When it opened in September, an AI-powered “bespoke smoothie shop” dubbed BetterBlends marketed itself as “the most personalized restaurant, ever.” The concept was simple: you, the customer, would input your preferences into an app, and the AI would draft a hyper-personalized recipe that would then be blended by human employees. “We want to part the noise,” BetterBlends co-founder Michael Parlato told The San Francisco Standard upon the store’s opening, in what can only be described as the most AI hype bro way to discuss frozen beverages imaginable. “This is a real application to solve a challenge.” But already, as The Guardian reports, strange things are afoot at the startup’s downtown San Francisco shop. Just weeks after its opening, it appears that the store has been all but abandoned — with not a single piece of organic fruit left in its wake. The timeline is pretty incredible even by tech hype standards. Again, this shop opened in early September. But according to the report, as of Oct 20, the doors were locked, with a note affixed to the door telling customers that the smoothie joint was “temporarily closed” and that staff would be back in an hour. Locals, however, told the Guardian that the shop had already been standing vacant for three weeks. Fast forward to that following Monday, per the report, and the storefront was completely empty, barring a left-behind trash can. As the Guardian notes, the venture’s Google Maps profile paints a strange portrait of BetterBlends’ brief time in…AI-Powered Smoothie Shop Goes Out of Business Almost Immediately