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

diabettech.com

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

#191

Post by tempaccount5050 »

drtz wrote: post #94
kioleanu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people are using LLMs for this because that is how they've been marketed, like being able to solve every day tasks like a personal assistant on one hand, but also like researchers being able to solve old problems that humans couldn't crack. Does the model say it can't do that when asked? No, it answers confidentely. Also it's easy to trust it if you don't know how it works

Would people really trust their personal assistant to tell them how many calories are in a sandwich just by glancing at it on a plate? I'm doubtful, and I would also expect a diabetic to be even more skeptical.

Yes.

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

#192

Post by ifwinterco »

thechao wrote: post #188
jvanderbot wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "…

To be fair this is a reflection of the general state of nutritional science and the actual answer seems to be "it depends on your genes".

Some people do well on 6 small meals, others do well on no breakfast and two large ones. Studies can't tell you anything useful about that, you have to experiment and find out what works best for you

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

#193

Post by techcode »

I've seen/noticed this simply from being on a low carb (aka KETO) diet.

Besides AI grossly over/under estimating values even when you give it a photo of the packaging with nutritional table and tell it weight you used.

The other thing that surprised me, at least until I read up on how LLMs are actually working. Was how it would confidently BS you for your daily total.

Even when the chat/messages are just "Ate ABC with XYZ values, what's my daily total?"

While I guess new chat for each day, or some MCP for storing and retrieval of record/meals would've helped with those daily totals.

The total would still be wrong - unless you explicitly specified each of the values you need to track (e.g. carbs, fat, protein, kcal) to be put into records.

At which point of course - you're not really using AI/LLM but basically an CRUD application.

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

#194

Post by bonoboTP »

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…

A large part of the effectiveness in counting calories is that you pay more attention and make more conscious decisions and are less likely to "cheat" if you have to enter it in your food log.

It's indeed like astrology. Simply thinking about personality traits and thinking through your life and your desires and goals and current situation is already beneficial to take charge and navigate your life.

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

#195

Post by winddude »

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…

as a t-1 diabetic, this is exactly what we do for nearly every meal we eat, especially in restaurants, look at it and try to estimate the number of carbs.

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

#196

Post by ozgung »

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.

As a human, in the photo of that sandwich I see 4 slices of bread and 4 slices of cheese (distributed unevenly). I have no idea about the weight of the bread, flour type or its sugar content. I don't know the type of the cheese, dimensions of the slices or total amount of cheese inside the bread. I don't know if there is butter or anything else inside. I can guess the size of the plate as a size reference but I can't be sure. Human or AI, it's an ill-posed problem. There can be widely different estimates which can be equally plausible.

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

#197

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

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…

The obvious meme to invoke here is:

  - AI will solve all of our problems 
  - No not like that!
Are the trillion dollars sloshing around the AI economy well-invested if the refrain is always “you’re holding it wrong”?

So we’re trying to define, through trial and error, what problems “AI” will actually solve, and this paper is one of the many cobblestones on that road.

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

#198

Post by swiftcoder »

endymion-light wrote: post #172
coldtea wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are commercial services anything more than just UI facades on top of frontier model APIs?

Great point - and i'd love a study to address that. If the study pointed out that X services sit perfectly within the analysis found, I think that would be a fantastic study that would be enlightening & useful to show.

The app the study is based on is open-source, so you yourself can verify that it does indeed just call a frontier model with the same prompts used in the study

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

#199

Post by Izkata »

wat10000 wrote: post #176
giancarlostoro wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the author just took pictures of food & expected a realistic response? Is this genuinely what amounts to a study in AI? Reminds me of that one youtube video (I forget who it is so I have no idea how to pull it up) where he turns on the camera on his phone for ChatGPT and asks it what everything it sees weighs, then puts it on a scale, and ChatGPT was never right, ever, which makes sense, I couldnt tell you what…

People do not understand this stuff at all. So many times I've seen people post the output from one of these services with full confidence that it has to be correct because it came from a computer.

Between the marketing and the hype, plenty of people believe we already achieved true sci-fi-style superhuman general AI a year or two ago.

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

#200

Post by swiftcoder »

dahart wrote: post #174
coldtea wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the author just took pictures of food & expected a realistic response? Is this genuinely what amounts to a study in AI? If there are commercial services where you take pictures of food and are promised a realistic (paid for) response, then yes. And there are.

And what’s the variance & accuracy of their responses? Isn’t comparing the models’ variance to baseline human variance what matters here? It seems like they didn’t do that, and I agree with parent’s call for that kind of baseline. Having counted calories for years, I don’t think I could reliably estimate the calories or carbs in the example picture of a cheese sandwich. I can make assumptions about the bread and the…

> Isn’t comparing the models’ variance to baseline human variance what matters here?

You seem to be missing the context that this isn't just about diet apps - this is about apps claiming to be able to track carbs sufficiently accurately to be used in a medical context to dose insulin (a substance which can be lethal if incorrectly dosed)

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