logoalt Hacker News

daharttoday at 1:55 PM1 replyview on HN

And what’s the variance & accuracy of their responses? Isn’t comparing the models’ variance to baseline human variance what matters here? It seems like they didn’t do that, and I agree with parent’s call for that kind of baseline.

Having counted calories for years, I don’t think I could reliably estimate the calories or carbs in the example picture of a cheese sandwich. I can make assumptions about the bread and the cheese, but I might easily be off by 2-3x. Calorie counting apps that use text descriptions also have huge variance for the same thing. The problem might be the belief that a picture or description is enough, regardless of who or what is guessing…?

Edit: Ah, I see from sibling thread you meant commercial services are LLMs, I thought you meant there were human-backed services to compare to. Anyway, I totally agree there’s a problem if people rely on AI for safety, but I’m not sure LLMs are the core issue here, it seems like using vague information and guessing is the core issue.


Replies

swiftcodertoday at 2:18 PM

> Isn’t comparing the models’ variance to baseline human variance what matters here?

You seem to be missing the context that this isn't just about diet apps - this is about apps claiming to be able to track carbs sufficiently accurately to be used in a medical context to dose insulin (a substance which can be lethal if incorrectly dosed)

show 1 reply