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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

#181

Post by hrimfaxi »

endymion-light wrote: post #164
Aurornis wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there are apps targeting people with diabetes that claims to count your carbs with AI, why haven't those been analysed? That would be a far more effective claim. Because the apps aren’t going to let you submit 29,000 automated requests for statistical analysis. And if you did, the authors of those apps would just release an update saying they changed models and try to dismiss the study. The vitriol against this…

You can commit statistical analysis on frontier models and still use commercial applications as an identifier & comparison. Criticism is not vitriol - it's possible to make a wider point about being taken aback by the lack of education within AI to the point that there's a critical mass of people using them for calorie counting; but there are many studies on effects of LLMs on psychology etc that are far more effecti…

It is not uncommon to study things that are considered common knowledge.

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

#182

Post by pirates »

2ndorderthought wrote: post #64
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.

It's more complicated than a calculator. Even researchers who have dedicated their lives to the field don't know all of the limitations of any given model. That fact alone isn't helpful when a model is 80% correct in one area but 2% in another.

If even experts in the field don’t know all of the limitations then it’s even more important to stress that relying on the output of an LLM is a poor choice without additional checking and verification.

Even with calculators, I was taught that you should double check by hand sometimes to make sure you got it right.

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

#183

Post by jerkstate »

emadda wrote: post #90

Related: I created an app to track the molecules in your foods: https://kg.enzom.dev/ You specify your foods in grams with plaintext (no pictures). I never liked the "take a picture to measure calories" approach, as you could have 10 table spoons of olive oil which would drastically change the calories but would not show in a picture.

This is really cool. I vibe coded almost exactly the same app, mine also tracks saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, and fiber (I'm getting older so these macros are pretty important to me). One of the really cool things you can do if you have tool calling hooked up is to have the LLM analyze your diet and tell you what you can do better to hit your targets - swap pizza for pasta, decrease the amount of cheese you put on your sandwich, if you're gonna have fast food don't get the fries and eat low fat/low sodium the rest of the day, etc. What model are you using? I have found Qwen Flash to be really good for my app - smart enough, tool calling works really well, and very cheap.

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

#184

Post by hombre_fatal »

lesuorac wrote: post #157
2ndorderthought wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average person has no idea this is true. And the average person cannot tell when this is the case. So we have a bunch of people, going their way through school, and then when they get stuck relying on AI. The future is gonna be wild.

If you're looking for a citation about this, the 1999 Dunning-Kurger paper "Unskilled and unaware" [1] is about this. People who are unskilled at a task are unaware of what that task performed correctly is. So, somebody who can't count calories is unable to tell that the AI can't perform the task correctly either. [1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10626367/

Fwiw invoking Dunning-Kruger is beyond trite at this point.

Which is a good thing because it means we can talk like normal humans ("people don't know that it's unreliable") instead of acting like we're making such a profound claim that it needs a citation and psychological dissection.

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

#186

Post by black6 »

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…

> There's an incredibly serious lack of education with how LLMs & carb-counting works

The public's education comes from the incessant marketing from AI companies that their models are the panacea for everything.

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

#187

Post by cj »

The mistake the article makes is providing a photo with zero context. That's why it's mistaking a cheese sandwich for creme brulee. You'll get much more consistent responses if you share a text description along with a picture.

I use AI to estimate calories / macros multiple times per week. I always ask both ChatGPT and Gemini, and then I use my brain to decide what I actually want to log in my calorie tracking app.

About 80% of the time, ChatGPT and Gemini give estimates that are very close to one another.

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

#188

Post by thechao »

jvanderbot wrote: post #180
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…

I did this too! For months (almost a year) I used descriptions, pictures, and measurements of food to get rough calorie counts. My diet is pretty simple and repetitive. I would occasionally check the estimates, maybe once every few days for meals I wasn't already pretty sure of, and it was generally accurate. Where it was extremely inaccurate was on portions, and anyone who has dealt with computer vision could tell y…

About once a week I ask ChatGPT to give me a reasonable diet for recomp with weight loss. It consistently insisted I have at least 7 meals consisting of at least 30g of protein per meal, but the protein source can't be whey or casein. When I ask "why" it cites a bunch of studies ... but most of those "studies" are N=1 of a college or Olympic level athlete. If, instead, I grab a large scale lateral analysis, it says "3 meals" with about 1/2 of the protein.

It'll defend both sides (mutually contradictory) to the death. NOTHING will budge it from its initial stance.

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

#189

Post by andrewvc »

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 below for the 20% figure, as well as their experimental results on real food items (some even exceeded this threshold though most were within it). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3605747/?st_source=...

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

#190

Post by WarmWash »

renticulous wrote: post #86
2ndorderthought wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average person has no idea this is true. And the average person cannot tell when this is the case. So we have a bunch of people, going their way through school, and then when they get stuck relying on AI. The future is gonna be wild.

Here's technical literacy of population on display. I love these prank examples which show the true education of populace. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/B7c9qJcRnVk

Many of of witnessed the technical literacy of the general population when we ran to show them ChatGPT 3.5, and they just kind of shrugged like "So? What are you showing me?"
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