But I don't see them using those commercial services in this study - instead, they're using frontier model companies? Is Gemini advertising that you get a realistic calorie count from a picture? Maybe so - in which case i'd take it back!
Are commercial services anything more than just UI facades on top of frontier model APIs?
The commercial services likely also have frontier model dependencies...
The opening to the actual paper is quite explicit that (i) other studies have already tested commercial apps with with unimpressive results and (ii) a popular open source app for carb counting directly relies on API calls from these frontier models, and this research batch tested the images used the exact same models and prompts as the popular open source app.