Starbucks Scraps Disastrous AI Tool

The AI never had its coffee.

By Frank Landymore

Published May 22, 2026 4:09 PM EDT

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Hold onto your pumpkin spice lattes, because Starbucks is canning its AI tool after it turned out to be a total disaster, Reuters reports, less than year after it debuted.

The tool, which was deployed across its North American stores, was designed to automate inventory management with the goal of providing accurate real-time information that could help Starbucks address ingredient shortages at its locations. 

But according to previous Reuters reporting, the error-prone AI frequently miscounted and mislabeled items, confusing different types of milk and sometimes forgetting to count them altogether.

Now, it’s getting the axe.

“Starting today, Automated Counting will be retired,” read an internal company newsletter from Monday obtained by the news agency. “Beverage components and milk will now be counted the same way you count other inventory categories in your coffeehouse.”

Having lasted just nine months, the AI experiment stuck around longer than some of the coffee chain’s seasonal drink offerings, but didn’t approach anywhere near the level of permanent revolutionary impact the tech promises, or indeed the company was hoping for. You also have to wonder if a human employee who couldn’t do the bare minimum of counting stuff would be shown anywhere near the same amount of leeway the AI got at the chain infamous for its union busting.

In any case, it’s a quick reversal from Starbucks. It was only in February that it told Reuters that the AI already helped improve product availability. On Thursday, it only explained that the AI program’s termination was part of a decision to “standardize how inventory is counted across coffeehouses as we continue to focus on consistency and execution at scale.” 

The tool, built by NomadGo, was intended to allow employees to “count everything in your inventory… with just a wave of a smartphone or tablet,” its website claims. In practice, employees held up a company tablet in front of shelves stocked with ingredients like syrups and milks, and the app scanned it with lidar and a camera, per Reuters. 

Also in practice: it didn’t always work. In an embarrassing augury of things to come, it failed to recognize a peppermint syrup bottle in an official video Starbucks uploaded when the collaboration was announced.

This is only the latest questionable example of restaurants, an industry far-removed from tech, trying to embrace AI that ultimately backfires. Earlier this week, one of Pizza Hut’s largest franchisees sued the pie-slinging chain over its mandatory deployment of an AI-powered kitchen management system, alleging that it dramatically slowed down delivery times and caused over $100 million in losses.

This also isn’t Starbucks first foray with the tech. Last month, it collaborated with OpenAI to allow customers to place orders through ChatGPT, a feature that quickly became a laughingstock online.

Short Sellers Are Having a Field Day Betting Against SpaceX

Short Sellers Are Having a Field Day Betting Against SpaceX as Shares Continue to Slip
It could soon get even worse.


By Frank Landymore


Published Jul 16, 2026 5:04 PM EDT
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SpaceX bears are smelling blood in the water. As its stock languishes below its IPO price — at press time, $131 — short sellers are going all in against the company, hoping to make a killing off of CEO Elon Musk’s faltering pull on investors.

As CNBC reports citing data from S3 Partners, 185 million SpaceX shares are now sold short, which is nearly 29 percent of its publicly tradable shares, when it was around only five to seven percent three weeks ago.

It’s one of the highest levels of short selling for a company in its first month of being publicly traded, Ihor Dusaniwsky, a managing director at S3, told Bloomberg.

“The recent price weakness has spurred short selling as well as the anticipation of lockups expiring soon,” he added, referring to the additional SpaceX shares that will soon be tradeable and will play a large role in how the stock performs.

SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share and seemed to set the tone when its price rose to $150 on its opening day and powered past $200 in the days that followed. Those blockbuster gains were short-lived, however. Its price has steadily declined over the past month, losing a third of its value since its peak.

Investors have questioned Musk’s vision for the company — which includes an ambitious pivot to building orbital AI data centers — while its path to profitability remains unclear. Last year, the company lost nearly $5 billion.

Musk’s decision to combine SpaceX with his AI startup xAI before the IPO has also exposed the rocket company to xAI’s numerous controversies, such as its chatbot Grok being used to generate millions of nonconsensual sexualized images of real people. Before, the public fascination around spaceflight had helped shield SpaceX against anti-Musk sentiment.

