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

There are very popular apps on the App Store right now that are going viral among non-techie people that do exactly this, and they have no concept of how AI works. My wife was talking about one and I had to give her a reality check that the AI had no idea what ingredients were used to make the food. And she's a licensed nutritionalist.

Studies like this create something to point at for people who are confused and serve as a springboard for a conversation in the media.

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 below for the 20% figure, as well as their experimental results on real food items (some even exceeded this threshold though most were within it). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3605747/?st_source=...

It's more a data-driven pub test, I think it explains itself well.

The question is - are those apps actually so simplistic? Or is this a strawman.

Had the author written the article themselves rather than an LLM their motivation probably would have been clearer.

> 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

The article explains this: There are apps targeting people with diabetes that claim to count your carbs with AI.

> If you’re using AI carb counting in a diabetes app

Before you dismiss a study, try to understand where it’s coming from.

The authors of the study weren’t stupid. They knew the LLMs would provide poor results. They ran the study to quantify it and create a resource to spread the information in response to the rise of AI carb counting apps.

If there are commercial services where you take pictures of food and are promised a realistic (paid for) response, then yes. And there are.

Funny thing is 4o did look up calories but I guess it was too good for this world

  - AI will solve all of our problems 
  - No not like that!

So we’re trying to define, through trial and error, what problems “AI” will actually solve, and this paper is one of the many cobblestones on that road.

I would occasionally check the estimates, maybe once every few days for meals I wasn't already pretty sure of, and it was generally accurate. Where it was extremely inaccurate was on portions, and anyone who has dealt with computer vision could tell you, you can't get scale from a picture. So I'd have to weigh some meals or ingredients, which would generally make things more accurate again.

So, I think it's possible, but you need multimodal data and grounded with regular checks.

Reminds me of that one youtube video (I forget who it is so I have no idea how to pull it up) where he turns on the camera on his phone for ChatGPT and asks it what everything it sees weighs, then puts it on a scale, and ChatGPT was never right, ever, which makes sense, I couldnt tell you what most things weigh on sight alone either, but ChatGPT often got it dramatically off. I got the feeling he thought it was terrible AI for this, but I don't think a model looking at an image of something and trying to guess its weight / calories / etc... is a reason to call an AI model bad...

It also exemplifies how current AI offerings are still quite limited in their capabilities, because one would expect that they’d do the intelligent thing on their own that you had expected, instead of the user having to come up with a working methodology.

This is a problem with the companies selling the AI models, not the customers. It is their responsibility to inform consumers about the limits of their services, and to train the models to say "I don't know, there is not enough information".

There are dozens of ios/android apps with 100-300k+ ratings and god knows how many millions of installs which do exactly this

"Cal AI - Food Calorie Tracker: Just snap a photo and our smart AI calorie tracker analyzes your meal instantly."

308k ratings on ios, 264k ratings on androids easily 5-10m installs across both platforms.

You say this (and I agree), but I know of quite a few companies in this area, including a couple accelerated by YCombinator, and that's pretty much 100% of what they do in their backend.

If you are counting calories, you don't want the answer to "how many calories are in the average avocado?", you want to know how many calories are in this avocado. Remember that bodyweight is roughly linear with BMR, so a 10% error in calorie counting is an extra 10% of bodyweight.

There is a shocking amount of Computer Vision tasks where the scientists claim you can get X info from a picture of Y and it's like, even with ML/AI you can't extract data where there isn't any. The fact I can add an arbritrary amount of high-calorie fat to a meal without changing the appearance by defintion shows it's pointless. A 1000 calorie and 100 calorie milkshake can look identical, and you'd have no way of working that out via an image even if it was a super-intelligent system.

Similarly I see it in things like extracting material of an object from an image of it in serious research papers, which for the same reason cannot be done, since how an object looks has very little to do with what its made of, else painting and other art would clearly be impossible. The information is just not there within the data.

I laughed, but you nailed it. Sadly so many people lack even basic understanding of LLMs and the ViT tower that makes it vLLM, that I expect a whole industry, similar to fortune telling, to emerge out of it.

Oh! Do the vendors offer trainings to make sure the users understand how LLMs work? If not, surely, the LLM itself is trained to know its limitations and politely decline in situations like that?...

