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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

#231

Post by toasty228 »

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?

There are dozens of ios/android apps with 100-300k+ ratings and god knows how many millions of installs which do exactly this

"Cal AI - Food Calorie Tracker: Just snap a photo and our smart AI calorie tracker analyzes your meal instantly."

308k ratings on ios, 264k ratings on androids easily 5-10m installs across both platforms.

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

#233

Post by ijk »

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…

> The authors of the study weren’t stupid. They knew the LLMs would provide poor results. They ran the study to quantify it and create a resource to spread the information in response to the rise of AI carb counting apps.

Yeah. I think it is under-appreciated that much of science is intended for debugging purposes. Sure, you and I know that X is positive, but what's it actual value? Can we find the causes that make it that way? Et cetera.

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

#234

Post by thedanbob »

mattnewport wrote: post #206

Ironic that they used an LLM to write the article: > 42.9 units of insulin from a single photo. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a potential fatality.

The vast majority of "AI screwed up" posts I've seen on HN have been written with AI.

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

#235

Post by strken »

andrewvc wrote: post #189
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…

One of the biggest gaps is that people don't understand that food labels are allowed by the FDA to be off by up to 20% in terms of the number of actual calories! In the real world you need to calibrate your behavior with the results. Are you gaining weight? You'll need to eat less if you want to lose any. You can do all the math with nutrition labels and macros you want but that's all theoretical. See this study belo…

Realistically the labels are going to be much closer for staples like long-grain Jasmine rice or olive oil, if they're measured by weight.

It's just not that easy to change the nutritional content of a kilogram of a known cultivar of dry rice when it's passed all the standard checks for moisture content, protein content, etc.

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

#236

Post by smoe »

criley2 wrote: post #150
Brendinooo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are apps doing exactly this Yeah, for sure there are. And people will just ask ChatGPT as well. The funny thing is that for people who are just trying to lose weight without managing any health issues precisely, this type of extreme variance doesn't really matter, because the mere act of consciously quantifying food consumption is, based on my experience counting calories, the single biggest factor in success…

I actually think "just asking ChatGPT" is fine, because A) the data in these apps is suspect at best and B) the data behind calories is also pretty suspect (but we all play along because we can adjust other variables to make it all "work" well enough). Once or twice a year I spend a few weeks meticulously measuring ingredients/cooked foods and recording calories and on complex recipes apps are next to useless at gett…

I honestly think that, given the sorry state of the pre-GenAI internet, with all the SEO optimization nonsense, clickbait, and supplement peddling everywhere, LLMs are for now actually better than Google for “doing your own research” on many things.

At least at the entry level. Once you want to go in depth, the outcome in my experience is the same as with LLM use on any topic depends heavily on the domain knowledge of the prompter and their ability to steer it.

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

#238

Post by SirMaster »

pohl wrote: post #60
therobots927 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the AI answering questions without answers then?

could be because, at the end of the day, it's just predicting the next likely token

The next likely tokens for a response to a question that can't possibly be answered from the context should be "I" followed by "don't", followed by "know".

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

#239

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

kalleboo wrote: post #142
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? There are very popular apps on the App Store right now that are going viral among non-techie people that do exactly this, and they have no concept of how AI works. My wife was talking about one and I had to give her a reality check that the AI had no idea what ingredients were used to make the food. And she's a licensed nutritionalist. Studi…

To be fair these kinds of apps also existed before LLMs. They just used OpenCV or similar instead of the LLM APIs.
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