Off the back of this waning enthusiasm, short sellers have seen their paper profits surge to $3.88 billion, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

But the next few months could be a key turning point for the stock’s performance — or further sink its hopes. Only a small percentage of SpaceX’s shares were made available when the company went public as a measure to prevent insiders from quickly cashing out and crashing the stock price. But around half of its shares will be unlocked from now until December, dwarfing what’s currently available.

If investors dump those unlocked shares, it could send SpaceX’s stock tumbling. Experts have warned that this period of gradually unlocking stocks could be considerably volatile— which isn’t exactly reassuring, given the company’s recent performance.

More on SpaceX: SpaceX Investors Are Lamenting All the Money They’ve Lost



Frank Landymore
Contributing Writer


I’m a tech and science correspondent for Futurism, where I’m particularly interested in astrophysics, the business and ethics of artificial intelligence and automation, and the environment.

Your Apple gear bills are going up soon

 

Tim Cook just rang the alarm bells. Your Apple gear bills are going up soon.

 

Apple's outgoing chief Tim Cook just sat for an interview with The Wall Street Journal, and he made a few grim announcements. Among them, Cook made it abundantly clear that Apple can no longer absorb the rising cost of components. According to the Journal, the price of these two components has quadrupled, and the trend will likely continue well into next year. Cook hasn't made it clear which products are getting a price hike first, but the Mac's base price has already gone up. According to the outlet, other Mac models and iPads will soon follow suit. The price hike is not surprising. Across the industry, the base value of desktops and laptops has gone up significantly, and brands have even resorted to measures like bringing the RAM capacity down to just 8GB on their PCs to keep the sticker price from ballooning up. It was only a matter of time before Apple embraced the reality.

 

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A Chinese AI Model Just Shot to Number One on the Charts

A Chinese AI Model Just Shot to Number One on the Charts, Sending Shockwaves Through the American Tech Industry
US tech execs are shaking in their boots.


By Joe Wilkins


Published Jul 17, 2026 11:54 AM EDT
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While Wall Street was fast asleep, a Chinese-made large language model quietly leapfrogged 16 other models to become number one on the AI charts.

The model is called Kimi-K3, developed by Beijing-based firm Moonshot AI. On Thursday, the AI benchmark platform Arena.ai announced that Kimi had gone from number 17 in the “Frontend Code Arena” — a measure of an LLM’s ability to perform multi-step web development tasks — to number one, surpassing the buzzy Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol by a mile.

In the “Text Arena,” a measure of an LLM’s ability in text-to-text tasks like creative writing, Kimi-K3 earned the number nine spot, a significant improvement from Moonshot AI’s previous model, Kimi-K2.6, which held number 38.

The news comes as investors are facing a major reckoning, with US semiconductor stocks plummeting on Friday morning and the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite sliding by 1.4 percent. Those losses are extending a horrible week for tech stocks, which had been driven by concerns over an all-American AI bubble.

The moniker, “Moonshot,” might be an understatement. The major catch here is that not only did a Chinese AI model surpass every US-designed model in front-end coding in a benchmark, it did so using a dramatically different approach.

Just like DeepSeek, a similar Chinese AI model that rankled the US stock market last year, Kimi is an open-weight model, meaning its inner workings are viewable to the public. Compared to proprietary models like GPT-5.6 that are kept under lock and key, open models cost users on average six times less, though their performance has historically been ever-so-slightly worse than their closed counterparts.

Responding to the news, Xiaoyin Qu, former Meta senior product manager turned AI entrepreneur, posed an important question: “When the best open weight model exceeds the best closed-source model, how does [Anthropic] justify its Fable pricing? Why would anyone pay for that?”

Even before Kimi-K3 dropped, the proposition of paying up to six times more for the slight performance boost offered by closed models was already pushing US companies toward Chinese AI. Now that the performance gap is closing fast, there’s even less reason for companies or individuals to pay exorbitant prices associated with Silicon Valley’s frontier models.

That simple math is bad news for the US tech industry, which has spent years insisting that it will take trillions of dollars to make AI work.

As Qu observed, “Kimi’s most recent funding round values the company at $20 Billion as of two months ago. Anthropic is worth almost 1 trillion, 50x. Why?”

