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He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice

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Re: He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice

#131

Post by Ekaros »

garciasn wrote: post #68
engineer_22 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am asking a lot here, but school needs to be training people what AI is and what it's weaknesses are and how to use it... My school taught me to use a calculator. It also taught me how to check my work when I relied on the calculator. AI is a very complicated calculator - you give it an input, magic happens, it gives you an output. Really no different, to a layman.

Considering the lack of basic math skills I encounter each and every day, I don't think schools did enough; they certainly aren't going to do enough w/LLMs.

Knowing the lack of understanding of basic chemistry and physics like fundamental thermodynamics... I have little hope any population can be trained to understand LLMs sufficiently...

Re: He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice

#132

Post by mortenjorck »

zipy124 wrote: post #110
endymion-light wrote: post #43

There's an incredibly serious lack of education with how LLMs & carb-counting works. This entire article would be better suited to astrology.com than hackernews. When I opened it up, I assumed the author would have at least attempted a calculation service, maybe even placed something like the size of the meal into an actual model, using the integration of pre-existing tools that are (slightly more) accurate. Hell - m…

Honestly it's scary how misunderstood this is by the general public, the media and EVEN scientists. There is a shocking amount of Computer Vision tasks where the scientists claim you can get X info from a picture of Y and it's like, even with ML/AI you can't extract data where there isn't any. The fact I can add an arbritrary amount of high-calorie fat to a meal without changing the appearance by defintion shows it's…

It’s like CSI “enhance!” AI image upscaling. People will do it, see it fabricated details, and then draw the wrong lesson from it, that “AI fabricates things!” when that is exactly what they asked the model to do and there is no magic math that would extract ground truth that was never in the image to begin with.

Re: He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice

#133

Post by Ukv »

p-e-w wrote: post #46
jaccola wrote: post #6

It’s just an impossible problem. Photons don’t provide sufficient information to determine calories (at least not in any way they could practically be captured). Inside that sandwich could be drenched with olive oil or it could be hollow cheese with lettuce. It’s impossible to tell.

Then the correct answer is “I can’t tell.” Not “Here’s a random guess that I just pulled out of my ass.” LLMs have picked up the bad habit of trying to give an answer when no answer can be given from scientists, who overall don’t say “I don’t know” nearly as often as they should.

> Then the correct answer is “I can’t tell.”

From the paper they're using structured JSON schema mode opposed to freeform answers, so it can't. Models do typically caveat their answer for questions like this, in my experience.

Re: He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice

#134

Post by sarusso »

endymion-light wrote: post #43

There's an incredibly serious lack of education with how LLMs & carb-counting works. This entire article would be better suited to astrology.com than hackernews. When I opened it up, I assumed the author would have at least attempted a calculation service, maybe even placed something like the size of the meal into an actual model, using the integration of pre-existing tools that are (slightly more) accurate. Hell - m…

[dead]

Re: He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice

#135

Post by Aurornis »

jaccola wrote: post #6

It’s just an impossible problem. Photons don’t provide sufficient information to determine calories (at least not in any way they could practically be captured). Inside that sandwich could be drenched with olive oil or it could be hollow cheese with lettuce. It’s impossible to tell.

That’s exactly the point of this article.

Many of the comments here assume the authors are stupid and were surprised by the result, but the point of the article is to inform readers that AI carb counting apps don’t work. That’s why they did the study.

Re: He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice

#136

Post by philipphutterer »

I agree to others that the intent of this study could be written more expressively, but honestly, doesn't this show exactly one thing to the people in the tech world? We need better education and communication for people without technical knowledge about what to use which AI models for and what NOT to do with them. For me, quite often I try to give quick help and information on what to expect from an LLM for given input whenever someone non-tech close to me is running into unexpected output. AI just seems so simple and non-complex to most people, it's shocking.

Re: He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice

#137

Post by ilivethere »

Aurornis wrote: post #128
endymion-light wrote: post #43

There's an incredibly serious lack of education with how LLMs & carb-counting works. This entire article would be better suited to astrology.com than hackernews. When I opened it up, I assumed the author would have at least attempted a calculation service, maybe even placed something like the size of the meal into an actual model, using the integration of pre-existing tools that are (slightly more) accurate. Hell - m…

> But the author just took pictures of food & expected a realistic response? Is this genuinely what amounts to a study in AI? The article explains this: There are apps targeting people with diabetes that claim to count your carbs with AI. > If you’re using AI carb counting in a diabetes app Before you dismiss a study, try to understand where it’s coming from. The authors of the study weren’t stupid. They knew the LLM…

Typical case of the "curse of knowledge". We deal with AI on a daily basis on the technical level, so it's very easy to forget that the "common" folk really still believe that AI can replace dieticians, gym coaches, etc

Re: He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice

#138

Post by Ekaros »

jihadjihad wrote: post #99
rsynnott wrote: post #2

I am... unsure why anyone would think LLMs would be able to do this. They are not magic oracles. Like I think even most humans would be extremely bad at this. Like, are people actually using LLMs for this? Please do not, it won't work.

> They are not magic oracles. I came across a LinkedIn post a couple days ago where someone had asked ChatGPT, "What are the top things you get asked about $NICHE_INDUSTRY_THING_I_AM_SELLING?" As if there is introspection like that at the meta level, where ChatGPT could actually provide hard numbers around its own usage and request patterns. The fact that these products work with natural language beguiles people into…

This is the weird intersection where I think that data might exist and LLM might be able to query it. But any company would never give it out. So the bot would not have access to it.

Re: He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice

#139

Post by rsynnott »

acchow wrote: post #47
rsynnott wrote: post #2

I am... unsure why anyone would think LLMs would be able to do this. They are not magic oracles. Like I think even most humans would be extremely bad at this. Like, are people actually using LLMs for this? Please do not, it won't work.

Most people are convinced LLMs can do this. Cal AI, which claims to generate a nutritional breakdown based off a photo, has $30 million in annual recurring revenue.

... Bloody hell. I mean that's basically fraud, surely. It is _not possible to do this even vaguely accurately_.

Re: He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice

#140

Post by nyc_data_geek1 »

jaccola wrote: post #6

It’s just an impossible problem. Photons don’t provide sufficient information to determine calories (at least not in any way they could practically be captured). Inside that sandwich could be drenched with olive oil or it could be hollow cheese with lettuce. It’s impossible to tell.

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