🌮 AI Takes Your Takeout Order

Hey TEDchats Fam!

Happy Thursday! Ever tried ordering tacos from a robot? At Taco Bell, the AI did fine with tacos — less so when someone tried trolling it with a lake’s worth of water. Catch this story and more in today’s Top AI News!

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📣 TOP AI NEWS

When AI Meets the Drive-Thru

Taco Bell is experimenting with voice AI at more than 500 drive-throughs, but not without hiccups. One viral moment involved someone ordering 18,000 water cups just to reach a human server. Chief Digital and Technology Officer Dane Matthews admitted the system can be both impressive and disappointing, noting that franchisees may decide when to rely on AI versus human staff. The company is still figuring out how broadly to roll out the technology (read more).

Anthropic Secures $13B in Record-Breaking Round

Anthropic, an AI research lab, has raised a massive $13 billion in Series F funding, boosting its post-money valuation to $183 billion. The round, co-led by Iconiq, Fidelity, and Lightspeed, drew in major backers from BlackRock to Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund. The AI firm now serves over 300,000 business customers, with annual recurring revenue jumping from $1 billion to $5 billion in 2025. Its Claude Code developer tool alone generates more than $500 million in run-rate revenue, growing 10x in just three months (read more).

Amazon Launches Real-Time AI Shopping with Lens Live

Amazon has introduced Lens Live, a new AI-powered upgrade to its Amazon Lens visual search tool. The feature lets shoppers point their phone at real-world objects to instantly see matching products in a swipeable carousel, compare deals, and even add items directly to their cart or wishlist. Powered by Amazon SageMaker and OpenSearch, Lens Live also integrates with Amazon’s AI assistant Rufus for product insights and summaries. The feature is rolling out first to tens of millions of iOS users in the U.S. through the Amazon Shopping app (read more).

🛠️ THIS WEEK’S AI COMBO: 1 PROMPT + 1 TOOL

⚡️ MIND SPARK

💰 OpenAI Buys Statsig for $1.1B: OpenAI is acquiring product testing startup Statsig in a $1.1B all-stock deal, one of its largest acquisitions, with founder Vijaye Raji joining as CTO of Applications. The move brings Statsig’s experimentation platform in-house to accelerate development of ChatGPT and other products (read more).

🚘 Tesla Pulls the Plug on Dojo: After years of hype, Tesla has shut down its custom Dojo supercomputer, disbanding the team behind it. Built to train Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) neural networks, CEO Elon Musk now calls it “an evolutionary dead end.” Analysts say the move signals a shift from risky in-house hardware to AI compute partnerships (read more).

🧩 Meta’s $14B AI Bet Faces Early Strains: Just three months after Meta’s $14.3B investment in Scale AI, cracks are showing. Former Scale exec Ruben Mayer left Meta after two months, and insiders say Meta’s TBD Labs is relying more on rival vendors Surge and Mercor. Some researchers also question Scale’s data quality (read more).

🤖 Runway Expands Into Robotics: Runway, best known for video and photo generation, is expanding into robotics. According to a TechCrunch exclusive, its world models are now used by robotics and self-driving firms for training simulations, providing scalable, cost-effective ways to test scenarios too costly or difficult in the real world (read more).

💸 Nvidia’s Heavy Reliance on Just Two Buyers: Nearly 40% of Nvidia’s record $46.7 billion Q2 revenue came from only two customers, according to an SEC filing. While this concentration poses risks, analysts note these buyers have deep cash reserves and are expected to keep spending heavily on data centers in the coming years (read more).

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🎨 AI ART

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