> The concept is simple: Take a picture of the food you are about to consume, and let the app log calories and macros for you.
> The result is an app that the creators say is 90% accurate, which appears to be good enough for many dieters.
It absolutely cannot be "90% accurate". But I'm sure it seems "90% plausible" to its millions of users.
Incredible that a product like this can exist. Do people just will the fiction into reality?
Incredibly, these are the types of app ideas you'd hear from non-tech "entrepreneurs" in 2012 looking for a co-founder. The problem being, the engineers knew it was impossible. You could fake it I guess by asking Google to search for "similar photos" and getting a plausible calorie count half the time. But the users wouldn't believe it.
We're now at the phase where any impossible idea can be fully marketable by slapping "AI" in the name. ChatGPT feels so magical that we now believe unicorns really do exist.
Just read the Google Play reviews, the app still has a long way to go to be usable.
But it's still a great idea.
Also, they should calculate both the calories and power requirements for each meal analyzed. What I mean is, it should says something like: this burger has 800 kcal and the analysis consumed 1kw of datacenter power. ;)
kw is an instantaneous measurement. Energy usage would be kWh (kilowatt-hours). Considering it would take a tiny fraction of a server’s compute for less than a second this would be very small.
It has $2m revenue, so it's clearly a great idea (at this stage?) financially and 'people love it' (30% retention)
Technically it's a garbage idea, and I'd say they could get class-actioned without good T&Cs. It's literally impossible to determine the sugar and fat content of a meal.
I'd never make it for the latter reason, however you clearly need to believe in the former to make it big haha.
He should have just written #BLACKLIVESMATTER 100 times, because that's apparently all it takes to get into Stanford. Honestly though college essays are a bit of a joke, reviewing hundreds of them sounds like torture. The lack of rigor is probably the point though, since it gives the admissions process flexibility to ensure that legacy students get in and they meet their DEI targets.
My reasoning for evaluating the relevancy of this app:
1. If the food being scanned has a nutrition label, I don't need this app.
2. If there's no nutrition label, the app can't possibly extrapolate the nutritional information. It can't estimate portion size or the ingredients in the recipe.
3. If the app can't extrapolate nutritional information, I don't need this app.
>But he looked around. “We were surrounded by people that were in their late 20s or 30s all day. And I realized that if I didn’t go to college, this is what life would be like.”
Lol, I can relate. I started working in an office when I was 16, now 24, and regretting wasting my youth grinding when I could have been having fun in a period of your life you only get to experience once.
Don't grow up too fast kids. Make stupid decisions and ride out your youth as long as you can afford to.
I understand the scepticism here. For sure this app isn’t 90% accurate in any traditional sense.
One note, as someone who also built a calorie tracking app with ai as well as lost a good amount of weight with it: accuracy for calorie tracking doesn’t matter. You can honestly just detect if it’s a meal and return 600 cals. For most people the simple fact that they become aware of what they eat and think about their food in an ongoing basis will lead them to loose Weight.
Sticking to it is the hard part.
It matters a lot if you have specific macro goals. If you don’t want to lose muscle, it is important to eat high protein especially during a cut. And keeping fat and/or carbs low while doing this is quite difficult without accurate data.
I'm a college admissions consultant, and this doesn't surprise me at all. People don't realize how competitive the landscape has become. His test scores and GPA are average at the schools he applied to. Really you'd need to know how many APs he took and his AP scores to understand how colleges will treat his academic record.
To me, his college list indicates that he was mostly prestige hunting. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but colleges can tell when a student wants to attend based just on branding. It comes across as if he wants to use college as a resume booster rather than as a place to grow.
The essay reads as a list of accomplishments, with little self-reflection. (Side note: referencing Steve Jobs is way overdone.)
Long story short, college admissions is not a VC pitch. If I had been this guy's advisor, I would have recommended he write an essay about something not related to Cal AI. Colleges will already know about the app from his activities list (and resume and, presumably, recommendation letters). There's a huge missed opportunity for him to write about something else.
