Technology

It’s just the latest in a long line of experimental, conceptual Coke flavours. Honestly, it’s something I’ve been saying for years; stop being constrained by imitating “real” flavours and let the flavour scientists loose, let 'em go nuts.

So far they've done:
Space (I liked that, hints of toasted carmel and raspberries)
Dream (Also good, a little bubblegummy, a little cotton candy-y, a little mangolike)
Transformation (Awful, like coke with coconut oil and a hint of turpentine)
Byte (Just decent, kind of indescribable)
Pixel (I never got to try it, it was US only, but by all descriptions it wasn't great)
Movement (A bit like theatre butter and cinnamon, it was okay but wasn't a fan)

And now AI flavour. I plan to give it a shot, but I don't expect much after their last two Tech-y flavours were eh.

They probably trained it using data from their Coca-Cola freestyle dispensers if you’ve used one. That’s my guess.

The answer is simple. They’re using blockchain NFTs to reach new market growth using AI to provide flavor solutions to consumers

“Unsurprisingly, ‘Diarrhea Sasquatch Xtreme’ hit the mark yet failed to wow test groups,” is likely one of many test flavors removed from the article for PR reasons.

The press release they link to is not especially forthcoming with information either and all they can get in terms of details is from that press release and tasting it themselves.

Yeah, I'm guessing it was as as much an "AI" thing as everything was "i-something" about 20 years ago, or a bunch of stuff, even video game consoles, were the "something something computer" 40 years ago

Companies using AI in a stupid way will die out, but the models themselves are far too useful for certain job fields (probably not yours or you wouldn't be comparing it to NFT's) for them to ever die. They're going to expand and become integrated into the data environment.

I don't know what their ai process looks like, what kind of data they trained it on, etc.

But annecdotally, I've played around a bit with chatgpt making cocktail recipes, and it's been surprisingly good at it. They sometimes need a little fine-tuning but they tend to get you in a pretty close ballpark, it's made some interesting suggestions I probably wouldn't have thought of, but nothing that turned out to be bad.

A lot of recipes tend to follow some pretty well-established ratios which means they can be broken down into some sort of mathematical formula which is something computers can actually do pretty well, and it's often just a matter for swapping out one ingredient or combination of them for another that is similarly salty/sweet/bitter/sour/umami.

For example a standard recipe for punch is 1 part sour, 2 of sweet, 3 of strong (liquor of your choice), 4 of weak (tea, juice, soda, water, etc.) and you can mix and match just about any ingredients that fit those profiles and get a drinkable punch.

I'm sure a company like coke probably has a long list of flavorings with known and well-documented flavor profiles that an ai trained on a list of proven recipes could mix and match with all day long.

Apparently Watson, the IBM AI that won Jeopardy, is actually pretty good at making recipes. That said, this is because it analyzes chemical compositions of known good recipes to find the compounds that make us like them and finds things that can produce similar profiles, rather than just sticking strings of text together in new ways.

Coke is in the branding business, IMHO.

They do a lot more advert creation than they do drink creation.

Pretty much all modern branded consumer goods invest way more on brand recognition and the kind of advertising that says nothing about quality and is purelly designed to create a subconsciously association they brand and positive feelings and/or make it seem socially fashionable (you know the kind: happy friends around a campfire having fun with package-of-branded-good on their hands)

(Those things are actually funny to analyse: generally drinks do "social/trendy", perfumes do "sex", cars do "freedom")

At some point in the 60s in the US a nephew of Freud (I kid you not!) introduced actual teachings from the Science of Psychology into Advertising and since then consumers of large brands have been mostly manipulated via that kind of psychologically manipulative advert. Nowadays you pretty much only see other kinds of adverts for cases like small brands trying to expand brand recognition (something the likes of Coka-Cola doesn't need), and for the rest seldom are the actual qualities of the product being sold mentioned.

I don't know why they don't just put the coke back. It'd definitely sell better than any of their recent attempts.

No, the secret ingredient was water. Ordinary water. Laced with nothing more than a few spoonfuls of LSD.

Of course an AI would use shitty imperial measurements instead of metric

It will do well in sales initially due to FOMO, but I am guessing it won't last due to it not tasting especially interesting.

"You, too, can lift Excalibur from the stone."

Motto on the cocaine bag