An AI Character’s Arc

Welcome back to the Enterprise AI Playbook, Issue 9. Here are the successes, cautionary tales, and deep dives from this week.

Successful launches - AI Tacos > AI Burgers?
Taco Bell has announced its continued expansion into the AI drive-thru space, growing from 5 locations in May to over 100 as of Aug 1st. This growth contrasts with McDonald’s recent decision to shut down its voice pilot and may be attributed to the selection of vendors. The Taco Bell parent company, Yum Brands, has made investments in voice automation for its KFC brand, with stores in Australia currently within a pilot.

The incentive to automate continues to be lower wait times, higher accuracy, and most importantly, lower costs. Full read.

Cautionary Tales - Character AI founders give Google another try
One of the major developments in 2021-2023 was the decentralization of AI talent throughout startups fuelled by massive VC investments. 2024 has been the year of consolidation. Announced Friday, Character AI’s founding team returns to Google in an acquihire, continuing the trend we’ve seen this year starting with Inflection and Adept AI.

“Noam, Daniel, and certain members of our research team will also join Google. Most of Character.AI’s talented team will remain and will continue to build the Character.AI product and serve our growing base of users. Dominic Perella, Character.AI’s General Counsel, has stepped into the role of interim CEO.”

The reasons for “joining” are not clear, but the trend likely indicates shifts in the industry, with a few speculations being:

1. Challenges raising further rounds of funding to continue being independent

2. Improved conditions in large research labs

3. Financial payouts one can only dream of

4. Hardware limitations in current environments

Each acquisition likely has a different combination of factors, and the reflections within 5 years' time will be interesting to read. Full read of the Character AI team’s announcement.

Deep dive - GPU delays and hardware deep dive
Late last week, news emerged that Nvidia’s new chip architecture has been delayed due to production challenges. In this blog post by SemiAnalysis, they dive into some chip production background and server configurations, explaining some configuration complexities.

Question to ask your team
How has your team structure and processes changed since the release of ChatGPT in Nov 2022?

Until next week,
Denys - Enterprise AI @ Voiceflow