The dream

Could you please share your process for us mortals ?

You seem to have missed the point a bit

Because like every other app on smartphones it'll require an external server to do all of the processing

Yeah if your willing to carry a brick or at least a power bank (brick) if you don't want it to constantly overheat or deal with 2-3 hours of battery life. There's only so much copper can take and there are limits to minaturization.

I want some of whatever you have, man.

No. No AI is NOT the umbrella term for all of them.

No computer scientist will ever genuinely call basic algorithmic tasks "AI". Stop saying things you literally do not know.

We are not talking about what what the word means to normies colloquially. We're talking about what it actually means. The entire point it is a separate term from those other things.

Engineers would REALLY appreciate it if marketing morons would stop misapplying terminology just to make something sound cooler... NONE of those things are "AI". That's the fucking point. Marketing gimmicks should not get to choose our terms. (as much as they still do)

If I pull up to your house on a bicycle and tell you, "quickly, get in my vehicle so I can drive us to the store." You SHOULD look at that person weirdly: They're treating a bicycle like it's a car capable of getting on the freeway with passengers.

While this is true, I think of AI in the sci fi sense of a programmed machine intelligence rivaling human problem solving, communication, and opinion forming. Everything else to me is ML.

But like Turing thought, how can we really tell the difference

I like how you stole my comment and I’m downvoted.

You're right, but so is the previous poster. Actual AI doesn't exist yet, and when/if it does it's going to confuse the hell out of people who don't get the hype over something we've had for years.

But calling things like machine learning algorithms "AI" definitely isn't going away... we'll probably just end up making a new term for it when it actually becomes a thing... "Digital Intelligence" or something. /shrug.

I'm not fighting, I'm just disgusted. As someone's wise grandma once said, "[BoastfulDaedra], you are not the fuckface whisperer."

You're very wrong.

Computer vision is scanning the differentials of an image and determining the statistical likelihood of two three-dimensional objects being the same base mesh from a different angle, then making a boolean decision on it. It requires a database, not a neutral net, though sometimes they are used.

A neutral net is a tool used to compare an input sequence to previous reinforced sequences and determine a likely ideal output sequence based on its training. It can be applied, carefully, for computer vision. It usually actually isn't to any significant extent; we were identifying faces from camera footage back in the 90s with no such element in sight. Computer vision is about differential geometry.

Machine learning?

"Computer Science"

Are you subscribed to Existence Premium or just Basic?

In 977 years, a suicide booth will cost 25¢

You are (currently) more profitable alive than dead so... no, now get back to work!

Capitalism has brought about as many people to this world as any Vampires have.

I hope you're right. I don't think you're right, but i hope you're right.

Rolling this out for tools and parts at my work. Tool boxes with cameras in the drawers to make sure you put it back. Vending machines for parts with auto order.

Cameras and computer vision aren't necessary. Food products already come with upcs. All you need is a barcode reader to input stuff and to track what you use in meals. Tracking what you use could also be used for meal planning.

I think you can achieve a similar result by having one giant DB so we can average out general consumption and then have a personal/family profile, where we in the first place manually feed the AI with data like, what did we bought, exp date, when did we partly or fully consume it. Although intensive at first I think AI will increasingly become more accurate whereby you will need to input less and less data as the data will be comming from both you and the rest of the users. The only thing that still needs to be input is "did you replace it ?"

This way we don't need cameras

It's too bad the actual users will be the grocers price fixing for maximum profit.

I think you focused too much on the details...

AI image manipulation is entirely based in a computer where an image is processed by an algorithm. Grocerybot involves many different systems and crosses the boundary between digital and physical. The intertwined nature of the complexity is what makes it (relatively) difficult to explain.

As always, such systems need infrastructure investment to make them widespread.

Thank goodness. until every intersection becomes this intuitive, I will only continually notice the ones that hold me hostage through several cycles and /or don't even notice I'm there waiting at a red light for 5 minutes at 3am when I'm the only car there.

Unfortunately, the US is king of the suburbs and I don't see that changing any time soon.

I know you don't need AI to do this but I think AI would do a great job if properly employed.

And it certainly didn't need any "AI" to work.

Not near me. I can't speak to the entire US, but everywhere I've been, it's horrible. In Germany they have a green wave, where all of the lights are green if you go the speed limit. I have only encountered this twice within 200 miles of where I live.

Thank you for the kindness. At least I think it's kind. I don't know who Sarah Radz is. So I choose to accept this as a compliment.

That would be great, but it's just not practical in many places.

I looked up how to get to work using public transportation once. It was 3 hours using 3 busses and a half hour walk. LOL. I could literally do it in two hours using a bike. But I'm just not willing to spend 4 hours a day getting to work and back. I don't know many that would of they had a choice. It's half an hour drive for me, but 22 miles, mostly interstate.

People who have only lived in car centric cities cannot fathom how this is better

That’s a problem, not a solution

That’s why you charge the end user of the AI: it keeps your own interests aligned with theirs.

Just don’t make grocerybot a free service. Make it a paid service, and then it works.

The accessibility of local models is nowhere near what the early web was. We could ALL have a geocities website and our own goofy "corner of the internet" without the extra bullshit.

Both of these problems could feasibly be solved by user input. If you had the ability to set rules for your personal experience, problems like that would only last as long as it takes the user to manually correct.

