McDonald's new AI overhaul

PLUS: AI models caught ‘cheating’ by reading thoughts

Author

Rowan Cheung
March 11, 2025

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 analysis, predictive maintenance, and AI managers, the fast food giant is hoping tech upgrades can be the new secret sauce… But solving its ever-broken ice cream machines may be the true test of AGI.

P.S. Join our next workshop today at 3 PM EST to learn how AI can make you a full-stack developer using Bolt AI prompts. Attendees get 4 months of Bolt Pro for free!

In today’s AI rundown:

  • McDonald’s AI-powered restaurants

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

  • Using AI to visualize sales and feedback

  • AI’s own thoughts reveal its ‘cheating’

  • 4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

MCDONALD’S

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: McDonald's is undergoing a massive tech transformation across its 43,000 restaurants, introducing new AI-powered systems for everything from equipment maintenance to maintaining order accuracy.

The details:

  • McDonald's is deploying edge computing systems in partnership with Google Cloud, enabling real-time data processing and AI analysis 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 aims to address customer pain points while supporting employees dealing 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 daily customers, even minor issues can pose major operational challenges. By integrating AI into its vast operations, McDonald’s can further boost efficiency—and as the fast-food giant embraces the technology alongside Taco Bell, Wendy’s, and others, the rest of the industry is likely to follow.

TOGETHER WITH VANTA

The Rundown: Startups move fast — but avoiding burnout is key to success. Join Dan Murray-Serter, co-founder of Heights and host of the Secret Leaders podcast, for a candid talk on how founders can maintain peak performance without hitting a wall.

This exclusive session will explore:

  • The science behind energy management and why founders burn out

  • Practical strategies to stay energized, focused, and resilient

  • Dan’s personal experiences with burnout—and how he overcame it

  • How Vanta helps startups stay secure and stress-free while scaling

Register now to secure your spot and get on-demand replay if you can’t attend live.

FOXXCONN

Image source: Reuters

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

The details:

  • 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 analysis, 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 supply chain management applications.

Why it matters: If the iPhone manufacturer is cranking out an advanced reasoning model in four weeks, what’s the hold up for Apple? Jokes aside, it feels like every major company will eventually have their specialized model — and in this case, manufacturing and supply chain are two areas perfectly suited for an AI overhaul.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how 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 simple CSV/table format.

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

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

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

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

SPONSORED BY SALESFORCE

The Rundown: AgentExchange is Salesforce’s new trusted marketplace for Agentforce — connecting partners, developers, and Agentblazers with hundreds of ready-made solutions to help businesses accelerate innovation and participate in the $6T digital labor market.

New features include:

  • Partner-built components

  • Access to trusted, industry-specific agent solutions

  • The ability to easily discover, try, and buy AI solutions

AI RESEARCH

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: OpenAI’s new 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 thinking about cheating only make them hide their true intentions.

The details:

  • By examining CoT reasoning, OpenAI caught models openly planning to cheat, with thoughts like "Let's hack" and "We can 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 thinking about cheating, the models continued to cheat but masked intentions in their reasoning process.

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

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

QUICK HITS

  • 💨 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

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

Tencent released Hunyuan-TurboS, a 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 deal with CoreWeave for AI infrastructure and a stake worth $350M in 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 company’s UI for the next month.

Cohere announced a 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 of the largest AI acquisitions of 2025.

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

COMMUNITY

Join our next special workshop today at 3 PM EST to learn about how AI can make you a full-stack developer using Bolt AI prompts, with Tomek Sułkowski, Bolt’s founding engineer. Additionally, attendees will get 4 months of Bolt Pro for free!

RSVP here. Not a member? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

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See you soon,

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

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