Marc Lore says that AI will soon enable anyone open a restaurant

Marc Lore, the veteran e-commerce entrepreneur who sold his previous startups to Amazon and Walmart, has big plans to infuse AI into his current venture , Wonder . The centerpiece of those plans is Wonder Create, an initiative that would let anyone — from food entrepreneurs to social media influencers — use AI to design and launch their own restaurant brand in under a minute. The virtual restaurant would then go live across Wonder’s growing network of tech-enabled kitchen locations, currently numbering 120 and expected to reach 400 next year. Lore’s startup, a vertically integrated dining and delivery platform, has evolved from food trucks to fast casual restaurants with 10 to 20 seats. These are not normal restaurants, though; they are “programmable cooking platforms” capable of operating as 25 different types of restaurants based on cuisine, within their all-electric kitchens that are increasingly becoming robotic. Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s “Future of Everything” conference this week, Lore said these kitchens have a 700-ingredient library. The “restaurants” they house actually consist of many different brands that operate from within these locations. In addition to a staff of up to 12 people in these kitchens, cooking tech, like conveyors and robotic arms, are involved in the cooking process. The company also just bought Spice Robotics , a maker of an automatic bowl-making machine previously used by Sweetgreen. …