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Food and Generative AI

engineering.hellofresh.com

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Re: Food and Generative AI

#81

Post by famouswaffles »

burkaman wrote: post #79
famouswaffles wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misunderstand what a language model is. What a human can or cannot do is frankly irrelevant. A GPT (Generative pretrained Transformer) is not a simulator nor an imitator. It is a predictor . Predictors try to reverse engineer the computation that could have led to a certain output so they don't just grok what is explicitly stated in a dataset but also what is implied by its structure. As an example, In a language…

I understand what you're saying, I just think we have a fundamental disagreement over "taste is implicit in the data" that I'm not sure we can resolve here. Intuitively it makes sense to me that if you know the entire sequence of a protein's fundamental building block then you can deduce its higher-level properties, but it does not make sense that if you know a lot of high-level descriptions of an ingredient and how…

I see.

First let me explain what I mean by implicit incentive with our biology example.

You have the protein sequence, G46AKT5778FAG4

The predictor is given "G46A____"

The only way to predict this correctly consistently across multiple proteins is learn the underlying biological structure.

Now, I pulled this snippet of a recipe randomly from the web.

"Add the tomato purée and turn up the heat slightly, cooking until it has darkened, about 2-3 mins."

Block out some information.

"Add the tomato purée and turn up the heat slightly, cooking until it has ____"

The only way a predictor is getting what kind of completion to make consistently correct across multiple unseen recipes and food items is if it has some model of the visible effects of heat on food in general. The predictor will be forced learn what kind of foods darken in heated water and group them together internally so it doesn't have to memorize every single instance (more effort than simply learning it)

Now let's put back darkened and block out the time.

"Add the tomato purée and turn up the heat slightly, cooking until it has darkened, about____."

The only way a predictor is consistently correct on what time interval this should be across multiple recipes is if it has some model of the effects of heat and time on whatever it is you're cooking.

Implicit incentives are everywhere.

Re: Food and Generative AI

#82

Post by famouswaffles »

ska wrote: post #78
famouswaffles wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His/Her primary assertion is that it is impossible for a LLM to generate novel recipes without physically tasting it first. His/her assertion is wrong and one easily corrected by understanding a LLM is and does. It's not a perfect predictor so it's not impeccable for all conceivable situations but GPT-4 can already generate novel recipes that taste nice. This is not some far flung science fiction ability.

This is true. On the other hand, the recipes aren't typically good, and generating novel ones isn't really what people mostly want to do... so the value seems limited.

That's part of it yes but people tend to forget that the road to capable prediction is not instantaneous.

It's possible the data is enough to get a good predictor but the one you tested simply wasn't good enough yet.

Re: Food and Generative AI

#83

Post by ska »

famouswaffles wrote: post #82
ska wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true. On the other hand, the recipes aren't typically good, and generating novel ones isn't really what people mostly want to do... so the value seems limited.

That's part of it yes but people tend to forget that the road to capable prediction is not instantaneous. It's possible the data is enough to get a good predictor but the one you tested simply wasn't good enough yet.

Possibly, but the easily available data itself seems is pretty poor for systemic reasons.

Re: Food and Generative AI

#84

Post by [deleted] »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #6
valyagolev wrote: post #4

I used Hello Fresh for a year, not sure if recipe variety was my problem. I think there's a lot of other possibilities to use LLMs in that product though, e.g. to help users express complex preferences, or to create best menus and schedules out of existing recipes. I'd say tampering with recipes would be the worst part of the AI integration. I think it's unfortunate that businesses look into using AI for something es…

I tried hello fresh. Unpacking a meal to find a fast food-sized mayonnaise packet as ingredient made me feel deeply sad

[deleted]

Re: Food and Generative AI

#85

Post by thuuuomas »

famouswaffles wrote: post #56
swatcoder wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine any cook or chef who believes that all the necessary information for all good recipes has been captured in text, let alone in the text that's been digitized and made available for training. That's not to say that LLM's can't mash together reasonable new recipes for certain audiences, especially for variations on popular modern standards, but the idea that their working space of recipes is exhaustive a…

It doesn't matter what the cook thinks. Predictors don't just grok what is explicitly stated in a dataset but also what is implied by its structure. In a language model trained on protein sequences alone and nothing else, you will find biological structure and function emerge in the inner layers. https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2016239118 Language Models are predictors. If the text you give them is the sha…

> It doesn't matter what the cook thinks.

