At the annual gathering of France’s finest chefs for the Michelin Guide awards this year, the talk was not only about whose restaurants had gained or lost a star.
“Everyone’s discussing AI [artificial intelligence]. I was at a table of 12 other chefs, and it was the main thing we talked about,” Matan Zaken, who runs the one-star Nhome restaurant in Paris, said at the event at the end of March.
The 32-year-old believes that some of his peers are reluctant to admit just how much they are already consulting services such as ChatGPT to help them with recipes and ideas.
Photo: AFP
“You’d be amazed to know how many people are using it. There are a lot of egos in the business. They’re not going to make a big thing about it,” he said.
Zaken has made a point of openly embracing the technology, which he said has the potential to produce surprising new pairings of ingredients, offering the possibility of palate-twisting discoveries for diners.
“You have to move with the times,” said the Franco-Israeli owner of the intimate 20-cover Nhome, where guests eat around a large communal table.
Instead of relying on his usual kitchen tasting books, he can now access vast online databases of food photographs, recipes and even the chemical analysis of food molecules.
One recent discovery thanks to ChatGPT Premium, which he says is starting to learn his cooking style, was the complementarity between peanuts and wild garlic. He has joined forces with French digital art collective Obvious Art.
The group provided Zaken with a series of AI-generated photographs of food on plates, and he was required to come up with meals that were served at a private event.
This reversed the usual creative cooking process which begins with the ingredients.
Not everyone is so enthusiastic about the new technology in the kitchen.
Although the high-end cooking jobs are seen as relatively insulated from the arrival of AI — unlike other industries — the idea of computers helping with, or even replacing, the creative process makes some chefs uneasy.
“Artificial intelligence will never replace the human touch, the palate of the cook,” said French celebrity chef Philippe Etchebest, who was toasting a second star for his Bordeaux eatery, Maison Nouvelle, at the Michelin event.
“Artificial intelligence can replace humans elsewhere, but in the kitchen, I don’t believe it will at all,” Etchebest said.
For others, computers and new technology run counter to the vision of kitchens as an artisanal workplace, based on human-to-human transmission and cooking that is rooted in local tradition and produce.
“It’s not really in the spirit of our business,” said Thibaut Spiwack, a young chef who runs Anona, an eco-friendly one-star restaurant in Paris that sources all its produce from the capital region.
“My intelligence is in these,” said Thierry Bridron, a pastry chef and head of the Valrhona cooking school, holding up his hands at an after-party at the Michelin awards.
“There’s nothing more beautiful than nature and what grows,” Bridron said.
Whatever their views on AI in the creative process, many appeared ready to embrace ChatGPT and other AI services to relieve them of tedious work, such as writing e-mails, job advertisements or producing kitchen rotas. New phone-based apps such as Menu or Fullsoon offer more, enabling users to enter recipes and then have instant estimates of cost or the carbon footprint of their dishes. By using data on past purchases and billing, some existing services can help restaurants predict demand, sometimes by integrating factors such as weather and the dates of local sports events. Raphael Haumont, a food chemistry expert at Paris Saclay University and cofounder of the French Center of Culinary Innovation, believes the biggest changes would be on the plate.
Advanced databases of food ingredients containing details about the molecules that produce the aromas and tastes we enjoy could help produce surprising new pairings, Haumont said.
“Perhaps the computer can find things in common that are completely unexpected. For example, chocolate and cucumber. We know now that it works,” Haumont said.
AI-augmented software can also analyze hundreds of thousands of cookbooks, while suggesting new ways to produce or plate food.
“It can analyze 10,000 images of plated langoustine, for example, and say: ‘The next one could look like that. Be inspired,’” he added.
In his techno-utopian vision of the future, high-precision robots might even do some of the most thankless kitchen tasks for an industry that is perennially short of workers.
“Who wants to peel potatoes for two hours?” he asked.
Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves fell below the US$600 billion mark at the end of last month, with the central bank reporting a total of US$596.89 billion — a decline of US$8.6 billion from February — ending a three-month streak of increases. The central bank attributed the drop to a combination of factors such as outflows by foreign institutional investors, currency fluctuations and its own market interventions. “The large-scale outflows disrupted the balance of supply and demand in the foreign exchange market, prompting the central bank to intervene repeatedly by selling US dollars to stabilize the local currency,” Department of Foreign
ENERGY ISSUES: The TSIA urged the government to increase natural gas and helium reserves to reduce the impact of the Middle East war on semiconductor supply stability Chip testing and packaging service provider ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光投控) yesterday said it planned to invest more than NT$100 billion (US$3.15 billion) in building a new advanced chip testing facility in Kaohsiung to keep up with customer demand driven by the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. That would be included in the company’s capital expenditure budget next year, ASE said. There is also room to raise this year’s capital spending budget from a record-high US$7 billion estimated three months ago, it added. ASE would have six factories under construction this year, another record-breaking number, ASE chief operating officer Tien Wu
For weeks now, the global tech industry has been waiting for a major artificial intelligence (AI) launch from DeepSeek (深度求索), seen as a benchmark for China’s progress in the fast-moving field. More than a year has passed since the start-up put Chinese AI on the map in early last year with a low-cost chatbot that performed at a similar level to US rivals. However, despite reports and rumors about its imminent release, DeepSeek’s next-generation “V4” model is nowhere in sight. Speculation is also swirling over the geopolitical implications of which computer chips were chosen to train and power the new
The EU and US are nearing an agreement to coordinate on producing and securing critical minerals, part of a push to break reliance on Chinese supplies. The potential deal would create incentives, such as minimum prices, that could advantage non-Chinese suppliers, according to a draft of an “action plan” seen by Bloomberg. The EU and US would also cooperate on standards, investments and joint projects, as well as coordinate on any supply disruptions by countries like China. The two sides are additionally seeking other “like-minded partners” to join a multicountry accord to help create these new critical mineral supply chains, which feed into
RSS