More on AI: Chinese Court Rules That a Worker Cannot Be Replaced by AI



Joe Wilkins
Correspondent


I’m a tech and labor correspondent for Futurism, where my beat includes the role of emerging technologies in governance, surveillance, and labor.

There’s a growing chance a Super El Niño is coming

  There’s a growing chance a Super El Niño is coming

Dasril Roszandi/Getty Images

Is it hot in here or is it just the weakening trade winds over the Pacific? El Niño, a naturally occurring weather pattern, now has an 80% chance of developing by the end of August, according to the UN’s World Meteorological Organization. The phenomenon could have wide-ranging effects on the global economy, hitting everything from trade to agriculture to energy. What is El Niño? We’ll never be able to harness Bill Nye’s raw passion for meteorological phenomena, but we can try. Every two to seven years, trade winds that normally blow from east to west weaken or reverse course over the Pacific Ocean, pushing warm waters usually headed toward Asia back to the Americas. No one is totally sure why this happens, just that when it does, it stirs up a whole bunch of weather and storm drama around the globe: El Niño’s effects are varied across different regions. It usually increases the temperature and dries out areas like Australia and southeast Asia, making them more susceptible to wildfires and droughts. Meanwhile, the southern US and Central America become more at risk of flooding. It can also disrupt normal weather patterns, and make hurricanes and monsoons more extreme or unpredictable. Now put a “Super” in front of it The odds of a “Super El Niño,” which occurs when the water in a specific area of the Pacific rises above two degrees celsius, have also jumped from 25% to 37%, according to the National Weather Service. A normal El Niño is classified by only a half a degree celsius temperature increase. Some data suggests that a deep wave of abnormally warm water could push Pacific Ocean temps higher than they’ve been in a decade, resulting in a record-setting year for global temperatures in 2027. Big picture: Scientists have warned that this El Niño could be supercharged by the warming climate, exacerbating already strained supply chains for everything from fertilizer to fuel. One study from Dartmouth estimated that in the five-year fallout from the 1997–1998 El Niño, there was a $5.7 trillion drop in global GDP.

LAPD Abandons Flock Contract After Making a Horrifying Discovery

LAPD Abandons Flock Contract After Making a Horrifying Discovery
"This contract is not being renewed because of serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues."


By Joe Wilkins


Published Jul 13, 2026 4:48 PM EDT
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Rarely has the Los Angeles Police Department found a police toy it doesn’t love. The third-largest police force in the US has major Palantir contracts in place, uses sketchy apps to track minority communities, and routinely sends drones to spy on peaceful protestors.

So when the LAPD ends a contract with a surveillance company because it thinks the technology is too dangerous, you know there’s a problem.

Over the weekend, the police department announced it was abandoning its contract with Flock Safety, the controversial company blanketing the United States in AI-integrated license plate cameras (ALPRs). Though its three-year contract with Flock is just about up, the LAPD says it won’t renew the partnership, citing residents’ concerns over privacy and civil rights, ABC reported.

“This contract is not being renewed because of serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues, particularly around privacy and the data that is being collected from these cameras,” LAPD’s chief information officer Dean Gialamas told ABC in a statement. “The LAPD had to make a difficult decision, in this case discontinuing using Flock services until we can get those data, privacy, security and sharing concerns ironed out through a contractual relationship.”

The news comes just days after our sister publication The Drive‘s Joel Feder reported how he was suddenly swarmed by armed cops while test driving a Range Rover with his wife in Minnesota. Officers said they had been tracking him for days using Flock’s AI-integrated cameras, which had erroneously tagged his car as stolen.

After the latest Flock contract news broke, 404 Media revealed that a July 10 audit by the LAPD Office of the Inspector General caught the department’s ALPR cameras generating 161 false stolen-vehicle alerts in just two months — each one ending with officers pulling over an innocent driver. Factoring in 337 alerts which “resulted in the recovery of stolen vehicles,” the LAPD’s cameras carry an error rate of 32.3 percent, effectively giving officers a one-in-three chance at pulling an innocent person over.

“During the review period, officers acknowledged 161 alerts as accurate license plate matches; however, subsequent investigations determined the vehicles were not stolen,” the report reads. “In addition to creating an inconvenience for vehicle owners, these inaccuracies can affect individual liberty interests, erode public trust, and potentially create substantial legal and financial liability concerns.”

