A restaurant in a rural Oregon city couldn't find enough servers to stay fully staffed. So the owner hired a robot named Plato. She had no idea how much pushback she'd get from the community. A San Francisco smoothie startup promised to create customers "one-of-a-kind" recipes, but two months after opening, the store was shuttered. The shop, BetterBlends, used artificial intelligence to generate custom smoothies based on customer preferences.

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. 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.