An AI Smoothie Shop Opened in San Francisco With Much Hype. Why Is It Closed Already?

In September, a "bespoke AI nutrition" store opened in beleaguered downtown San Francisco to much fanfare, promising smoothie concoctions generated by AI and a much-needed boost to the area. Less than two months later, it has seemingly closed without explanation. From a report: BetterBlends advertised "Your Smoothie, powered by AI" and received positive press upon its opening, ginning up excitement for a new business and a novel use of artificial intelligence. Its AI model would take customer orders and preferences to generate a smoothie recipe that would then be blended by hand by co-founders Michael Parlato and Clayton Reynolds, who worked in the shop. But now the storefront sits empty. On Friday 20 October, the locked doors to BetterBlends featured a sign that read "temporarily closed," stating the shop would reopen in one hour -- but sources in the neighborhood said the storefront had been closed for more than three weeks. By the following Monday, the sign had been removed, and the inside of the shop was largely cleared of blenders, fruit, vegetables and other supplies -- anything you might need to make a smoothie, with or without AI. Only a trashcan and a few plants remained. The store's Google Maps listing speaks to both problems in the physical world and its roots in AI. A Google Maps review posted two weeks ago accompanied by a picture of the sign read: "I was hopeful for this business. The owners however did not understand the discipline to run a restaurant. It was often open late and closed early. They changed their hours after a week of being open. And then 1 day they put up a sign, 'Temporarily closed, be back in an hour.' They have not been back in over two weeks." Other reviews were positive, awarding BetterBlends four or five stars. The shop owners themselves uploaded pictures of their smoothies to the Google Maps page as well as an image of happy customers that bears the hallmarks of generative AI. The light on their smiling faces is soft and glossy like a photoshoot. The fruits in the store window are, on closer inspection, unrecognizable blobs of fruit-colored things. The clear plastic cups are branded with gibberish characters that don't spell anything and filled with lumpy smoothie-ish mixtures. They are cartoonishly large in the customers' hands, one of which has only three too-long fingers. AI image generators have a documented history of failing to produce text within images or realistic human hands.

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