The essays that worked for my students this year were often about more mundane topics that gave insight into their character. One of my favorites was from a student who started giving free haircuts to classmates. The essay implicitly shows that he's thoughtful and well-liked—someone you'd definitely want in your college community.
If he absolutely insisted on writing about Cal AI, I would have recommended that he write more about why he was inspired to build it and the human impact. Instead, he just rattled off metrics that admissions officers will likely know from other places in his app.
Surely this sort of thing happens all the time? Not to excuse it, but I really don't think any of those rejections was intended to be the personal attack he thinks it is.
The app sucks, there’s no reason to use it when myfitnesspal is just leagues better. You can poison it and it will just follow the instructions as well.
A friend of mine build a similar app last year (https://joineat.app) and it didn't go anywhere (even though it is objectively the nicer app). So there's a lot of luck involved here as well (or maybe he was too early).
For your friends app, I had to go into the app store and then expand the description to view the key features, where it is mentioned that it uses AI similarly as Cal AI. Just based off the initial images of Eat compared to Cal AI, then it's much more clear what Cal AI does compared to yours (besides plastering AI everywhere).
Another thing I noticed is that I saw a random guy on instagram with a rather big following being sponsored by Cal AI. Maybe your friend was unsuccessful in getting his app out there? Although I agree that luck will always play a role, but if the public don't understand what your app immediately does and they believe AI to be pure magic, then sprinkling that everywhere will get something like Cal AI flying.
I still think it is shit from a technical perspective in terms of the validity of amount of calories from a single image and nothing else. But it seems like that's not what people want, inherently because they are lazy. Actually counting calories is much harder long term. If regular people now think that this is magically replacing this process by just snapping a picture of their processed meal, then I can see why it's successful. Although quite depressing...
Seems contradictory that there's a market for this since it requires the same individual to simultaneously be concerned about precisely measuring calories yet willing to pay for a method of doing so that's (probably) wildly inaccurate.
The comments from HNers in this case are interesting.
Usually if a teenage hacker builds something, the HNers would respond with enthusiasm, but then, this is a guy who builds *something* and *actually* makes a good business out of it, at the same time maintains his high school life, and all we have is skepticism and discouragement.
The obvious problem with this is how can it tell how large your meal is or how much butter you put in? I can see it working for fast/junk food, though.
When I learnt machine learning one of the things was continually training the model. Like your spam filter. You show it what is spam and eventually it learns. Is this stuff continually trained on the user's BMI? That's the only way to tell if a diet is working. Or is it just making absolute claims based on universal training data?
(1) That is the paradigm of classification, don't knock it, and
(2) I did some work on a pre-product startup that wanted to build something like this about 10 years ago, when visual recognition was much less developed.
> The concept is simple: Take a picture of the food you are about to consume, and let the app log calories and macros for you.
> The result is an app that the creators say is 90% accurate, which appears to be good enough for many dieters.
It absolutely cannot be "90% accurate". But I'm sure it seems "90% plausible" to its millions of users.
Incredible that a product like this can exist. Do people just will the fiction into reality?
Incredibly, these are the types of app ideas you'd hear from non-tech "entrepreneurs" in 2012 looking for a co-founder. The problem being, the engineers knew it was impossible. You could fake it I guess by asking Google to search for "similar photos" and getting a plausible calorie count half the time. But the users wouldn't believe it.
We're now at the phase where any impossible idea can be fully marketable by slapping "AI" in the name. ChatGPT feels so magical that we now believe unicorns really do exist.
Even the nutritional labels printed on packaging are only around 90% accurate. It’s all downhill from there.
Truth is so overrated these days.
Exactly! The are so many alternatives, why do we have to place THE truth so highly?
With AI being weaponized by anyone who wants to make a profit, what do you expect?
Just read the Google Play reviews, the app still has a long way to go to be usable.
