is one of those things I
             | swear has definitively gone downhill.
        
           | olyjohn wrote:
           | You used to be able to get a bag full of tacos for less than
           | $10. Now a standard meal there is like $15 which is like 2
           | tacos and a shitty burrito. And when they remove all their
           | 'expensive' labor costs and switch to this automated
           | ordering, the price of the food still won't go down.
        
         | JohnFen wrote:
         | It's god awful in the US, too.
        
       | omoikane wrote:
       | The article's title is "Taco Bell Is Adding AI Ordering at
       | Hundreds of US Drive-Thrus", which seems less hyped than the
       | current title makes it out to be.
       | 
       | But maybe thanks to "AI", Taco Bell stock (NYSE:YUM) has gone up
       | slightly. This reminds me of few years ago where a company can
       | just add "Blockchain" to their name and watch their stock go up:
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15979024
        
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       (page generated 2024-07-31 23:02 UTC)