I have a successful cafe that does one thing really well: Pot Noodles. You can come in and order any type of noodle pot and we’ll throw it together for you. We have all the flavours you can imagine, and there’s nothing we do better than pouring that boiling water over powdered seasoning and dried noodles.
Last month we bought in a PNM (that’s Pot Noodle Machine to the non-industry folk) which speeds up our service – down from 4 minutes by our kitchen staff (we hired a bunch of chefs) to just 5 seconds!
These PNMs are cracking. They produce hot water instantly and we can make pots so quickly we often made a bunch, taste them and only serve the one that’s best.
We’ve even taken to feeding the pots back into the machine and asking it to refine the recipe until it’s closer to what we’re looking for.
We’re considering bringing in a close relative of the machine – the Season Machine – which actually makes the powders itself! I’ve heard rumours of people getting the PNM and SM working together in some crazy ways – there are photos of dishes we couldn’t even have imagined floating around the noodleverse!
I think one of the big reasons people are so excited by LLMs in the workplace is that we’ve built so many companies for making pot noodles. And most people don’t like to think of their work as to ship mass-made, low replication-effort food.
But, by definition the outputs of LLMs are designed to be average. We can get them to do some incredible things – particularly when we interlink them, create feedback loops, or provide access to more resources – and the best chefs know how to use technology to their advantage.
What’s exciting to me is what the chefs can be doing if they’re freed up from making pot noodles all day. Their latent potential was always there – they were simply allocated to an economically useful task. If they don’t have to spend their time filling pots, what else could they be doing?