I messed with this a bunch (still have a prototype floating around somewhere). Add a food weight signal with a Bluetooth scale and you’ll get a much much more grounded answers. Standardized the output format, soft match against nutritional databases and run through the model for confirmation and it does even better.
He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice
241–250 of 329 posts
Re: He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Well, for me the comments that insist we don't need to study X because everybody knows LLMs can't do that is a very good justification to study exactly X. Not to mention that this is now a standard thought-terminating cliché, where someone points out a use case where LLMs don't work at all well and irrate responses protest that LLMs aren't meant to be used in that way. Says who? If you ask an LLM a question and it an…
Yes - my original claim is not to not study it, it's to study it deeper than just surface level, which is my belief at what I've read from the site linked
Re: He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice
#243It’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.
Correct. But why doesn’t the AI just say that.
Re: He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice
#244[deleted]
Re: He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice
#245There'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…
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Re: He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice
#246There'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…
Does this only apply to calories or to other categories too?
Re: He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice
#247It’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.
It's not impossible to tell. Diabetics and others with dietary restrictions, have to do that sort of thing every day to decide what they can and can't eat. If you pick up a loaf of bread at the baker's, the baker usually has no idea the amount of carbs, or salt, or sugar is in that loaf of bread. Try it. Ask the baker: "how much carbs in this loaf of bread?". They'll just stare at you. They can tell you whether the loaf has salt or sugar in it but can't tell you how much because they don't calculate the amount by loaf. So if you have dietary restrictions you have to know what you can and can't eat and that requires the ability to judge the contents of a piece of food from the way it looks.
Photons don't carry that information? Sure. But you don't just have photons to go by. You can rely on a large database of prior knowledge about how food is usually made and with what ingredients.
Other people who have to rely on their imperfect human senses to decide what they can and can't eat: people with allergies, people with heart problems, hypertensives, kidney patients, etc. etc.
Re: He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
That's not really the same thing as what I'm saying - which is to investigate the applications specifically advertising AI calorie counting capabilities
Re: He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice
#249There'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…
how many calories are in strawberry?
Re: He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice
#250> You’d expect the same answer each time. It’s the same photo, the same model, the same question. But you won’t get the same answer. Not even close — and the differences are large enough to cause a hypoglycaemic emergency. Already the first paragraph highlights the issue; unless you set temperature=0.0 and the model can actually do reproducible inference, none of the "answers" you get are deterministic! But it's a ve…
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