If so then what a colossal waste of our planetary carbon budget. I don't know what the backend on this app is (maybe it was done properly i really hope so) but surely there is a solution which maintains or surpasses the accuracy of an LLM and uses <1% of the compute resources.

Like a small vision model combined with the size/measurements data from the AR sensors modern phones come with and an open source caloric values database should achieve the 90% accuracy they are claiming.

Ronald Wright writes about "progress traps" in A Short History of Progress. It's been awhile since I read that but I think about it more and more these days with AI products on the rise.