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🍯 Google and Wendy's Team Up

🍯 Google and Wendy's Team Up

PLUS: Google's major AI advancements and self-driving cars are (almost) here

Honey Tree
May 12, 2023

Welcome to Honey Tree, the newsletter that makes learning about AI sweet and simple. The world of AI can be fast-paced and confusing, and that’s why we’re here.

And the best part is we’re all natural.

Plus, if you’re a student or looking for a new job, check out our Honey Board at the end of the newsletter for open jobs and internships!

Here’s what what we got for today:

🚨 Google Rolls out the (AI) Red Carpet
🍟 Wendy’s New AI-powered Drive-thru
🚗 The Future of Tesla’s FSD
🤣 Sweet Memes
🍯 Honey Board

🚨 Google I/O 2023

It seems Google’s Code Red has paid off - as the company announced several incredible AI advancements at I/O 2023.

PaLM 2 - Google’s new LLM - will power 25 new products and works with over 100 languages
Bard (Google’s ChatGPT competitor) no longer has a waitlist and is powered by PaLM 2
MusicLM turns your musical ideas into reality
Search adds new AI-powered snapshots - see below

Magic Editor in Google Photos makes editing a piece of cake for everyone
A partnership with Adobe will make text-to-image available in Bard - see below

Med-PaLM is an LLM designed for the medical domain - it’s the first AI system to pass the US Medical License Exam

If you’re interested in watching the keynote, check out the recap here

🍟 AI Enters the World of Fast Food

Wendy’s and Google have teamed up to develop “Wendy’s FreshAI”, an AI chatbot that will take drive-thru orders. Yes, we just said that.

If you want to test it out firsthand, head to Colombus, Ohio in June.

What’s the reason behind this? Ideally, the chatbot will reduce wait times by taking verbal orders from customers and relaying the order to the line cooks quickly.

It’s not that simple. Since the AI will have to ignore several background noises, such as kids in the backseat of the car, this is actually a really difficult problem to solve from a technical standpoint, according to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.

Most importantly, Wendy’s FreshAI is trained to understand Wendy’s lingo, such as “JBC” standing for “Junior Bacon Cheeseburger” - who doesn’t know that?

On a side note, Wendy’s has announced that it does not plan to replace existing workers with the AI chatbot - even though it should be able to do everything a human can do.

🚗 Self-Driving Cars are Almost Here

If you’re dream is to eat Wendy’s in your car while it drives itself, then we’ve got good news for you. Elon Musk announced that Tesla will roll out a free month of FSD once the software is “super smooth”.

@TeslaSynopsis @Tesla Once FSD is super smooth (not just safe), we will roll out a free month trial for all cars in North America.
Then extend to rest of world after we ensure it works well on local roads and regulators approve it in that country.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
5:44 PM • May 8, 2023

At the moment, FSD is available to any Tesla owner who is willing to pay $15,000. The software, however, does not actually let the car drive itself fully - so drivers still need to pay attention while eating their JBC.

A one-month free trial is genius. Since FSD runs on deep neural networks, it requires tons of data to train and learn. If Tesla offers customers a free one-month trial, the company will collect a lot of useful data while also creating excitement around the self-driving feature.

Here’s an interesting fact: Back in March, Tesla disclosed that the accident rate of FSD is one accident per 3.2 million miles which is over six times safer than the national average (one accident per 500,000 miles).