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Comment by rob | Hacker News Reader

Not really sure how the author thinks anybody who tracks their calories/macros seriously is going to trust a website that literally just makes up values for the vitamins, minerals, etc:

> TL;DR: They are estimates from giving an LLM (generally o3 mini high due to cost, some o1 preview) a large corpus of grounding data to reason over and asking it to use its general world knowledge to return estimates it was confident in, which, when escalating to better LLMs like o1-pro and manual verification, proved to be good enough that I thought they warranted release.

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That’s the best part! People don’t care and won’t check! They’ll just pay money!

Most of the data being close enough to be better than nothing and not actively harmful + a disclaimer and the author is absolved of all responsibility!

Even better, this will now be used in all sorts of other apps, analyses, and for training other LLMs! And I expect all those will also prominently include an “all of this was genereated by an LLM” disclamers. For sure.

Also https://world.openfoodfacts.org/ exists, and has an app with everything you'd need. And is just crowd sourcing nutrition labels and barcodes.

OpenFoodFacts is a huge inspiration to this project, obviously. However, as someone with a normal diet, OFF lacks:

1. Generic, non-branded foods

2. Simple prepared foods that ease food entry

3. Restaurant foods

4. Micronutrients beyond those reported by the brand.

OFF is a fantastic project but OpenNutrition is really trying to fit a different niche. OFF does what it does very well; I would never be able to use it to track my food intake.

Hi Josh: Pierre, Open Food Facts NGO co-founder. 1. Generic, non-branded foods & 2. Simple prepared foods that ease food entry: Those two could be solved in a deterministic way, and we'd be happy for a separate Open Food Facts hosted API endpoint (basically a small backend serving a combination of all national generic databases), or improvement to the core software 3. Restaurant foods - Open Prices (our effort to collect geo-located prices on products) could be an entry point to collect menus, and potentially estimate nutrition for food in restaurants, since we have support for products without barcode. 4. Micronutrients beyond those reported by the brand. - We have an issue to propose approximation of micro-nutrients from reputable database: https://github.com/openfoodfacts/openfoodfacts-server/issues...

We're happy to cover more use-cases, so feel free to join the project and contribute your time/coding skills to help us solve those issues. https://slack.openfoodfacts.org or https://forum.openfoodfacts.org or directly https://github.com/openfoodfacts

I have tracked my macro intake seriously for years and use the database every day, as do many folks who used the initial app releases. It's actually more valuable to me to have the data in this format, even estimated, because what happens with other apps is you get gaps in macronutrient reporting on things like Omega 3's, and you wonder 'Am I not eating any Omega 3's or does the database containing the food I ate just not include them?'. In that case I'd much rather have an LLM that had access to as much relevant data as I could feed it reason through approximate nutrient distribution and give me the best estimate it could.

Appreciate the feedback!

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