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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

#71

Post by nextlevelwizard »

edu wrote: post #59
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #29

I used LLMs to count calories, but not based on photos, I mean I also did that, but primarily I fed in my exact ingredients and then used weights to get calorie estimates. Was it always correct? Certainly not. But it helped me lose 30kg of weight since keeping even some track of calories was so much easier with LLM than any app I had used before. Also of course it didn’t matter if I was exactly on point since it wasn…

Curious, why it was easier to use an LLM vs a non-AI app with a DB of foods? Seems that in this case a traditional approach would be more precise and more environmentally efficient to get to the same results.

Any app I have used before has asked me to look up the foods and add them manually and usually there has been ads or subscriptions involved.

Much easier for me to take pictures of the packets while making the food, the weight the final bulk product and then when I eat just weight the plate and say “500g of casserole” and the LLM spits out the calories and keeps track of the daily consumption

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

#72

Post by jeroenhd »

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.

It's not even impossible from a technical point of view.

Your cheese sandwich may contain a lot more or a lot less calories, even if you take the numbers from the packaging and calculate the correct ratios by weight. The calories on the label are based on an average and individual packages may contain more or less of any listed nutrient to some margin. Of course, counting calories is meaningless if not done on a long-term scale anyway, but on a long-term scale the LLM doesn't need to guess the correct amount either.

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

#73

Post by 2ndorderthought »

lordleft wrote: post #34
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.

Yep. And it doesn't help that the people selling AI products act as if they're going to build God. Going, "well AI can't do that" isn't going to fly when you are lax about communicating its limitations!

It also doesn't help when the messaging is linked to how "there will be no jobs where you use your brain anymore everything will be automated". What motivation does the average 16 year old have to try hard and learn anything beyond what they immediately need.

No jobs, ai Jesus is coming, and if you use ai it will use all of the worlds compute power to try to convince you it's correct even when it's not.

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

#74

Post by FrustratedMonky »

Is this about AI?

1. If I feed the exact same image in, it does not deterministically give me the exact same result every time.

2. Or is this about calories, because even if a package label says "200 Calories", if you were to measure every package, each one would all be different. 198,199,200,201,202. Plus/Minus a pretty big range.

>>> answered own question. " It’s the same photo, the same model, the same question. But you won’t get the same answer"

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

#77

Post by ge96 »

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.

I was thinking at least if you had an advanced phone with lidar like iPhones can get volume but yeah the hidden/inner mass is a problem plus the oil as mentioned

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

#78

Post by swalsh »

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…

It amazes me how much people try to build AI systems relying on nothing more than the models knowledge. I suspect a great deal of "failed" AI experiments we keep reading are people just not having any idea how to use AI at what its good at.

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

#79

Post by the_duke »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #55
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 someone who used to do this. OpenAI models refuse to look up calories unless you explicitly tell them to and even then it is a hit and miss even if you tell them exactly what the product is. Easiest way to get good calculation is to just take a photo of the nutrition label or feed that info in by hand. Funny thing is 4o did look up calories but I guess it was too good for this world

I exclusively use thinking mode, which is slower but much more likely to double-check things with web search etc.

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

#80

Post by embedding-shape »

> 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 very common misconception that "same question gets same answer" would be true, when it's almost by accident you get the same answer for the same question. The part that people expect this, is the problem, as most platforms are not built to provide that experience. Of course you'd get different responses, it's on purpose!

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