AI-designed sustainable burger ingredients: BurgerAI selected these ingredients by optimizing for environmental sustainability while maintaining consumer appeal. The resulting mushroom-based recipe combines portobello mushrooms, arugula, rosemary, grains, and condiments to achieve an environmental impact more than an order of magnitude lower than a popular fast food burger. Credit: Living Matter Lab
Stanford researcher Ellen Kuhl estimates that there are some 1043 potential burger recipes in the world. And with BurgerAI, a new tool developed in her lab, artificial intelligence can now design the best one for you based on your age, taste, nutritional needs and even your sustainability goal.
But BurgerAI's ability to suggest a great-tasting, nutritionally complex, sustainably produced burger is only part of the story. More broadly, this innovation heralds a shift for AI itself: moving AI from prediction to design.
"Most AI systems are trained to predict what already exists. We wanted AI to invent what should exist next," explained Kuhl, a professor of mechanical engineering in the School of Engineering who now directs Stanford Bio-X, an interdisciplinary life sciences institute that brings together researchers across medicine, engineering and the natural sciences.