The OIG report notes that officers are required to “attempt to verify all records prior to conducting an investigative stop,” though it didn’t disclose how many of the 161 wrongful stops were the result of an officer’s failure to do so. Instead, investigators blamed license plate records it says were “not updated in a timely manner,” which “may” lead cops to “act on inaccurate or outdated information, increasing the risk of unnecessary enforcement actions, including vehicle stops and wrongful detentions, or a confrontation with serious consequences.”

As 404 flagged, the LAPD approaches potentially stolen vehicles as “high-risk” stops. For the LAPD, these stops require drastic shows of force, including “calling for back up, air support, and a supervisor and ordering the suspect out of their vehicle,” the report reads.

It doesn’t take a large language model to figure out that this is an incredibly dangerous scenario for Black people in Los Angeles, who account for 19.5 percent of those killed by the LAPD, despite making up only nine percent of the city’s population.

Whatever way you slice it, it seems one of the most notorious police departments in the US has finally met its match.

Sagrada Família is almost done after 144 years

 Sagrada Família is almost done after 144 years

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Construction of the church that’s taking longer than even your landlord’s effort to fix that leaky faucet is nearly finished. Pope Leo XIV is visiting Barcelona today to inaugurate the Sagrada Família’s 566-foot Tower ⁠of Jesus Christ, the completion of which recently made it the world’s tallest church. Today’s date marks 100 years since the death of the mastermind behind the basilica’s funky design, the legendary Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí. He took over the project shortly after construction began in 1882, envisioning its ornate towers with intricate sculptural compositions and natural motifs as a stone embodiment of the Bible. After decades of construction delays due to the Spanish Civil War and funding shortfalls, it now stands as Spain’s most recognizable landmark, helping power the country’s tourism boom. But there are earthly concerns Not everyone thinks crowds of Gaudí-stanning gawkers are a godsend: Some locals complain that the surrounding neighborhood has become too touristy, while neighbors oppose a facade plan that would require the demolition of their homes. Sagrada Família hype comes amid a broader anti-tourism backlash blaming Barcelona’s hospitality industry for rising housing costs and for ruining the city’s character.

Premier Smith’s Warm Embrace of Meta

 Premier Smith’s Warm Embrace of Meta

Not a word about the tech behemoth’s harm to kids. One disgusted jury awarded $375 million in damages.

Andrew Nikiforuk 14 Jul 2026The Tyee

Tyee contributing editor Andrew Nikiforuk is an award-winning journalist whose books and articles focus on epidemics, the energy industry, nature and more.Our journalism is supported by readers like you. Click here to support The Tyee.


Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. His trillion-dollar company faces numerous lawsuits for imperiling child safety. Photo via Wikimedia.


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Let’s get this straight. The premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, dons a cowboy hat and gushes and glows over a $13-billion data centre project in Sturgeon County just outside Edmonton.

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Ah, the success of low taxes and less red tape, she enthuses.

Smith then salutes the centre’s big owner: Meta Platforms.

Yep. That’s the same trillion-dollar company that thousands of people and communities are suing for going fast and breaking things with addictive social media platforms that imperil child safety and mental health.

And isn’t this the same company that also blocked and restricted Canadian news from its platforms?

Yep. And the same company that Iowa whistleblower Frances Haugen accused of choosing profits over safety over and over again before the U.S. Congress.

Now Meta can do it over and over again in Alberta.

No matter. Smith praises Meta for its “largest private sector investment in Canada.”

The massive project will be powered by separate $4-billion power station fuelled by Alberta’s fracked natural gas. The Meta centre will use more electricity than the whole city of Calgary to polarize more people with more manipulative algorithms. Just think of the emissions. Alberta-made.

During the press conference the premier chattered on and on as she tends to do. The project will occupy 30 football fields with several boxes and at its completion will employ 300 people.

Imagine that. For every $43 million of Meta’s investment in computer processing units, Alberta will get one permanent job.



How Age-Restricting Social Media May Play Outread more

Smith calls this “responsible growth” and then praises the company’s “closed loop liquid cooling system” to minimize water usage.