But it's still a great idea.
Also, they should calculate both the calories and power requirements for each meal analyzed. What I mean is, it should says something like: this burger has 800 kcal and the analysis consumed 1kw of datacenter power. ;)
kw is an instantaneous measurement. Energy usage would be kWh (kilowatt-hours). Considering it would take a tiny fraction of a server’s compute for less than a second this would be very small.
>But it's still a great idea.
Define "great".
It has $2m revenue, so it's clearly a great idea (at this stage?) financially and 'people love it' (30% retention)
Technically it's a garbage idea, and I'd say they could get class-actioned without good T&Cs. It's literally impossible to determine the sugar and fat content of a meal.
I'd never make it for the latter reason, however you clearly need to believe in the former to make it big haha.
"In CS, it can be hard to explain the difference between the easy and the virtually impossible."
It seems we're at a point where this obligatory xkcd [1] is no longer true.
1. https://xkcd.com/1425/
It took a bit more than 5 years and a (single) research team, though.
Anything's possible if you're willing to fake it!
This is the guy who's been whining on X about not getting into elite colleges despite his essay being radioactively bad, right?
Yes, same guy. He wrote a list of all his accomplishments, whining about his college rejections. Painfully pretentious individual.
I fed his college essay into ChatGPT and it absolutely roasted him.
"Even if there’s a 1% chance I continue my rate of success, wouldn’t they want to take the risk of being able to use my name in the future?"
lol
"60% of the time it works every time!"
Not enough virtue signaled?
https://www.cnn.com/2017/04/05/us/stanford-application-black...
He's given a TEDx talk so I should listen to him, right?
Apparently he ended up going to Yale instead.
That guy walked the talk. It would be virtue signaling if any of us did it, but not him.
He should have just written #BLACKLIVESMATTER 100 times, because that's apparently all it takes to get into Stanford. Honestly though college essays are a bit of a joke, reviewing hundreds of them sounds like torture. The lack of rigor is probably the point though, since it gives the admissions process flexibility to ensure that legacy students get in and they meet their DEI targets.
My reasoning for evaluating the relevancy of this app:
1. If the food being scanned has a nutrition label, I don't need this app.
2. If there's no nutrition label, the app can't possibly extrapolate the nutritional information. It can't estimate portion size or the ingredients in the recipe.
3. If the app can't extrapolate nutritional information, I don't need this app.
4. I don't need this app.
“You can count calories and sugar content of the meal using just a camera”
“You can have a full self driving car with just a few cameras”
In a way both things are very much similar and the real accuracy is more of a fiction than reality.
>But he looked around. “We were surrounded by people that were in their late 20s or 30s all day. And I realized that if I didn’t go to college, this is what life would be like.”
Lol, I can relate. I started working in an office when I was 16, now 24, and regretting wasting my youth grinding when I could have been having fun in a period of your life you only get to experience once.
Don't grow up too fast kids. Make stupid decisions and ride out your youth as long as you can afford to.
I understand the scepticism here. For sure this app isn’t 90% accurate in any traditional sense.
One note, as someone who also built a calorie tracking app with ai as well as lost a good amount of weight with it: accuracy for calorie tracking doesn’t matter. You can honestly just detect if it’s a meal and return 600 cals. For most people the simple fact that they become aware of what they eat and think about their food in an ongoing basis will lead them to loose Weight. Sticking to it is the hard part.
It matters a lot if you have specific macro goals. If you don’t want to lose muscle, it is important to eat high protein especially during a cut. And keeping fat and/or carbs low while doing this is quite difficult without accurate data.
Not sure if it made it to hn, but the founder recently got rejected from a number of top universities, despite clear talent:
https://x.com/zach_yadegari/status/1906859987105636667
https://x.com/zach_yadegari/status/1906888487292559531
I'm a college admissions consultant, and this doesn't surprise me at all. People don't realize how competitive the landscape has become. His test scores and GPA are average at the schools he applied to. Really you'd need to know how many APs he took and his AP scores to understand how colleges will treat his academic record.
