This Beer Was Designed by Artificial Intelligence

IntelligentX is a beer you don’t necessarily need to love on the first go. That’s because it evolves with every batch based on customer feedback, as Smithsonian reports. Billed as the “world’s first beer brewed by artificial intelligence," it uses a Facebook messenger bot to incorporate customer preferences into new batches of beer, tweaking its recipe along the way to learn how to make better brews.

London-based marketers at 10x teamed up with their neighbors at the machine-learning startup Intelligent Layer to add “launch fancy new beer” to the former’s portfolio, so there’s a reason it looks so slick. Food and booze are usually positioned as the artistic result of a chef or brewmaster’s craft, but IntelligentX makes it, essentially, a scientific equation. The A.I. learns to do more of what people like and tweak what people don’t.

IntelligentX: The World's First Beer Brewed by AI from IntelligentX on Vimeo

Whether that leads to the best brew possible is questionable. There’s a reason “too many cooks in the kitchen” is seen as a bad thing. You can’t please everyone, much less a faceless mass of regular consumers and professional brewers. It might just lead to a middle-of-the-road brew, rather than the award-winning beer its creators are aiming for. But hopefully the robot brewer has enough data-crunching abilities to sort out the valuable feedback from the noise.

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