In the middle of the French lockdown in October 2020, a new restaurant launched on Deliveroo and UberEats in Paris: Cala.
Its pasta dishes started at €8 each, causing some customers to wonder about the high quality to price ratio — particularly compared to some other Parisian outlets.
It wasn’t until the lockdown ended and Cala customers could visit the restaurant in person that the reason became clear. Instead of a team of chefs, the food is cooked and assembled by a robot.
“We wanted to make sure that the quality of the product was what was really driving customers to come to a restaurant,” says Ylan Richard, who founded Cala in 2019, when he was 19 . “No one knew there was a robot behind the restaurant on the platforms.”
Cala’s now raised €5.5m in seed funding, led by Backed VC, and is scoring in the top 1% of Paris’ restaurants on delivery apps.
Cala is part of a new wave of food robots (some people say it’s spurred on by a pandemic-induced hygiene desire to remove humans from the food prep process). In Europe, there’s Pazzi, also in Paris, where a robot cooks pizzas; in Sweden, there’s ice cream robot BonBot and in the UK, there’s Karakuri.
It’s tech that could accelerate parts of the restaurant industry — particularly dark kitchens.
There are new sheriffs in town in Singapore, and they are unnerving many who live there.
Called "Xavier," the robots are equipped with seven cameras that enable them to detect "undesirable social behaviour," for instance if you incorrectly park your bike, if you smoke in an unauthorised area or if social distancing is not being respected.
According to project manager Michael Lim, these machines are a new weapon against insecurity.
"If the robot is around and something happens, the people in the control room will have a trace and will be able to see what happened”, he said.
The robots initially patrolled a housing estate and a shopping centre as part of a 3-week trial in September.
Re: AI & Robotics News and Discussions
Posted: Sat Oct 09, 2021 3:10 pm
by wjfox
Robots Take Over Italy’s Vineyards as Wineries Struggle With Covid-19 Worker Shortages
Oct. 3, 2021 7:34 am ET
The coronavirus pandemic is pushing the wine industry toward automation.
Covid-related travel restrictions left severe shortages of agricultural workers last year, as Eastern Europeans and North Africans were unable to reach fields in Western Europe. Though the shortages have eased this year, the difficulty of finding workers has accelerated the shift, which was already under way across the agricultural sector.
While harvests of some crops, like soybeans and corn, are already heavily automated, winemakers have been slower to make the switch.
[...]
For many vintners in Europe and the U.S., however, the difficulty of finding workers—a problem they say had grown steadily for years but became acute during the pandemic—has pushed them to take the robot plunge. It is a change that will outlast the pandemic and could shift longstanding migration patterns that bring tens of thousands of foreign workers to Italy, France and Spain for agricultural harvests each year.
[...]
Last year was the worst labor shortage of his half-century career in wine. Use of harvesting machines among the group’s members increased 20% this year in response, he said.
We are excited to introduce the DeepSpeed- and Megatron-powered Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation model (MT-NLG), the largest and the most powerful monolithic transformer language model trained to date, with 530 billion parameters. It is the result of a joint effort between Microsoft and NVIDIA to advance the state of the art in AI for natural language generation.
As the successor to Turing NLG 17B and Megatron-LM, MT-NLG has 3x the number of parameters compared to the existing largest model of this type and demonstrates unmatched accuracy in a broad set of natural language tasks such as:
Completion prediction
Reading comprehension
Commonsense reasoning
Natural language inferences
Word sense disambiguation
The 105-layer, transformer-based MT-NLG improved upon the prior state-of-the-art models in zero-, one-, and few-shot settings and set the new standard for large-scale language models in both model scale and quality.
Re: AI & Robotics News and Discussions
Posted: Sat Oct 16, 2021 7:52 pm
by andmar74
Re: AI & Robotics News and Discussions
Posted: Sun Oct 17, 2021 6:48 pm
by raklian
Yep, we are living in the future. Dystopia time!
Re: AI & Robotics News and Discussions
Posted: Mon Oct 18, 2021 10:09 am
by Nanotechandmorefuture
raklian wrote: ↑Sun Oct 17, 2021 6:48 pm
Yep, we are living in the future. Dystopia time!
That's for 1st generation. I bet the later ones won't be so easy and besides with that robot dog with the gun that has been going around recently good luck with the later iterations.
