McDonald’s is temporarily putting a new McFlurry on its menu with flavors that might make customers think of their grandmothers.

The fast-food chain said Thursday that a limited-time “Grandma McFlurry” will roll out at U.S. restaurants on Tuesday and remain for sale “while supplies last.”

It will be made with a “delicious syrup and chopped, crunchy candy pieces” as well as McDonald’s vanilla soft serve ice cream, according to the chain. It described the candy as being “like grandma’s favorite treat that she hid in her purse.”

Ahead of the launch, McDonald’s said New York City residents will have the opportunity over two days this weekend to sample the Grandma McFlurry from a “Grandma’s McFlurry Mobile.” 

MCDONALD’S $5 MEAL DEAL COMING IN JUNE FOR LIMITED TIME: REPORT

The ice cream truck will do the free tastings at Herald Square on Friday and at East Harlem and Queens senior centers and assisted-living homes the following day, according to the fast-food chain.

With the Grandma McFlurry, McDonald’s is looking to honor grandmothers and seemingly capitalize on viral online trends inspired by them.

MCDONALD’S LOOKING TO BEEF UP WITH LARGER BURGERS

“Grandmas have always held a special place in our hearts, and today they’re having a major moment influencing culture – inspiring trends in fashion, decor and now, even food with our Newest McFlurry,” McDonald’s Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer Tariq Hassan said.

McDonald’s has been serving McFlurries since the ’90s, and over the years it has put out various limited-time flavors. 

The frozen dessert derives its name from “the process in which the spoon is attached to the McFlurry mixer which is used to ‘flurry’ the ice cream and inclusions (and sauce if applicable) together,” according to the chain.

MCDONALD’S TO SELL KRISPY KREME DOUGHNUTS NATIONWIDE

It moved to using a reusable spindle to make McFlurry desserts and serving them with a black spoon late last year, as previously reported by FOX Business.

Read More 

A team of university researchers in the Netherlands says they’ve developed an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that can recognize sarcasm, according to a new report.

The Guardian reported on Thursday that the research was presented at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the Canadian Acoustical Association in Ottawa, Canada, on Thursday. At the event, Ph.D. student Xiyuan Gao said the research team used video clips and other text and audio content from American sitcoms like “Friends” and “The Big Bang Theory” to train a neural network.

The work leveraged a database called the Multimodal Sarcasm Detection Dataset (MUStARD), which another research team from the U.S. and Singapore had annotated with labels about whether sarcasm was present in a given piece of content as part of a push to build their own sarcasm detector.

After training their AI model on the data, the researchers said they’re able to detect sarcasm in exchanges that were unlabeled by the researchers almost 75% of the time. They added that subsequent work at the lab using synthetic data has improved that accuracy level even further, though those research findings haven’t yet been published, The Guardian wrote.

AI IS LIKE A ‘TSUNAMI’ HITTING LABOR FORCE, IMF CHIEF SAYS

Among the content from TV shows in the database used to train the AI model about sarcasm were a scene from “The Big Bang Theory” in which Sheldon observes his friend and roommate Leonard unsuccessfully attempting to escape from a locked room, as well as a scene from “Friends” that shows Chandler, Joey, Ross and Rachel unenthusiastically assembling furniture.

“We are able to recognize sarcasm in a reliable way, and we’re eager to grow that,” Matt Coler, a researcher at the University of Groningen’s speech technology lab, told the outlet. “We want to see how far we can push it.”

WORRIED ABOUT LOSING YOUR JOB TO AI? EXPERT POINTS TO THE ACTUAL THREAT

Shekhar Nayak, another member of the research project, said the team’s methods and findings could help AI assistants interact more easily with human speakers by detecting negativity or hostility in the speaker’s voice.

Gao noted that incorporating visual cues into the AI tool’s training data could make it even more capable of detecting sarcasm conveyed through facial expressions like raised eyebrows or smirks.

THE FUTURE OF LOVE: BUMBLE FOUNDER SAYS AI COULD DATE FOR YOU

The interest in AI-powered sarcasm detection shown by the University of Groningen research team and the researchers who compiled the sarcasm-annotated MUStARD content database follows a similar line of research done by the U.S. Department of Defense in recent years.

The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and researchers from the University of Central Florida used DARPA’s SocialSim program to develop an AI model capable of classifying whether a piece of text such as a social media post or text message contains sarcasm.

GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE

“The team demonstrated the effectiveness of their approach by achieving state-of-the-art results on multiple datasets from social networking platforms and online media,” DARPA wrote in 2021. “The model was able to successfully predict sarcasm, achieving a nearly perfect sarcasm detection score on a major Twitter benchmark dataset as well as state-of-the-art results on four other significant datasets.”

“Accurately detecting sarcasm in text is only a small part of developing these simulation capabilities due to the extremely complex and varied linguistic techniques used in human communication. However, knowing when sarcasm is being used is valuable for teaching models what human communication looks like, and subsequently simulating the future course of online content,” it added.

Read More 

A former diversity program manager for Facebook and Nike who admitted to stealing $5 million through kickback schemes she orchestrated at the companies is headed to federal prison for her crimes.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia announced this week that Barbara Furlow-Smiles, 38, was sentenced to five years and three months behind bars for her fraud scheme and ordered to pay restitution of $4,981,783.58 to Meta-owned Facebook and $121,054.50 to Nike.

“Furlow-Smiles shamelessly violated her position of trust as a DEI executive at Facebook to steal millions from the company utilizing a scheme involving fraudulent vendors, fake invoices, and cash kickbacks,” U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Buchanan said in a statement announcing the sentence.

FAA LAWSUIT CLAIMS AGENCY DISCRIMINATED AGAINST AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLER APPLICANTS ON THE BASIS OF RACE

“After being terminated from Facebook, she brazenly continued the fraud as a DEI leader at Nike, where she stole another six-figure sum from their diversity program,” Buchanan continued. “Her prison sentence reflects the consequences of her decision to orchestrate an intricate scheme to defraud two of her employers for personal profit.”

Furlow-Smiles led diversity, equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs at Facebook from January 2017 to September 2021 and was responsible for developing and executing DEI initiatives, operations and engagement programs.

MEDIA MOGUL SOO KIM FILES RACIAL DISCRIMINATION SUIT AGAINST FCC: NOT ‘RIGHT TYPE OF MINORITY’

Prosecutors say she committed the fraud by linking PayPal, Venmo and Cash App accounts to credit cards given to her by Facebook and used those accounts to pay friends, relatives, former interns at a prior job, nannies, babysitters, a hairstylist and others for goods and services that were never provided to the company.

After Furlow-Smiles was terminated by Facebook, she worked as a DEI senior director at Nike from November 2021 to February 2023, where she carried out a similar kickback scheme against that employer.

GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE

“As Lead Strategist at Facebook, Furlow-Smiles’ employer put an extreme amount of trust in her, only to have that trust completely violated,” said Keri Farley, special agent in charge of FBI Atlanta. “After she was fired, she carelessly continued her fraudulent schemes at Nike, thinking she was untouchable.

“As a result,” Farley added, “she not only threw away a lucrative career, but will serve time behind bars for her excessive greed.”

FOX Business’ Louis Casiano contributed to this report.

Read More