This is the fantasy of GenAI boosters stated concisely - that these statistical methods present a new objectivity that avoids the shortcomings of human subjectivity. Of course, these web-scraped models are distilled subjectivity in aggregate, subjectivity at scale. ChatGPT is made of people!

Re: Food and Generative AI

#86

Post by chefandy »

NeoTar wrote: post #74
chefandy wrote: post #58

It's kind of funny-- I'm a technical visual artist, classically trained (former) chef, and spent a long time as a web developer in an environment where people breathlessly spoke about the possibility of LLMs. (Auto-correcting OCR was my pet wish that I never fulfilled.) It's been... interesting seeing layman's usually naive and mistaken takes on generative AI performing these functions. The difficult part of recipe d…

> and use volumetric measurements instead of weights Sorry to pick up on one sentence of an interesting long comment, but this is a pet peeve on mine when having to rely on American recipes. There seems to be an obsession on using volumetric measurements for things which really should be done in mass units - flour, sugar, sometimes even ingrediants like grated cheese. European recipes in my experience tend to use mos…

Yeah it's definitely a big thing with recipes designed for American home cooks. Just like using SAE measurements, it's a chicken and egg thing. Maybe one in ten US home kitchens has a food scale because our recipes don't generally use weight measurements, and recipes don't generally use weight measurements because one in ten US home kitchens has a food scale. If you're making an investment in publishing a cookbook, it's probably not a defensible principled stand to sacrifice the sales and piss off your potential readers because they don't have the equipment to make your recipes. Many professionally-published recipes use both, but that's an added expense and increases your recipe testing costs.

As far as the medium onion is concerned, some of that is unavoidable because onions are a natural product with size variations, and unlike sugar, salt, flour, water, etc that serve important chemical or mechanical purposes during cooking, something being 10-20 percent more or less oniony in the grand scheme of all the flavors you have is not likely consequential. Most professional recipes wouldn't be that much more specific in that regard.

Re: Food and Generative AI

#87

Post by [deleted] »

famouswaffles wrote: post #39
burkaman wrote: post #7

I feel like generating recipe ideas/titles is the easy part, and advanced AI techniques are not necessary. Even the article notes that there is not really any difference between 1 round of training and 40 rounds of training with their model. Actually generating a recipe is obviously much harder, and should be effectively impossible unless you include a humanoid robot that can cook and taste. I think the best you coul…

>Actually generating a recipe is obviously much harder, and should be effectively impossible unless you include a humanoid robot that can cook and taste. It's not because this necessary information is already implicit in the sum of all the data it is trained on.

[deleted]

Re: Food and Generative AI

#88

Post by [deleted] »

famouswaffles wrote: post #63
burkaman wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree, even a human chef with decades of experience in all the tools and ingredients they're using is not going to get every recipe right on the first try. I'm not saying an AI recipe will never be good, but it is going to make mistakes sometimes. If you're wondering whether a task is theoretically possible for an AI, I think a good rule of thumb is to ask "could a human domain expert do this given a few days…

You misunderstand what a language model is. What a human can or cannot do is frankly irrelevant. A GPT (Generative pretrained Transformer) is not a simulator nor an imitator. It is a predictor . Predictors try to reverse engineer the computation that could have led to a certain output so they don't just grok what is explicitly stated in a dataset but also what is implied by its structure. As an example, In a language…

[deleted]

Re: Food and Generative AI

#89

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

keenmaster wrote: post #80
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As complex as it might be, the "intelligence" would probably be the easy part. Aggregating that data in a way that didn't become a burden for the user--either because its tedious, or because they don't trust you--would be quite a trick.

“Burden for the user” - why not make this a burden for the AI instead? Have the AI do some web-crawling.

Because it would have to crawl into my refrigerator to see when my milk expires and into... I don't know where... to know that I didn't eat enough vitamin A yesterday. Data that's not on the web.

Re: Food and Generative AI

#90

Post by firtoz »

esafak wrote: post #69

Computer generated recipes and images would make me discount the service entirely, unless their tasters tried it first, in which case they could simply take a picture of the dish. You can't use a language model to predict how something is going to taste.

You could train an image based model with image/taste test pairs though
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