Robot Smoothie War 1. Humanity wins.

I was really, really really hoping this story would be about a bunch of idiot techbros who raised a couple of million from idiot vulture capital funds to ‘disrupt’ the smoothie market and ended up selling AI-designed faecal milkshakes.

Alas, it just looks like a poorly planned gift.

When it opened in September, an AI-powered "bespoke smoothie shop" dubbed BetterBlends marketed itself as "the most personalized restaurant, ever."

The concept was simple: you, the customer, would input your preferences into an app, and the AI would draft a hyper-personalized recipe that would then be blended by human employees…

But!

Just weeks after its opening, it appears that the store has been all but abandoned — with not a single piece of organic fruit left in its wake.

The timeline is pretty incredible even by tech hype standards. Again, this shop opened in early September. But according to the report, as of Oct 20, the doors were locked, with a note affixed to the door telling customers that the smoothie joint was "temporarily closed" and that staff would be back in an hour. Locals, however, told the Guardian that the shop had already been standing vacant for three weeks.

Fast forward to that following Monday, per the report, and the storefront was completely empty, barring a left-behind trash can.

Despite my fervent hopes, it doesn’t seem like the AI was designing shit-flavoured smoothies, ala “Nathan For You”. More like a bunch of grifty techbros didn’t realise running a shop requires basic commitments like turning up on time each day.