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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

#211

Post by zdragnar »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #202
ozgung wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But why would the same llm give you wildly different answers EACH TIME you ask?

Because that's how they work? They aren't knowledge machines, they are random generators.

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

#212

Post by gus_massa »

Let's start with the wrong title:

> I Asked AI to Count My Carbs 27,000 Times. It Couldn’t Give Me the Same Answer Twice.

If you look at the image https://www.diabettech.com/i-asked-ai-to-count-my-carbs-2700... it clearly shows some repeated values. I guess AI like multiples of 5 or 10 or something. It would be nice to look at the raw tables.

> A cheese sandwich on a plate. Here’s one that should be easy. Two slices of thick white bread (carbs on the packet: 20g per slice) plus cheddar cheese (negligible carbs). Reference value: 40g. Simple, unambiguous, packet-label accuracy.

Real cheese of fake cheese that is actually flour paste with gum and colorant? Does it have mayo? I like mayo! Real mayo or fake mayo that is actually flour paste with less gum and another colorant? Does it has a slice of jam that is totally covered by the bread? Real jam or ilegal fake jam that is actually some grounded pork with flour paste with more gum and yet another colorant.

> The models don’t always know what they’re looking at. [...] Crema catalana: Three of four models called it “creme brulee” 100% of the time. Only Gemini 3.1 Pro got “crema catalana” — in 3.4% of queries.

Can someone from Europe tell me the difference? I like it (at least one of them), and I eat it from time to time (like once a year, in a restaurant), but looking at the Wikipedia page of both I can't tell the difference.

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

#213

Post by sjhatfield »

This post made the rounds on the open source DIY looping community in Facebook. In my opinion this isn't a good way to use AI to estimate carbs. Using AI to estimate carbs is just one of a large list of tools at our disposal including nutritional info, company websites, weighing with a scale, etc. Just taking a photo of a food with no other input isn't going to give good results. Taking a photo, along with a description including a brand name, an idea of size, a recipe url etc will do much better. My opinions as a parent of a type 1 child

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

#214

Post by bcjdjsndon »

zdragnar wrote: post #211
bcjdjsndon wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why would the same llm give you wildly different answers EACH TIME you ask?

Because that's how they work? They aren't knowledge machines, they are random generators.

They're next word predictors. They explicitly add in randomness at various stages of the transformer itself, otherwise it'd be too obvious it's not actually intelligent and just a next word predictor

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

#215

Post by zamadatix »

The title seems to be clickbait (the 13 foods in the paper didn't even have ranges such a title would be possible) but the results/paper are much more on point.

It'd be really interesting if it evaluated humans on the exact same image sets. The correct answer is just to feed in more data, such as the exact food itself, but the post makes it sound like it's using a model that is the only risk in this approach to counting carbs.

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

#216

Post by senordevnyc »

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…

licensed nutritionalist

Nutritionist?

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

#217

Post by SirMaster »

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…

How about instead of blaming the user for not understanding how AI works, the AI makers stop letting their chatbots answer questions so confidently that they clearly can't answer...

If I ask the AI about some health issue, it says something along the lines of warning I'm not a doctor etc. So if I show it a picture and ask it to tell me the carbs, how about a warning telling me it can try, but that it probably wont be very accurate.

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

#218

Post by endymion-light »

chromacity wrote: post #208
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 Oh! Do the vendors offer trainings to make sure the users understand how LLMs work? If not, surely, the LLM itself is trained to know its limitations and politely decline in situations like that?... The #1 use case for this tech is "here's a problem I don't feel like solving, let's have a computer do magic ". It's how it's advertise…

yes - the vast majority of labs offer a whole host of training material for users to understand how LLMs work. There's entire course websites created by each of the major vendors specifically to understand how LLMs work. Here's a couple of examples:

https://academy.openai.com/public/content

https://www.commonsense.org/education/articles/practical-tip...

Quote

>Getting the most out of generative AI depends on what you put in. To quote our Outreach team, "It's a tool, not magic!" As the technology evolves, more and more chatbots are designed for specific purposes.

https://www.anthropic.com/learn https://anthropic.skilljar.com/ai-fluency-framework-foundati...

https://grow.google/ai

All of the above are completely free, you could start 3 coursers today that specifically teach you how AI tools work in practice. yes, this is different from the marketing that some of these tools use, but these resources are there, free and available.

Maybe we need to create a form of driving license for responsible AI use, but saying the resources don't exist is not accurate

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

#219

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#220

Post by gblargg »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #201
harperlee wrote: post #53

There is a lot of hate in the comments but there is some merit to the post existing: 1. Even if the task is unreasonable, it is good to showcase that the LLM will perform poorly - warning not to be used for diabetes. 2. As it is a probabilistic model, the approach was to execute it multiple times and look at the distribution. They also tried to minimize variance: "All at the lowest randomness setting these models off…

Re: 2... I think it's interesting they add arbitrary randomness in the algorithm. The problem of wildly varying outputs to the same input wouldn't exist in the first place

Sounds like a kind of dithering to spread out errors and avoid getting stuck.
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