Sherwood News

Taco Bell is adding artificial intelligence to 100s of drive-thrus

Would you like AIs with that?

8/1/24 10:51AM

Depending on where you live, the next time you pull in to get a Cheesy Roll Up or Crunchwrap Supreme, you might be telling your order to a robot rather than an actual human being.

Burrito bots

Yum! Brands, Taco Bell’s parent company, yesterday announced plans to introduce AI voice tech at hundreds of the chain's US locations by the end of 2024, after successfully trialing the system at over 100 branches across 13 states. The fast food giant, which also owns Pizza Hut and KFC, said that the tech has already proved useful in easing employees’ workloads, improving order accuracy, and reducing wait times.

That third point isn’t exactly a massive problem for the burrito behemoth at the moment, though, especially compared to other major American “fast” food chains…

According to industry publication QSR Magazine’s 2023 Drive-Thru Report, Taco Bell’s already “digital-forward” drive-thrus are the speediest in the fast food game for the 3rd year in a row, with an average completion time (including taking the order, preparing the food, and closing the transaction) of just 4 minutes and 38 seconds. McDonald’s customers, by contrast, can expect to wait 6 mins and 53 secs for their meals, while Chick-fil-A scored lowest in the speed test, with an average wait time of 7 mins and 15 secs.

Although Chick-fil-A clocked in slower than the other chains reported by QSR, it did return the best accuracy score of the bunch: just 8% of customers received orders with errors, suggesting that the workers who always get Sundays off prioritize getting those sandwiches spot on, rather than slinging them out ASAP.

It will now be interesting to see whether Taco Bell’s new fleet of automaton order assistants will be able to move the needle on the chain’s current 85% accuracy rate.

Rani Molla7h

Tesla’s Model Y just cleared a new federal safety bar

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced today that Tesla Model Ys manufactured after November 12 were the first to pass the agency’s new advanced driver assistance system tests, which are now part of the New Car Assessment Program.

“By successfully passing these new tests, the 2026 Tesla Model Y demonstrates the lifesaving potential of driver assistance technologies and sets a high bar for the industry,” NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison wrote in the press release. “We hope to see many more manufacturers develop vehicles that can meet these requirements.”

The new tests include:

Pedestrian automatic emergency braking
Lane-keeping assistance
Blind spot warning
Blind spot intervention

The milestone offers Tesla highly coveted regulatory validation, as it seeks to spur usage of its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) tech. The NHTSA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

80x

Jon Keegan8h

We knew Claude Code was driving crazy growth at Anthropic, but it may be much more than the company is expecting.

Speaking at the company’s developer conference yesterday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that while the company is planning for 10x growth this year, it could be as much as 80x, calling the overwhelming demand “crazy” and that he looked forward to more modest growth, saying such growth is “too hard to handle.”

The demand is so great that Anthropic partnered with Elon Musk’s xAI to buy up the bulk of computing from his Colossus data center in Tennessee.

Rani Molla14h

Tesla’s made-in-China vehicle sales jumped 36% in April

Tesla’s sales of made-in-China vehicles — sold across China, Europe, and other international markets — rose 36% year over year to 79,478 units in April. The increase marks the sixth straight month of annual growth in sales of vehicles made in the world’s largest manufacturing economy, suggesting the EV maker’s overseas business may be stabilizing after a difficult stretch.

That said, China wholesale deliveries fell from March, even as overall new energy vehicle sales rose 7% during the period.

Later this month, the China Passenger Car Association will report China-only sales, offering a clearer picture of performance in Tesla’s second-largest market.

Tesla China April wholesale sales jump year-on-year but slip from March

Later this month, the China Passenger Car Association will report China-only sales, offering a clearer picture of performance in Tesla’s second-largest market.

Rani Molla5/6/26

Anthropic’s scramble for compute now includes rival xAI

Another day, another major partnership with an AI rival. This time, Anthropic signed a deal with SpaceX’s xAI to access compute from its Colossus 1 data center to help it improve capacity for its Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers. Just yesterday, The Information reported that Anthropic planned to spend $200 billion on Google Cloud services over the next five years. As Sherwood News’ Luke Kawa wrote:

“Anthropic has been a victim of its own success: the popularity of Claude Code and Cowork have revealed compute constraints and left users frustrated by caps. In response, the Claude developer has embarked upon a mad scramble for compute, striking or expanding deals with CoreWeave, Amazon, Google, and Broadcom.”

Now, it’s adding xAI to the list — even as the Elon Musk company builds a competing model.

In less terrestrial news, xAI said that as part of the agreement, Anthropic “expressed interest in partnering to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.”

xAI — Creators of Grok, the AI Chatbot

“Anthropic has been a victim of its own success: the popularity of Claude Code and Cowork have revealed compute constraints and left users frustrated by caps. In response, the Claude developer has embarked upon a mad scramble for compute, striking or expanding deals with CoreWeave, Amazon, Google, and Broadcom.”

Now, it’s adding xAI to the list — even as the Elon Musk company builds a competing model.

In less terrestrial news, xAI said that as part of the agreement, Anthropic “expressed interest in partnering to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.”

5/6/26