The #1 use case for this tech is "here's a problem I don't feel like solving, let's have a computer do magic". It's how it's advertised on TV, it's how it promoted in the software I already use. Food preparation? Travel planning? Shopping? Tutoring your children? You can do anything now!

I just talked to a realtor who will make a killing on a real estate transaction. Instead of offering human insights, they sent me "AI reviews" of several properties. The AI has never been to any of these properties and has no idea how they actually look like. But I guess it's how we operate now as a society.

If you go to eBay, every other listing description for used items is AI-generated. This is an official platform feature for sellers. The AI doesn't know the condition of the item or what's included or missing. Doesn't matter, it's magic. It's AGI, it will figure it out.

Most of the uses of AI I encounter as a consumer are like that, and the companies selling this tech are 100% complicit.

Outside our tech-enabled bubble, there are folks who have been sold the idea that ChatGPT et al is a miracle worker capable of replacing dieticians, gym coaches, psychologists, etc.

So it's VERY plausible to believe that there are folks out there snapping pics of their meals and asking GPT to spit out nutritional values.

This is because the people who promote these technologies, and the companies that sell these technologies, engage in a massive amount of puffery (aka hyperbolizing aka just straight telling lies).

These technologies are painted as the magical solution to whatever problem you have (all it costs you is a few tens of thousands of tokens, aka your water supply). There is literally nothing they CAN'T do if you will just let us build these gigantic small town destroying, noise polluting, water and electricity hungry 'AI data-centers'. So that we can use those datacenters to sell you more tokens to put into their slot machines.

The aim of the study was to understand the variation in results returned by models and how that could cause risks for patients using those models. The main result was measuring within-model variation.

From the pre-print (https://www.diabettech.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/diabet...):

We aimed to characterise the within-image reproducibility of carbohydrate estimates from four large language model (LLM) vision APIs and to quantify the clinical risk for insulin dosing, stratifying accuracy by reference value quality.

Methods

Thirteen food photographs were each submitted 495–561 times to four LLM vision APIs (GPT-5.4, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview) using an identical structured prompt adapted from the iAPS automated insulin delivery system (26,904 total queries, temperature 0.01). The primary outcome was within- image variation (coefficient of variation [CV], range, distributional normality). Secondary outcomes included accuracy against reference values for nine images, stratified by quality tier (packet label, weighed/measured, portioned, or visual estimate). Clinical risk was translated at an insulin-to-carbohydrate ratio of 1:10.

>> I'd like to see this study done using any kind of actual grounding knowledge, seeing what mistakes AI makes when attempting to query ground truth from picture analysis - there would at least be an interesting result methodology in that

The ground truth was established by the author. There's an appendix in the pre-print (Appendix I) that describes the methodology. Methods are described in page 4 of the pre-print:

Reference values for accuracy analysis

For nine of the thirteen images, the author estimated the carbohydrate content using methods described in Appendix 1. Reference quality was categorised into four tiers:

Tier 1 (packet label): Carbohydrate values derived from manufacturer nutrition labelling. Two images (cheese sandwich, soup with bread) used bread with labelled carbohydrate content of 20 g per slice.

Tier 2 (weighed/measured): Portions directly weighed and cross-referenced with established composition data. Three images (Bakewell tart, bakery cookie, breakfast burrito).

Tier 3 (portioned): Portions estimated by the author (not weighed) and combined with USDA composition data. Three images (roast dinner, chilli con carne with rice, stuffed pork loin).

Tier 4 (visual estimate): Portions and composition estimated from visual inspection. One image (churros).

For the four restaurant dishes (pizza capricciosa, eggs benedict, crema catalana, paella), no reference value was established. These images were used for the primary reproducibility analysis only.

Carbohydrate values follow the EU convention with dietary fibre excluded.

The public's education comes from the incessant marketing from AI companies that their models are the panacea for everything.

If someone sent me a picture of a meal and asked me what the macros were or how many carbs this is, I would say "I can't tell from a photo. Nobody can". The problem is that current LLM chatbots don't seem to have a concept of telling you "I don't know", "you can't do that" or even "you're wrong".

