Taco Bell is going all in on artificial intelligence | Hacker News Reader

Taco Bell is going all in on artificial intelligence

bloomberg.com

12 pointsEhsanEtezad18 comments

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

Mickey D's failed with it:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mcdonalds-ends-ai-drive-thru-or...

Which kinda surprises me. It's a very constrained domain, where it should be possible to make really good guesses. Or at least, no worse than a human being.

And if it has to call in a human being every so often, it's still cheaper than dedicating a full-time employee to the job. It can be shared with whoever is handing the food out the window.

I guess it's just not ready for prime time, but I'd be surprised if it takes that much longer.

I expect kids will figure how to inject prompts into Taco Bell's order-taking LLM in no time.

"What am I going to do with 2500 burritos?".

I would hope AI would advise me to avoid Taco Bell. At least the UK franchises, it's god awful.

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.

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.

With options (in the US; YMMV) like Popeyes and Churches, I haven't taken a risk on KFC in more than a decade.

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.

That whole tier of restaurants decided to cede the market for half decent food to Chick Fil A/Shake Shack/Raising Canes/Chipotle/etc,

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.

Pizza Hut too.

Maybe it's a Yum Brands thing.

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.

Plus, let's talk about wages. When I worked there as a teen (late '70s, when inflation was a much greater problem than it is now), I got paid minimum wage. Adjusted for inflation, that was a lot more than minimum wage was in later years until the increases in recent years brought it closer to parity.

And yet, these places were able to produce quality food at reasonable prices and still make very healthy profits.

Why do they make it sound impossible now?

Nacho fries are pretty good though…

Because it's decent and open late.

I have routinely gone to one where at 11pm and there's a line 15 deep. This isn't entirely made up of crappy cars either, ie. not the stereotypical "looking for cheap food" crowd, there's BMWs, Mercedes, and everything in between. This particular one is open late (5:30 AM) and I've gone there at 3:30AM on my way to the airport and there's lines then too.

Thanks to COVID shutdowns, there's not many 24 hour restaurants open anymore, so Taco Bell fills that void.

It's god awful in the US, too.

Taco Bell here gets orders wrong about 95% of the time. How is anyone still giving them money?

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