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- What Ice Cream has to do with AI
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During World War II, the U.S. military built the first floating ice cream parlour for sailors in the Pacific. Let’s look at the future of ice cream!
What’s in store:
How robotics and AI make ice cream even cooler.
OpenAI are setting up robot lab partners.
Read Time: 6 minutes
ROBOTICS
Ice Cream x AI - it’s the collaboration you never knew you needed! A new startup, Dice Cream, is combining powerful autonomous robotics with fantastic ice cream, and looking to disrupt a giant market that’s ripe for an operations revolution.
The big idea? Autonomous ice cream parlours that act like vending machines, without the need for any staff.
How does it work?
Cutting-edge robotics power a self-contained ice cream parlour. A novel scooping mechanism has been developed by the team that scoops cube-shaped ice cream.
Customers will order on the touch screens on the side, and the robot arm serves up exactly what you ordered. And it’s not just plain ice cream - you can pick between flavours, toppings, and even cones!
But how does the customer actually get handed their delicious ice cream? Minions!
This is what they call the dice which transport the ice cream to the customer, which operate on a circular rail system, creating a fluid experience from start to finish.
The robot can handle three orders simultaneously, making it much faster than a human ice cream vendor. The “scoop” is warmed, letting it easily cut through the ice cream, and then it is thoroughly cleaned after the order is delivered, preventing any cross-contamination.
The team has a provisional patent for the unique design of the machine, which you can see below.
AI will also play a role, helping create a more enjoyable, unique customer experience when ordering. The kids are going to love it!
Watch the Dice Cream prototype in action here. It’s even cooler than you might think.
Dice Cream hopes to have a deployable unit by the end of 2024.
Headed by an expert team
The Dice Cream executive team comes with 30 years of combined experience in food, robotics & automation (Miso Robotics, Graze, Bobacino), & backgrounds at Raytheon, Booz Allen Hamilton, & Lockheed Martin.
That makes the team the perfect match of skillsets to bring this ambitious vision to life.
Why Ice Cream is big business
The fact is that Americans love ice cream! On average, every person in America eats 20 lbs per year! It’s not just Americans though. The global ice cream industry is already worth $82B, and is expected to grow to $115B by 2030.
That’s a big market, and Dice Cream hopes to break into it. With such a small footprint, and almost no labour costs, Dice Cream can be deployed in popular areas like universities, shopping malls and arenas at low cost, with huge sales potential, and no expensive rental fees that a traditional parlour would face.
Dice Cream’s advanced robotics means it can serve 90 customers an hour - that’s one every 40 seconds. Even the most experienced ice cream vendor would struggle to keep up!
Looking forward, Dice Cream has already secured provisional deals to deploy 90 machines across Japan and Korea, showing demand for the concept.
We can’t wait for Dice Cream to launch!
You can invest in the future of Ice Cream
You can support Dice Cream’s mission to deliver the ice cream parlours of the future by investing in the project.
The round closes on July 15th, meaning you haven’t got long - and shares have been in high demand, and the company has already raised over $225,000 on a $10M valuation.
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OPENAI
OpenAI and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) are collaborating to explore the safe use of AI in bioscience research.
This partnership builds on a tradition of public-private cooperation to drive innovation in essential fields like healthcare and bioscience.
The recent White House Executive Order on AI Safety tasks national labs, including LANL, with evaluating AI models' capabilities, particularly in biological contexts.
OpenAI aims to accelerate scientific progress with AI, already partnering with companies like Moderna and Color Health to enhance clinical trials and cancer screening.
How they’re doing it:
OpenAI and LANL are assessing AI models like GPY-4o for their potential in lab settings, focusing on safety and effectiveness.
Testing AI’s capabilities in vision and voice to assist in bioscience tasks.
Understanding how AI can aid both experts and novices in performing complex lab tasks safely and accurately.
Transforming bioscience research
OpenAI’s CTO, Mira Murati, expressed excitement about the collaboration, noting that it advances scientific research while addressing risks.
LANL's Nick Generous highlighted the need to understand the potential benefits and risks of AI in science.
The study involves assessing GPT-4o’s ability to support tasks in a physical lab setting through multimodal capabilities.
This includes safety evaluations for GPT-4o’s real-time voice systems to support bioscience research.
These efforts are part of OpenAI's broader work on biothreat risks, following their Preparedness Framework and commitments to Frontier AI Safety.
The upcoming evaluations will test multimode frontier models in a lab setting by assessing experts’ and novices’ ability to perform standard lab tasks safely.
Tasks include genetic transformation, cell culture, and cell separation.
By examining task completion and accuracy-enabled GPT=4o, the study aims to measure how AI can upskill professionals and novices in real-world biological tasks.
GPT-4o’s ability to handle voice and visual inputs can expedite learning, allowing users to show their lab setup and troubleshoot visually rather than in writing.
I want my lab partner to be a robot if you ask me.
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