You can say that somebody shouldn't trust an LLM for this but it's going to be a problem that LLMs give nonsencial answers. What I find particularly amusing is that there are still technical people (generally, not anyone specifically) who seem unable to acknowledge that LLMs hallucinate and lie.

There was a post on here recently that I couldn't find with some quick searching but the premise basically was that chatbots were trained like neurotypical people: A lot of affirmation and basically lying. Separately someone else characterized this NT style of communication as "tone poems" [1]. I keep thinking about that because to me that's so accurate.

Dunning-Kruger is a common refrain on HN, for good reason. Another way to put this is how often people are confidently wrong. I really wonder if this is an inevitable consequence of NT communication because most neurodivergent ("ND") people I know are incredibly intentional in what they say and mean.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47832952

If I ask the AI about some health issue, it says something along the lines of warning I'm not a doctor etc. So if I show it a picture and ask it to tell me the carbs, how about a warning telling me it can try, but that it probably wont be very accurate.

We've been seeing examples of this constantly since 2022. How many more do we need?

They absolutely won't be 100% correct (bread sizes e.g. are going to be an estimate), but unless it's a trick sandwich drenched in olive oil or with hollow cheese, they're probably going to be in the right ballpark.

I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility for an LLM to be in the right ballpark as well, but that doesn't seem to be where we're at now.

That said, it's notable that diabetes education materials often suggest estimating glycemic loads by rough portion size / plate ratios. Which is to say that absent accurate weight measurements (themselves subject to variations in ingredients, moisture levels, etc.) current clinical recommendations are themselves pretty rough.

It could be much different -- it could one of those breads with weird macros, or fake cheese, or it could be hollowed out and packed full of hidden vegetables. But a human is going to give you the answer for two slices of plain white bread.

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.

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.

Many of the comments here assume the authors are stupid and were surprised by the result, but the point of the article is to inform readers that AI carb counting apps don’t work. That’s why they did the study.

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.

Not “Here’s a random guess that I just pulled out of my ass.”

LLMs have picked up the bad habit of trying to give an answer when no answer can be given from scientists, who overall don’t say “I don’t know” nearly as often as they should.

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

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.

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...)

Cal AI, which claims to generate a nutritional breakdown based off a photo, has $30 million in annual recurring revenue.

As far as consumers know, LLMs can identify the towns pictures were taken (without metadata), can summarize entire movies, generate clips of your kid flying a rocket to the moon, can translate images from any language imaginable, but somehow they cannot estimate the calories in a cheese sandwich.

The supposed professional posting about an LLM deleting their prod database for their non-existent company asked the AI to explain itself. That's the level of LLM knowledge you should expect from most people that actually work with these tools.

Truth is the LLM is good at making intelligent decisions. But in order to make intelligent decision, you need context.

If you give proper context -> ask the LLM -> get almost perfect result every time.

Anything else is rolling dice, a very special type of dice, but dice anyhow. Not magic.

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?

But does training llms to be better at this, improves their world model or does it only make changes at the surface?

They are surprised and upset when the Oracle is not perfect

Go ahead and search around on hacker news you’ll see precisely the same pattern with people who are ostensibly engineers and hackers

It’s actually pretty mind boggling but then again humans never fail to surprise and disappoint

Some people have a very poor understanding of what LLMs are good for. Some people do see them as magic oracles.

Well firstly the average IQ is 100. And also because people market products to consumers that claim to be able to count carbs from images. If you don't know the limitations of LLMs then there would be little reason to doubt it for an uniformed or below average intelligence person, of which there are hundreds of millions.

They are both covered by burned sugar and therefore indistinguishable(!) visually.

Seems that in this case a traditional approach would be more precise and more environmentally efficient to get to the same results.

There is already a solution to this that would be very hard to beat (and one can choose to use or not use an LLM to assist): prepare food yourself and use the information provided by the manufacturer.

i'd be ok with it if i was generating a picture of X, or some word salad about Y, but not for code. Never for code.

We should not allow companies to lie blatantly to the customers.

Edit: r/blame/lie/

Also, if LLMs worked as they are often advertised, they should have easily been able to answer "there isn't enough information in this picture to give you an accurate estimate. Try taking a picture of the label, or at least of the inside of the sandwich, or list the ingredients used".

Why assume trick ingredients?