Like, "Ai, I bought groceries for a party on March 5th. Don't use that bill to predict what I need" or "stop recommending butter that isn't this specific brand"

You don't use vision, or if using it you are only supplementing a model that is mostly using purchase histories as the guiding factor.

There could be an easy party mode button in which it just ignores the usual and picks likely food options for a party.

Honestly I would be perfectly happy with the service like this, even if I had to manually input what groceries I need. It's still an incredibly complex problem though. AI is probably better suited for it than anything else since you can have iterative conversations with latest generation AIs. That is, if I tell it I need cereal, it looks at my purchase history and guesses what type of cereal I want this week, and adds it to my list, I can then tell it no, actually I want shredded mini wheats.

So it would probably have to be a combination of a very large database and information gathering system with a predictive engine and a large language model as the user interface.

They absolutely don't want to make automatic comparison shopping that easy. The goal of every grocery store is to get you there with one or two specific good deals they advertise and then have you do the rest of your shopping there because nobody wants to go to a second store and MAYBE get a slightly better deal but also maybe get a worse deal.

But also I’m blown away that most grocery stores don’t list inventory and prices on the website. I can only think this is because they don’t want to show prices in an attempt to get you to go to the store.

yuuup.

I mean... Yeah? Grocery stores want you in the store. If they didn't they'd be shipping only warehouses.

That's how you get weird things like the AI determining that your favorite items are jam, baking soda and whatever you left at the back of your fridge to rot for six months.

It is easy to detect what's in your fridge. We have that today on some smart fridges.

The problem to be solved though is

• what's in your fridge
• what's not in your fridge
• what do you consume vs throw away
• what do you buy
• where do you shop
• what prices are available
• what's the best way to minimize cost and store trips
• what's your metric for how to balance that

Of those things, AI is really only helpful for determining the metric for how much money you need to save to add another grocery stop, and knowing that the orange blob is probably baking soda.

Most of the rest of that is manual inputs or relatively basic but tedious programming, and those are the parts that would be the most annoying.
I say this as a person who has repeatedly utterly failed to use https://grocy.info/ because actually recording what you eat vs throw away is painful.

This isn't a great AI problem not because AI can't help, but because the tedious part isn't the part it can help with right now.

Probably would make sense to start with the receipts for what you purchase and aggregate lists from there (pantry, freezer, fridge, etc.).

Yeah, kinda. Except you'll likely need a camera or two for each shelf of the fridge (given the layout remains unchanged), and also you have to make sure they don't get covered with ice/spilled milk/whatever or blocked by a box of some stuff. Aaaalternatively, you install a receipt scanner and touch scrreen which asks you what you took and updates an internal db accordingly.

then I feel like cameras to detect what's in your fridge is pathetically easy in comparison

But you're skipping over a huge amount of context that's missing. It's context we (as humans) take for granted. What's the difference between a jar and a bottle? Is the cream cheese in a tub or in a little cardboard container? Then it would need to be able to see all items in a fridge, know the expiration dates for each thing, know what you want to get, how quickly something gets used, etc.

Some of those things are more straightforward, and some of them need data well beyond "this container has milk". The issue isn't processing all the data, but acquiring it consistently and reliably. We humans are very chaotic with how we do stuff in the physical world. Even the most organized person would throw off an AI system every so often. It's the reason self driving cars are not a reality yet and won't be for a while.

The problem is that "AI" is a completely ill-defined term. The commenter above used the definition of it just being a more complex program and then they argued that you don't need a more complex program. That's as good of a definition as any other.

By "ai tasks" I mean smth where ai is actually useful, such as object/pattern recognition, object classification, making predictions based on past data, etc. Can one train an ai to predict they need to buy onions when they have less than X in their fridge? Yap. Can one do the same with an if statement and prevent themselves from running into issues when ambient temperature on Mars rises? Also, yes.

AI is just a program that learns from the information you provide it to predict the next element in a series.

If you want a program to check whats in your fridge, a simple spreadsheet updated whenever you empty a bag is just as good.

An use for AI could be to update the spreadsheet with images from the inside of the fridge but you would need cameras that can work inside fridges.

In this case I would suppose that there's no need to get firehose of data, especially if run locally. The user only has so many shops around and the fridge is not a factory scale big

Creating art is creating art. Back in the day you had to mix your own pigments and put those on a canvas. Now you can buy pigments and canvas, or skip that altogether and go digital. That doesn't make digital art any less art. It's the same thing with AI art. It's another tool for us to use.

New tools come up for professions ALL THE TIME, and it's up to people in those fields to figure out how to roll with it. This tool is out of the box and it's not going back in.

What we should be asking now is how do we ETHICALLY use this tool? Well, probably by crediting people. Licensing any copywritten material that needs it. Don't use it to make gross shit like deep fakes or direct rip-offs. Which, just because it's easier to do these things with an AI, doesn't mean they didn't happen with Photoshop etc.

There's also more nuance to the process than "type a prompt get image." That works, but it'll get you shit, inconsistent results. You still have to play around with the image, adjusting parameters and sometimes even loading it into a "real" image manipulation software.

To give you an idea of how I personally am using stable diffusion, I've been using it to generate a few dozen images that look like a character in going for. I'll grab those images, edit them, and then use them to train my own LoRA (a kind of mini, specific, model) to use for future generation of that character. It's actually work, just work I'm better at than manipulating images manually.