To me, his college list indicates that he was mostly prestige hunting. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but colleges can tell when a student wants to attend based just on branding. It comes across as if he wants to use college as a resume booster rather than as a place to grow.
The essay reads as a list of accomplishments, with little self-reflection. (Side note: referencing Steve Jobs is way overdone.)
Long story short, college admissions is not a VC pitch. If I had been this guy's advisor, I would have recommended he write an essay about something not related to Cal AI. Colleges will already know about the app from his activities list (and resume and, presumably, recommendation letters). There's a huge missed opportunity for him to write about something else.
The essays that worked for my students this year were often about more mundane topics that gave insight into their character. One of my favorites was from a student who started giving free haircuts to classmates. The essay implicitly shows that he's thoughtful and well-liked—someone you'd definitely want in your college community.
> huge missed opportunity for him to write about something else
When you are locked in and have the grindset there is nothing else.
If he absolutely insisted on writing about Cal AI, I would have recommended that he write more about why he was inspired to build it and the human impact. Instead, he just rattled off metrics that admissions officers will likely know from other places in his app.
> His test scores and GPA are average at the schools he applied to.
Average is quite a bit above the floor though, so that just makes it sound like he should have been accepted.
> $30M ARR biz
Unlikely
Probably pointed the Biz AI app at himself to get that estimate.
clear talent?
Surely this sort of thing happens all the time? Not to excuse it, but I really don't think any of those rejections was intended to be the personal attack he thinks it is.
The app sucks, there’s no reason to use it when myfitnesspal is just leagues better. You can poison it and it will just follow the instructions as well.
A friend of mine build a similar app last year (https://joineat.app) and it didn't go anywhere (even though it is objectively the nicer app). So there's a lot of luck involved here as well (or maybe he was too early).
For your friends app, I had to go into the app store and then expand the description to view the key features, where it is mentioned that it uses AI similarly as Cal AI. Just based off the initial images of Eat compared to Cal AI, then it's much more clear what Cal AI does compared to yours (besides plastering AI everywhere).
Another thing I noticed is that I saw a random guy on instagram with a rather big following being sponsored by Cal AI. Maybe your friend was unsuccessful in getting his app out there? Although I agree that luck will always play a role, but if the public don't understand what your app immediately does and they believe AI to be pure magic, then sprinkling that everywhere will get something like Cal AI flying.
I still think it is shit from a technical perspective in terms of the validity of amount of calories from a single image and nothing else. But it seems like that's not what people want, inherently because they are lazy. Actually counting calories is much harder long term. If regular people now think that this is magically replacing this process by just snapping a picture of their processed meal, then I can see why it's successful. Although quite depressing...
Seems contradictory that there's a market for this since it requires the same individual to simultaneously be concerned about precisely measuring calories yet willing to pay for a method of doing so that's (probably) wildly inaccurate.
The comments from HNers in this case are interesting.
Usually if a teenage hacker builds something, the HNers would respond with enthusiasm, but then, this is a guy who builds *something* and *actually* makes a good business out of it, at the same time maintains his high school life, and all we have is skepticism and discouragement.
The obvious problem with this is how can it tell how large your meal is or how much butter you put in? I can see it working for fast/junk food, though.
When I learnt machine learning one of the things was continually training the model. Like your spam filter. You show it what is spam and eventually it learns. Is this stuff continually trained on the user's BMI? That's the only way to tell if a diet is working. Or is it just making absolute claims based on universal training data?
two teenagers and a whole lot of LLMs
Hot | Not Hot Dog
(1) That is the paradigm of classification, don't knock it, and
(2) I did some work on a pre-product startup that wanted to build something like this about 10 years ago, when visual recognition was much less developed.
[flagged]
You must be joking.
He's probably AI himself