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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

I saw this on X/Twitter. I do not believe that human cooking, and all of its techniques and ingredients and the various ways that things can be prepared in different cultural contexts can be compressed in to 2 megabytes.

It is sort of like saying here is a 1GB model that can do tool calling and coding and then you try it out and it barely functions. Yes, it technically is a 1GB coding model, but it isn't a good one.

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The space of palatable human food is small. There are only a few thousand ingredients and a few thousand preparation techniques. This could easily be compressed at high fidelity into a model.

Citations needed

Less than 7 thousand ingredients [1]. Even if you think it's way more than that on account of underrepresented cultures (which does not seem to be the case), it's still just a few thousand. Most cuisines use around 50 of them.

[1] https://flowingdata.com/2018/09/18/cuisine-ingredients/

Total number of techniques should be in the hundreds (not thousands), to be generous, even accounting for historical / prehistorical techniques.

I say prove it. If it was a coding bot we would see some metrics on how it did. Have this thing produce a bunch of on demand recipes and judge it against human chefs. Have the people preparing the food cook according to its descriptions faithfully as either robots or non-cooking people so that their knowledge doesn't leak into the preparation. And then let's judge those recipes.

IF you need experienced culturally knowledgeable chefs to prepare the food for it to work, then you haven't encoded all the techniques, just crib notes.

There are only a “few thousand ingredients” seems like orders of magnitude off

I'm sorry to repeat myself but this bothers me because this is my specialization.

There are less than 7 thousand ingredients [1]. Even if you think it's way more than that on account of underrepresented cultures (which does not seem to be the case in this particular study), it's still just a few thousand. Most cuisines use around 50 of them.

[1] https://flowingdata.com/2018/09/18/cuisine-ingredients/

The total number of cooking techniques should be in the hundreds (not thousands), to be generous, even accounting for historical / prehistorical techniques.

So yeah, this checks out.

I suppose it depends on what you count as an ingredient, even still it's greater than 7 thousand. I'm not sure what you mean by it's "your specialization" so I'm happy to hear what you could elaborate on, but I'm a bit stumped. Almost any given state in southern Mexico or any of the tropical latin American countries has thousands of ingredients from native herbs, leafy greens, chiles, spices, bugs, sea life, mammals, snakes and lizards, birds, ferments, mushrooms and fungus, tree barks, seeds, milks, any number of vegetables and fruits. Even an animal has non "meat" ingredients like blood, rennet and bile, bone marrow, do you count brains and intestines and offal here? I can't imagine where you're getting this less than 7 thousand number nor your confidence about it to be honest.

Few thousand? Really? Larousse Gastronomique is 3600 pages, averaging maybe 1 recipe and 1 ingredient per page - and that's just classic French cooking.

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