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Comment by octotep

7 days ago

Overall, very cool and seriously much needed! How does the micronutrient estimation work? Or is that part of the secret sauce?

I was looking at this page: https://www.opennutrition.app/search/original-shells-cheese-... and saw the amino acid, vitamin, and mineral sections; there are many things listed which aren't covered by the official nutritional data. These entries also have very precise numbers but I'm not sure where and how they're derived and if I could put any serious weight in them. I'd love to hear more if you're willing to share!

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.

You can read about the background on how I did them in more detail in the about/methodology section: https://www.opennutrition.app/about (see "Technical Approach")

  • You need to add a disclaimer for this data. People could rely on them being accurate, and you simply can't prove they are.

    • There is a large disclaimer that states, among other things, "We strive to ensure accuracy and quality using authoritative sources and AI-based validation; however, we make no guarantees regarding completeness, accuracy, or timeliness. Always confirm nutritional data independently when accuracy is critical." on every page on the website where that kind of in-depth data is available.

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