Are AI-created recipes hard to swallow?

In Singapore, Italian expat Stefano Cantù has created an AI-powered app that can suggest recipes in response to you telling it what ingredients you have in your fridge and cupboards. In a nod to the app being powered by ChatGPT he has called it “ChefGPT”.

“I’m Italian, so of course I cook stuff,” says Mr Cantù, whose day job is at a software company. He says he came up with the idea “over a weekend” after asking ChatGPT for recipe inspirations.

The app also has drop-down menus and toggles, to let a user specify tools they have in their kitchen, or if they’re in a hurry or not a very good cook. The AI then comes up with a recipe and a picture of the dish.

Mr Cantù says he got 30,000 users within a week and a half of launching last year. But then he got “quite a big bill from OpenAI”, the company behind ChatGPT.

He now continues to pay OpenAI a regular fee for using its AI. Mr Cantù explains that this is a standard arrangement when a start-up like his builds its app on top of another company’s technology.

He adds that he is continuing to try to find “the right balance between advertising and subscriptions, and the right level of usage to give free users”. And how he can “monetise free users without selling their data”.

Back in Dubai, Spartak Arutyunyan at Dodo Pizza says AI should be seen as more of a fun thing to use rather than something you’d base your entire menu around.

Yet Dodo Pizza is now enabling customers in Dubai, who order via its app, to try using AI themselves to dream up unusual pizza toppings. And the firm says it aims to extend the AI function to its other branches around the world.