MIT Is Teaching Robots How To Make A Pizza Just By Looking At A Photo Of It

You may have already heard of robots and drones delivering your pizza. But for now, the chef's themselves are secure in their work. Or at least they were until MIT got involved and started turning robots into oven masters that can take over

Researchers at MIT and the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) have been developing an artificial intelligence called PizzaGAN (short for Generative Adversarial Network). This AI, after thousands of hours training on pictures of real and synthetic pizzas, can now make one itself. It doesn't just identify individual toppings in a photo, it can also distinguish various layers (like cheese for instance) and the order in which they need to appear.

By identifying the order of steps required to recreate the pizza in a picture, the AI can then create a guide for itself. And all from one single photo.

The system isn't perfect of course. The researchers found it could identify the right order 88 percent of the time, though it did better on synthetic pizzas, and only on those with just two toppings. Still, it's a start.

Right now, AI isn't advanced enough to be able to let a robot prepare and cook a pizza all on its own. But this does help set the stage for a future where that's possible. Because this system already lets the Ai simply look at a pizza and spit out a recipe. Maybe it could also work on other food like burgers. And that's just looking at food.

MIT

Perhaps something like this could even be applied to fashion, so an AI on your phone can show you how you'd look wearing a scarf you found online for instance, or how that makeup shade would look on you. That way, pizza is just a delicious place to start.