our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed As AI makes life more efficient, people are seeking out real-world community — and all its messiness. This article is part of Big Think’s fall 2026 special issue, Made in Our Image. At a recent technology conference, Marc Lore, the billionaire cofounder of Diapers.com and Jet.com, was describing his newest venture.
It’s called Wonder, and it operates about 120 “tech-enabled” kitchens across the northeastern U.S., each one a fast-casual storefront that Lore calls a “programmable culinary platform”: an all-electric kitchen with a 700-ingredient library, a staff of up to 12, and a growing complement of conveyors and robotic arms capable of preparing meals from 30 different restaurant brands simultaneously in one location. The company has partnerships with Bobby Flay and José Andrés, and it recently bought the robotics firm that automated Sweetgreen’s kitchens. The secret sauce to Lore’s newest food venture, however, is not grandma’s recipe.
It is AI that helps you decide what to eat. AI is telling me what to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner most days.” > Silicon Valley has spent decades engineering “friction” out of every corner of life, and it has been remarkably successful, in good ways and bad. The sweeping vision, which is helping fuel interest in a 2027 IPO that could value the company beyond its current $9 billion valuation, is to make all of this available to anyone, anywhere.
Lore describes the endgame as a “Shopify front end with an AI prompt.” You type in the restaurant you want to exist, and AI generates the name, branding, menu, pricing, and recipes, then launches it across every Wonder kitchen in the country. Lore says he envisions 10,000 locations by 2040. At the center of Lore’s quest for epicurean domination is a robot he calls the “infinite bowl machine.” It assembles salads and grain bowls on a magnetized spinning platform — 500 flawless bowls per hour — and it exists to solve what Lore identifies as a restaurant’s biggest weakness: humans.
He is simply articulating, with unusual candor, the belief system of the AI age: that because machines _can_ absorb ever more of the physical and mental labor of daily life, they _should_. Silicon Valley has spent decades engineering “friction” out of every corner of life — deciding what to eat, hailing a taxi, speaking to another human being — and it has been remarkably successful, in good ways and bad. Four times a year, the Big Think print magazine shows up at your door.
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