Teaching artificial intelligence how (in what order) to construct a pizza may lead to bigger things. But can a computer ever replace your favorite pizza maker?
Researchers and MIT and Qatar Computing Research Institute built an AI system that can look at a photo of a pizza and deduce whether the sauce, cheese, or toppings come first, reports CNN Business. Computers can already learn how to identify specific objects in images, but when some of those objects are partially hidden, it becomes more difficult for them to figure out what they’re looking at.
But why bother? “Food is a big aspect of our lives, and also cooking, so we wanted to have a model that could understand food in general,” MIT researcher Dimitrios Papadopoulos told CNN Business. He believes that this research could lead to non-food applications as well.
Take clothes, for example: a digital shopping assistant may one day us AI to figure out how to assemble a fashionable ensemble. “It’s exactly the same idea,” explains Papadopoulos. “You don’t try to add pepperoni; you try to add a jacket.”
Do you anticipate a day when computers replace pizza makers and stylists?