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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

#91

Post by beached_whale »

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.

From personal experience, one can get practically close guessing such that the error isn't going to be more significant compared to the errors in insulin to carb ratios/sensitivity factors/...

I am pretty good at this and the cheese sandwich example threw me, I would have estimated around 10-15g of carb for each slice. So the 28g is fairly consistent with that, not 40g. The only real way would be to weigh it and use the labeling. Another thing that often gets people is the labeling often has a serving size of say 2 slices and a weight that does not reflect the actual weight of 2 slices.

Luckily with good tools the significance is reduced, people using closed loop insulin pumps will automatically correct for that. Lots more room to wiggle.

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

#92

Post by throwaw12 »

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 feel like you didn't understand the goal of this study

> The DTN-UK stated earlier this year that generic LLMs must never be used as autonomous advisory calculators for insulin delivery. This data is the quantitative evidence base for that statement.

This study is to prove that you should not rely on LLMs

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

#93

Post by 827a »

To be fair, if you ask 10 people to eat visually identical food 10 times each, then magically measure the calories consumed by each individual, you'd probably get ~70 different values. The internal density of food is extremely difficult to reason about from the outside. The personal variance is also difficult to reason about.

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

#94

Post by drtz »

kioleanu wrote: post #21
rsynnott wrote: post #2

I am... unsure why anyone would think LLMs would be able to do this. They are not magic oracles. Like I think even most humans would be extremely bad at this. Like, are people actually using LLMs for this? Please do not, it won't work.

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.

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

#95

Post by kdheiwns »

rsynnott wrote: post #2

I am... unsure why anyone would think LLMs would be able to do this. They are not magic oracles. Like I think even most humans would be extremely bad at this. Like, are people actually using LLMs for this? Please do not, it won't work.

They're marketed as AI. AI has a long standing image built up by movies and other media of being some omniscient computer capable of analyzing the world. These AI companies are very aware of this and leverage it.

And a person with sufficient knowledge could easily give a rough estimate of the calories. A slice of store bought sandwich bread of a given thickness generally has calories within a certain range. So do cheese slices. It's elementary school health class material. We all learn how to calculate calories in a meal. Packaging on food also always has calories, so clearly people know how to estimate it fairly accurately.

If a fifth grader can calculate it but an AI can't, that says a lot about how bad these AIs are. We'll get another series of paid and bought articles saying "AI analyzed IMPOSSIBLE math problem beyond human comprehension and solved it with FACTS and LOGIC", while at the same time being told "bro no you can't expect an ai to calculate calories in a sandwich bro that's impossible bro if you even try that then you're insane for even thinking ai should be used that way bro". These companies need to decide: is AI smart enough to solve hard questions, or is it too useless to calculate something any kid could do by googling calories in a slice of bread and doing some basic arithmetic?

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

#96

Post by tcoff91 »

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.

The data entry is a pain in the ass with those apps when cooking food from scratch. It’s much much easier with LLMs and natural language and voice mode and pictures of a food scale and things like that.

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

#97

Post by Brendinooo »

furyofantares wrote: post #87
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…

From the text of the article I believe the author is implying there are apps doing exactly this, and so this is why it was studied that way. Had the author written the article themselves rather than an LLM their motivation probably would have been clearer.

> there are apps doing exactly this

Yeah, for sure there are. And people will just ask ChatGPT as well.

The funny thing is that for people who are just trying to lose weight without managing any health issues precisely, this type of extreme variance doesn't really matter, because the mere act of consciously quantifying food consumption is, based on my experience counting calories, the single biggest factor in success with weight loss.

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

#98

Post by ozbonus »

Before the next galaxy brain shows us all how smart and witty they are by adding the nth sarcastic comment about how obvious this result is, I hope they'll take a moment to consider a few things.

Yes, people are using LLMs for this kid of thing. Lots of people. All the time. I've met plenty of them and there loads of apps that offer this kind of "service". The authors are well aware that people are doing this and probably anticipated the result.

Why do the study at all? Because it's important to demonstrate and measure things, even obvious ones. Because it's not obvious to everyone, like the people who are already consulting LLMs for dietary information to manage their health. Because it's easier to enact official policies when there's hard evidence.

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

#99

Post by jihadjihad »

rsynnott wrote: post #2

I am... unsure why anyone would think LLMs would be able to do this. They are not magic oracles. Like I think even most humans would be extremely bad at this. Like, are people actually using LLMs for this? Please do not, it won't work.

> They are not magic oracles.

I came across a LinkedIn post a couple days ago where someone had asked ChatGPT, "What are the top things you get asked about $NICHE_INDUSTRY_THING_I_AM_SELLING?"

As if there is introspection like that at the meta level, where ChatGPT could actually provide hard numbers around its own usage and request patterns.

The fact that these products work with natural language beguiles people into thinking they are, indeed, magic oracles.

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

#100

Post by pjc50 »

rsynnott wrote: post #2

I am... unsure why anyone would think LLMs would be able to do this. They are not magic oracles. Like I think even most humans would be extremely bad at this. Like, are people actually using LLMs for this? Please do not, it won't work.

> They are not magic oracles.

Anthropic's trillion dollar valuation hinges on the idea that it is just that, a magic oracle that can replace any worker for any type of task. Any programmer, any author, any musician, any kind of clerical work. All we've asked here is "sudo evaluate me a sandwich", the sort of estimation task that humans with internet resources might reasonably be expected to do, and it's given up?

(It would be fun to compare this to sending the picture out on Mechanical Turk and asking humans to eyeball the calorie count of said sandwich...)

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