This Week in AI: Even Oreos are Tapping into AI Now

Over the years, Oreo maker Mondelez has tested many different flavors between its popular cookies: Lemon twist, strawberry milkshake, orange ice cream, peanut butter and birthday cake. The next one might come from artificial intelligence.

Photo: ChatGPT, prompted by Dan Ackerman 

The Wall Street Journal profiled a new technology Mondelez created to speed up "the creation of snack recipes and optimizing them to fit certain taste profiles." 

"The consumer wants the product to taste like X. We’re not stopping iterating until it tastes like X," Mondelez R&D manager Kevin Wallenstein told the WSJ.

Oreo's AI efforts are just the latest way the technology is helping businesses to experiment with new products. AI is also helping drug companies explore new medications, it's helping drone developers attach smarter tracking to flying cameras, and it's of course even being used by companies like Google to code new projects.

For those worried that Oreo may hand over too much power to its AI, creating a Terminator-like danger to the snack industry, the WSJ assured readers that humans will remain in the loop (taste testing.)

ChatGPT is just a call away now

867-5309, eat your heart out. ChatGPT maker OpenAI announced a new phone service at the number 1-800-CHATGPT(242-8478), which people can call or message through WhatsApp. 

OpenAI said users will have a 15-minute limit to the service per phone number per month, so don't expect it to replace the 38-year-old Butterball Turkey cooking hotline anytime soon.

PlayStation and AMD pushing more AI in games

Sony has been working with chipmaker AMD on the technology powering its PlayStation consoles for years, but now The Verge reports that the two companies are establishing a "deeper collaboration" to bring more AI technology to gaming. The two companies have already used AI to help make games look better using upscaling technology called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution. 

Sony said the technology the two companies are building will be made available, "across a variety of devices," including "PC, console and cloud."

The AI bubble keeps bubbling

Data and AI company Databricks announced it had secured up to $10 billion in new funding, which Axios said amounts to one of the largest investment rounds in Silicon Valley history. 

With the funding, Databricks is now valued at $62 billion, enough to make it one of the 350 biggest companies in the world. 

So, is AI in a bubble?

"When you get billion dollar valuations on companies that have nothing, that's a bubble," DataBricks CEO Ali Ghodsi told Axios, of course referring to other companies than his own. (Remember that it was just a month ago that AI chipmaker Nvidia hit a $3 trillion valuation, kicking off another short-lived round of debate about a potential tech bubble.)

The Databricks funding round was led by Thrive Capital, with additional investments from Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global and more.

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Ian Sherr is a widely published journalist who's covered nearly every major tech company from Apple to Netflix, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and more for CBS News, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and CNET. Aside from writing, he tinkers with tech at home, is a longtime fencer -- the kind with swords -- and began woodworking during the pandemic.