Posted by PaulHoule 4/3/2025
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?
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.
I'm Polish, here the only thing that matters is your final test scores, and nothing else. And I think it's same in the most of Europe and Asia too, right?
My impression is that American unis care way more about social aspect and so on, which I don't understand (but I guess it's a fine way of looking at things, too.)
It's true that this model is more fair, and that's good, but it still feels wrong. There are way too many professions where you're de-facto locked out if you didn't get the right credentials at the right age, regardless of your practical skills. That results in us putting teenagers through these absurd trials for no real reason.
The only thing that distinguishes applicants is the soft social stuff.
Japan and South Korea kind of fixed this problem with cram schools and ridiculously overtuned college admission exams. But e.g. KAIST isn’t really comparable to MIT.
Or is it that way because of some other factors? I was thinking how much of this is because of historical factors; I assume in times before standarised exams it would be a very convinient way of finding new students. But then, I don't know how it was historically in Europe/Asia.
The tests need to be harder, but people would complain.
I didn't study for the ACT at all (literally went in without knowing anything about it) and got a 35. It's a trivial exam.
I got a 1040 on the SAT in the 5th grade. The average score is useless for gauging how hard these exams are.
Bragging how you got a 34 on the ACT or 1450+ on the SAT for an elite college is like bragging about clubbing a seal
Bar making exams harder, the only other way is subjective methods. I detest subjective methods, but making exams harder is very unpopular
When you are locked in and have the grindset there is nothing else.
I would agree, talking about actual human stuff related to an actually interesting topic was a wasted oportunity. Nobody actually cares what the numbers on the app are, least of all admissions officers.
Average is quite a bit above the floor though, so that just makes it sound like he should have been accepted.
The question you need to be asking is how the university system made an enemy out of someone who is clearly one of the most talented members of his age cohort in the nation. That's a failure no matter how hard you try to explain or justify the status quo. It's time for some real accountability and soul searching from the system, not excuses. Trying to nit pick the essay and pointing out how he should have done X or Y instead is completely missing the point.
I can't understand why the admissions officers would rather read an essay about a kid who volunteered at an animal shelter or something. Anyone can do that.
Joe, a regular guy: Makes $120k at his desk job
Joe, the businessman: Made $20k in 32 days, $228k ARR
Joe, who launched 5 months into development and did 60k in the first 2 weeks: $1.5M ARR
In all three of these examples, Joe's financial outcome is the same. This business does not have any longevity, and all of its revenue is from converting paid advertising of various kinds. It's still impressive, but is most likely a >10x exaggeration on even the lifetime revenue he makes from this. Which is of course circular, because the reason he's doing all this is to make a business out of monetising the audience of people who want to make money.
All of this is clever social climbing, but is clever social climbing the thing that should be rewarded by colleges?
The app is fake - at best its puffery, and the essay was littered with grammatical errors.
I’m also quite sure letters matter for undergraduate admissions. They certainly do at the graduate level.
Yeah. That's how it works. When you do community building and participate in activities in addition to "the grind", people like you more.
This doesn't just apply to academia.
Unlikely
My conclusion is that while AI is excellent for augmenting your tracking experience, it's not yet reliable enough to be the sole tracking method. Consistency is key to successful food tracking, and AI can certainly help users avoid the common issue of missing a meal and losing momentum. However, inaccuracies, like consistently being off by 100-200 calories per day, can significantly impact results, especially for those on lower-calorie diets (like 1,200-1,500 calories/day, which is common for many women due to their physical size).
With FitBee I landed on communicating to the user that these are estimates and you probably shouldn't use it as your primary method of tracking calories.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fitbee-calorie-macro-counter/i...
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.
You cannot differentiate a high calorie meal from a low calorie meal on sight alone.
The waste is selling a lie, enabled by AI bullshit artists and the public's seeming inability to understand that the US has no legal (or market most of the time) requirements to be truthful, upfront, or honest in marketing.
Like people just take this shit at face value and I don't understand how you can live in the US for more than a few years and not recognize that marketing is just lies, like not even smart or clever lies.
App Quality and Luck are not the only two factors that go into App Success.
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...
If you want to derive any benefit from doing this you should really be trying to get your numbers correct from the start. I wouldn't leave that to a LLM.
If I could, I am not sure that I would. This app seems actively harmful. I don't think it can actually do what it claims to do, and that's going to cause real people problems.
It's unfortunate that that disqualifies me from making that kind of money. It's unfortunate that they are allowed to do so.
> 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.
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. ;)
No, it isn't, because it can never work. It is, in general, impossible to determine the calorie content of food by looking at a picture of it.
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.
The $2m figure is unverified but, even if it was, turnover is meaningless without knowing their expenses. If they're burning through £2.1m in LLM compute and marketing then they're losing money.
Plus, the guy seems like a dick so I'm taking his story with an enormous pinch of salt.
It seems we're at a point where this obligatory xkcd [1] is no longer true.
Are you eating a 10% calorie deficit or a 10% calorie surplus? Cal AI can't tell you.
Not possible to know accurately enough from a picture. Potentially ever.
But I tried one of these apps years ago and it went a step further than photos. It used the front facing camera on iPhones to build a 3d model of the food and measure its volume as well. Even that was off by more up to 50% not 10%.
The interesting thing I found, and it’s obvious when you read it but not when you’re trying to diet, is if you don’t layer food on top of itself or other food, you (and a camera based calorie counter) will have a much better understanding of how much you’re eating. Bowls / mounds of food will deceive you.
Standard for cutting is about 500 calories deficit, for 1lbs lost a week. Lets say 2500 calories daily standard. That's 20%. If food packaging was off by 30%, food nutrition planning would be worthless, but we know it isn't because we see fairly consistent results from weightlifters (assuming they're actually weighing their food and not eyeballing/using a PoS app like this)
Maybe there's something where they're off by 30%, but how many people even track how much vitamin D they get from food?