Yeah, I did a double-take, too.
Yeah. It’s real.
Chicken shop giant Red Rooster has entered the AI game. No, they’re not dishing out a new poultry-themed variant of ChatGPT. If anything their new product is maybe even, dare I say, more ambitious than the pursuit of artificial general intelligence, if by ambitious I mean that what they’re trying to do isn’t just difficult – it’s not even likely to get anyone thinking it’s a real product. And let’s be honest, it’s probably not actually meant to: you really don’t need to study an MBA online to know that people aren’t likely to line up to buy a shirt that orders burgers for you using a convolutional neural network trained on billions of audio samples of people’s stomachs rumbling. Who are they trying to fool, right? Does anyone else think Red Rooster probably can’t afford to build an AI?
Buddy Up
…but wait. An American multinational marketing firm probably can.
And Red Rooster, as it turns out, can afford an ingenuous attempt at a guerilla marketing campaign. Rather than a revolutionary leap forward in biotechnology, the “crave_ware” stunt is an attempt at creating a viral marketing campaign cooked up by whiteGREY, an American marketing agency with offices in North Sydney. Attempting to capitalise on the current AI craze, Red Rooster hired out whiteGrey to put them on the map on social media in order to attempt to compete with American chicken giant KFC and other US-based fast food chains that have gobbled up market share away from local brands. It’s not easy pickings when your competition is a handful of multinational, multi-billion dollar companies who can out-spend you into the dirt by throwing their logo on every street corner, website, and YouTube ad break. So what do you do?
In the military, they call this asymmetric warfare, which is a fancy way of saying “The other guy is way bigger than us, so we have to think outside the box.” It also usually refers to the idea of doing something that the other one can’t, or will have limited means to respond to. And in this case, Red Rooster has a major first-mover advantage. After all, now that Red Rooster has played the AI card, Maccas and KFC can’t very well make a goofy ad about AI without just getting everyone thinking and talking about Red Rooster all over again, now can they?
And believe it or not, this doesn’t look like vaporware. They do actually plan on making this thing! As it turns out, training an AI is no longer the revolutionary, super exclusive, high-tech process that you might be tempted to assume it is. What was once cutting-edge technology, guarded jealously by Fortune 500 companies and well-heeled venture capital-backed Silicon Valley startups, has been well and truly commodified. These days, cloud computing giants like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offer AI training clusters for rent to just about anyone who wants to sign up and fork out the cash. That’s right, you don’t have to wait in line to buy NVIDIA GPUs and set up shop next to a small nuclear reactor to train your own AI. You can just rent out a supercomputer, perform a training run, and voila – you’ve got an AI. Turns out that running the AI, often referred to as the inference process, doesn’t require anywhere near the computing power needed to train these systems.
So yeah. Red Rooster now has their own AI. And how are they doing this? What does the AI actually do to somehow become relevant to a glorified chicken shop?
Well, they wanna listen to your tummy rumble.
…yep.
This Is Fine
The Red Rooster-whiteGREY duo project literally wants you to wear a shirt with a microphone and Bluetooth connectivity built into it. The shirt connects to your phone just like any headset or speaker and works with the crave_ware app to process data. When your stomach starts growling, the shirt feeds the audio from your bubbling guts through the app, up into a cloud-based neural network, determines what you’re hungry for, and automatically pings Red Rooster to place your order. And it can tell the difference between a hungry rumble and an upset tummy: it only serves up your burger if you’re actually hungry. Because it can tell.
This is more than a little creepy. But it’s actually one of the more, dare I say…pragmatic uses of AI to date. I mean, sure, apparently, Sora is going to take Hollywood by storm someday, and apparently AI can write some pretty good code. But until now, AI has kind of left most people out in the cold. And with common jobs like customer service, teaching, and accounting on the chopping block, it might get worse before it gets better.
A bit odd, isn’t it? We hear so much about how AI is going to destroy jobs and put whole companies out of business. But no, this time it’s helping a beloved Aussie chain stay in business, and keeping food on the table not just for whatever lucky soul winds up wearing these superintelligent threads, but for the guys and gals flipping their burgers, too. About time, I say: up to this point, AI has mostly been used for generating ad copy on the cheap and making mildly…ok, REALLY unsettling deep fakes of Will Smith eating pasta through the side of his face. At least this one is actually appetising.
One thing’s for sure: this viral marketing campaign, which Red Rooster apparently has every intention of turning into a real product, isn’t likely to break the cycle of AI giving people a hard time of telling what’s real from what’s not.
Seriously, I had to use two different search engines and three different chatbots to find all of the sources to believe this wasn’t an April Fool’s joke.
This is definitely the weirdest timeline.