But in her excitement, she forgets to mention that the power station energizing the computer chips will use about 1.2 million litres of water a day, and that fracked gas consumes tonnes of fresh water, too.

During the proceedings not a word is wasted on the subject of human decency. Or AI’s threat to the human condition.

Isn’t Meta the same company that a New Mexico jury just fined $375 million for facilitating child sexual exploitation?

And didn’t the evidence including Meta documents and testimony of whistleblowers show that Meta’s design features enabled pedophiles and predators to engage in child sexual exploitation on Meta’s platforms?

How did New Mexico’s attorney general put it? “Meta’s refusal to follow the laws that protect our kids tells you everything you need to know about this company and the character of its leaders.”

And haven’t Meta’s own studies and global research consistently shown that millions of teens experience sleep deprivation and sexual harassment on Meta’s platforms?



Zuckerberg Is Wrong to Block Canadian News. His Own AI Bot Told Meread more

Has Smith forgotten the compelling evidence collected by Jonathan Haidt and others showing that social media, all powered by data centres, substantially increases the risk of anxiety, loneliness and depression among adolescents?

Or does she just not care?

Did Smith really welcome to her province a corporate miscreant now lobbying the U.S. government to amend its laws to grant it legal immunity from thousands of lawsuits from young people and their families harmed by its products?

Yes, she did. Wearing a cowboy hat.

She played sycophant to another a Big Tech bully whose systemic algorithm failures allowed paid advertisements promoting child sexual exploitation to run on Instagram in India.

But hey.

It’s “responsible growth.”

Innovation. 


Read more: Alberta

Camp styles of the rich and the famous

 Camp styles of the rich and the famous

Brant Lake Camp

Traditionally, sleepaway summer camps have been places to connect with nature, make boondoggle bracelets, and shower in your swimsuit. But that’s not all that they have to be, especially if your parents can afford to send you to a luxury camp. Amenity now: Luxury camps can run as much as $17,000 for the summer, so they don’t scrimp on the nice-to-haves. For example, Brant Lake Camp in upstate New York offers: Fifteen tennis courts (11 of which are clay), 11 basketball courts, and a covered roller hockey rink. A fully stocked weight room, a 30-foot climbing wall, and a ninja course. A woodshop, a clay studio, a ceramics room, and podcasting classes. Hello Muddah, hello Fadduh. We need more sushi, for the grotto Don’t expect today’s luxury campers to get by on just gorp and Eggs Erroneous. They’re eating farm-to-table, scratch-made meals. Sometimes, they even help grow the produce in on-site, organic gardens. But if omelets, daily salad bars, and fresh-baked cakes aren’t enough, there’s always visiting day, which many parents use to sneak in giant candy balls, sushi platters, and steak. Some families even bring their housekeepers, presumably to clean up all of the empty soy sauce packets. There are benefits for the counselors, too. In a bid to set their teenage staffers on the right career course, some summer camps offer job-hunting lessons, internship-style programs, and connections to successful camp alumni.

Americans’ money-saving hack: not buying groceries

 

Americans’ money-saving hack: not buying groceries

Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

A “positive attitude” might start counting as something to legitimately bring to a dinner party. Food prices are rising so much that US shoppers are simply buying fewer groceries: Grocery unit sales, which refer to individual items sold, fell 1.8% in June compared to the same time last year, according to a new analysis from Bain & Company using NielsenIQ grocery data, reported by CNBC.

In June 2025, grocery unit sales actually increased 0.1%, compared to 2024. The recent drop suggests that prolonged inflation, which has hovered between 2% and 4% year over year for the past few years, has finally forced shoppers to make changes to their shopping trips:

• Grocery prices are about 33% higher than they were seven years ago.
• About 66% of US shoppers think groceries are unaffordable, according to a Washington Post/Ipsos poll published yesterday. That’s a steep increase from the 45% of respondents who thought so in February.

Americans are trying every trick in the book to lower the bill. More shoppers said they’re couponing, deal-hunting, or swapping out name brands for private labels, per the survey. Even credit card rewards points, typically used to fund vacations, are increasingly being deployed to pay for everyday staples, a separate survey shows.

Big picture: Even though June’s inflation data was softer than economists’ expectations, energy prices, which got some relief last month, are expected to continue rising amid renewed tensions with Iran.