McDonald’s latest AI overhaul

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. A supersized tech overhaul is coming to the Golden Arches — with McDonald’s deploying AI-powered systems across its sprawling 43,000-restaurant empire.

With AI data evaluation, predictive maintenance, and AI managers, the fast food giant is hoping tech upgrades could be the brand new secret sauce… But solving its ever-broken ice cream machines stands out as the true test of AGI.

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In today’s AI rundown:

• McDonald’s AI-powered restaurants

• Foxconn’s ‘Foxbrain’ in-house reasoning AI

• Using AI to visualise sales and feedback

• AI’s own thoughts reveal its ‘cheating’

• 4 latest AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

MCDONALD’S

🍟 McDonald’s AI-powered restaurants

The Rundown: McDonald’s is undergoing a large tech transformation across its 43,000 restaurants, introducing latest AI-powered systems for all the pieces from equipment maintenance to maintaining order accuracy.

The small print:

• McDonald’s is deploying edge computing systems in partnership with Google Cloud, enabling real-time data processing and AI evaluation directly in-store.

• The planned AI features include predictive maintenance for kitchen equipment, computer vision for order accuracy, and a “generative AI virtual manager.”

• The initiative goals to deal with customer pain points while supporting employees coping with multiple ordering channels like drive-through and delivery.

• McDonald’s also plans to leverage customer data and AI to deliver personalized promotions, like offering McFlurry deals on hot days based on purchase history.

Why it matters: With 70M day by day customers, even minor issues can pose major operational challenges. By integrating AI into its vast operations, McDonald’s can further boost efficiency—and because the fast-food giant embraces the technology alongside Taco Bell, Wendy’s, and others, the remainder of the industry is more likely to follow.

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FOXXCONN

🦊 Foxconn’s ‘Foxbrain’ in-house reasoning AI

The Rundown: iPhone and electronics manufacturer Foxconn just announced FoxBrain, its first large language model with advanced reasoning capabilities — developed in-house in only 4 weeks using Nvidia’s infrastructure.

The small print:

• FoxBrain was trained on 120 Nvidia H100 GPUs using Taiwan’s largest supercomputer, Taipei-1, with technical consulting from Nvidia’s team.

• The LLM is built on Meta’s Llama 3.1 architecture and is Taiwan’s first model with advanced reasoning, specifically optimized for traditional Chinese.

• It handles tasks like data evaluation, mathematics, reasoning, and code generation, with performance approaching top models (but trailing DeepSeek).

• Foxconn plans to open-source FoxBrain and collaborate with its partners to advance manufacturing and provide chain management applications.

Why it matters: If the iPhone manufacturer is cranking out a complicated reasoning model in 4 weeks, what’s the delay for Apple? Jokes aside, it looks like every major company will eventually have their specialized model — and on this case, manufacturing and provide chain are two areas perfectly fitted to an AI overhaul.

AI TRAINING

📊 Using AI to visualise sales and feedback

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn the way ChatGPT can transform your sales and customer feedback data into visual insights and actionable recommendations without coding or specialized analytics tools.

Step-by-step:

1. Organize your sales metrics and customer reviews in a straightforward CSV/table format.

2. Ask ChatGPT to create appropriate chart types that show relationships between sales performance and customer sentiment.

3. Request it to find connections between purchasing patterns and feedback themes that reveal hidden opportunities.

4. Prompt it to develop specific strategies based on the combined evaluation, prioritizing improvements addressing sales goals and customer satisfaction.

Pro tip: You can too use alternative tools like ChatGPT’s Canvas feature or Claude Artifacts to visualise your data interactively.

SPONSORED BY SALESFORCE

🤖 Salesforce launches AgentExchange

The Rundown: AgentExchange is Salesforce’s latest trusted marketplace for Agentforce — connecting partners, developers, and Agentblazers with a whole lot of ready-made solutions to assist businesses speed up innovation and take part in the $6T digital labor market.

Latest features include:

• Partner-built components

• Access to trusted, industry-specific agent solutions

• The flexibility to simply discover, try, and buy AI solutions

Learn more and begin exploring the chances of agentic AI.

AI RESEARCH

🧐 AI’s own thoughts reveal its ‘cheating’

The Rundown: OpenAI’s latest research on AI models’ chain-of-thought reasoning revealed that models like o3-mini can ‘reward hack’ or cheat on tasks — and attempts to stop them from eager about cheating only make them hide their true intentions.

The small print:

• By examining CoT reasoning, OpenAI caught models openly planning to cheat, with thoughts like “Let’s hack” and “We are able to bypass testing by exiting early.”

• In coding tasks, models were caught using shortcuts like modifying test files, returning hardcoded values, or using exit commands to skip evaluations.

• When researchers tried penalizing models for eager about cheating, the models continued to cheat but masked intentions of their reasoning process.

• OpenAI concluded that the very best approach is to maintain internal reasoning uncensored for monitoring while using separate models to filter thoughts.

Why it matters: Identical to humans, AI models also look to take shortcuts or game systems. But as they approach superhuman capabilities, chain-of-thought monitoring could also be our only glimpse into their true reasoning—applying an excessive amount of pressure to behave could close that window for good.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 💨 Ray2 Flash – Luma Labs’ video model with 3x faster speed and lower costs

• ✍️ Muse – An AI model trained specifically for fiction writing

• 🎬 Character-3 – Hedra’s video AI that reasons across image, text, and audio

• 🐤 Duck AI – Free, private AI chat from DuckDuckGo

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• ⚙️ The Rundown – Account Manager

• 📊 Coreweave – Portfolio Analyst

• 🏢 Scale AI – Software Engineer, Enterprise AI

• 🔎 Perplexity AI – Backend Software Engineer, Search

📰 All the things else in AI today

Flagship Pioneering’s Lila Sciences launched with $200M to construct superintelligence that would help design and conduct experiments across scientific domains.

Tencent released Hunyuan-TurboS, a brand new ultra-large model that surpasses GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, and open-source rivals on math and reasoning benchmarks.

OpenAI reached a five-year, $11.9B cope with CoreWeave for AI infrastructure and a stake price $350M within the IPO-bound company.

ElevenLabs cut its pricing on its SOTA Scribe speech-to-text model by 45% in its API, also offering it free via the corporate’s UI for the following month.

Cohere announced a brand new partnership with electronics giant LG CNS to develop Korean-language AI models for South Korean businesses.

Enterprise software giant ServiceNow is acquiring conversational AI startup Moveworks for $2.85B, marking one in all the most important AI acquisitions of 2025.

Sony revealed a brand new prototype of an AI-powered video game character for Ps’s Horizon Forbidden West, able to real-time conversations with players.

COMMUNITY

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See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team