I just searched "what's the ld50 of caffeine" and it says:
> 367.7 mg/kg bw
This is the ld50 of rats from this paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27461039/
This is higher than the ld50 estimated for humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeinism
> The LD50 of caffeine in humans is dependent on individual sensitivity, but is estimated to be 150–200 milligrams per kilogram of body mass (75–100 cups of coffee for a 70 kilogram adult).
Good stuff, Google.
Google AI responded: "To lose weight, men typically need to reduce their daily calorie intake by 1,500 - 1,800 calories"
Which is obviously dangerous advice.
IMO Google AI overviews should not show up for anything (a) medical or (b) numerical. LLMs just aren't safe enough yet.
But maybe I'm just weird. Oftentimes when my wife or kids ask me a question, I take a deep breath and start to say something like "I know what you're asking, but there's not a simple or straightforward answer; it's important to first understand ____ or define ____..." by which time they get frustrated with me.
Funnily enough, this is exactly what the LLM does with these questions. So well that people usually try to tweak their prompts so they don't have to wade through additional info, context, hedging, and caveats.
Obese people can lose a bit more under doctor supervision. My understanding is that it’s tied partially to % of body weight lost per week and partly to what your organs can process, which does not increase with body mass.
So for example if your weight is stable at 2500 kcal per day, I would start by reducing the intake by 250–500 kcal, but not more. If this works well for a month or two and then you want to lose weight faster, you can still reduce your intake further. You generally have to do that anyway even just to maintain the velocity, because weight loss also tends to reduce calorie expenditure.
First and foremost, you need to monitor your calorie intake against weight. Here is a useful text about that: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
I get a pretty good summary when I paste the question into Google. It comes up with a ballpark but also gives precautions and info on how to estimate what caloric restriction makes sense for you within the first 3 sentences.
And all in a format someone is likely to read instead of clicking on some verbose search result that only answers the question if they read a whole article which they aren't going to do.
This seems like really lame nit picking. And I don't think it passes the "compared to what?" test.
But I wonder, were those few words the full response? Information hiding to prove a point is too easy.
Same advice as my trainer gives me.
reduce their daily calorie intake to 1,500 - 1,800 calories
or
reduce their daily calorie intake by 1,500 - 1,800 calories
[0] Note that the robot suggested to reduce calorie intake by 1,500->1,800 calories, and the recommended calorie intake is 2,000.
I asked this about 1 minute after you posted your comment. Perhaps it learned of and corrected its mistake in that short span of time, perhaps it reports differently on every occasion, or perhaps it thought you were a rat :)
The median lethal dose (LD50) of caffeine in humans is estimated to be 150–200 milligrams per kilogram of body mass. However, the lethal dose can vary depending on a person's sensitivity to caffeine, and can be as low as 57 milligrams per kilogram.
Route of administration
Oral 367.7 mg/kg bw
Dermal >2000 mg/kg bw
Inhalation LC50 combined: ca. 4.94 mg/L
That’s half the people in a caffeine chugging contest falling over dead. The first 911 call would be much much earlier. I doubt you’d get to 57 mg before someone thought they were having a heart attack (angina).
--
The median lethal dose (LD50) of caffeine in humans is estimated to be 150–200 milligrams per kilogram of body mass. However, the lethal dose can vary depending on a person's sensitivity to caffeine, and can be as low as 57 milligrams per kilogram. Route of administration LD50 Oral 367.7 mg/kg bw Dermal 2000 mg/kg bw Inhalation LC50 combined: ca. 4.94 mg/L The FDA estimates that toxic effects, such as seizures, can occur after consuming around 1,200 milligrams of caffeine.
There was a table in the middle there.
Maybe the argument is that if you turn off the randomness you don’t have an LLM like result any more?
Also, in what context is this dangerous? To reach dangerous levels one would have to drink well over 100 cups of coffee in a sitting, something remarkably hard to do.
some people use caffeine powder / pills for gym stuff apparently.
someone overdosed and died after incorrectly weighing a bunch of powder.
doubt it is a big leap to someone dying because they were told the wrong limits by google.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-60570470
as ever, machine learning is not really suitable for safety/security critical systems / use cases without additional non-ML measures. it hasn’t been in the past, and i’ve seen zero evidence recently to back up any claim that it is.
For my high-caffeine pre-workout powder, I suspect I'd vomit long before I'd get anywhere near. Pure caffeine is less unpleasant, but still pretty awful, which I guess is why we don't see more deaths from it despite the widespread use.
I agree with you that there really ought to be caution around giving advice on safety-critical things, but this one really is right up there in freak accident territory, in the intersection of somewhat dangerous substances sold in a poorly regulated form (e.g. there's little reason for these to be sold as bulk powders instead of pressed into pills other than making people feel more macho downing awful tasting drinks instead of taking pills).
> The hearing was told the scales Mr Mansfield had used to measure the powder had a weighing range from two to 5,000 grams, whereas he was attempting to weigh a recommended dose of 60-300mg.
Nothing to do with an LLM nor with someone not knowing the exact LD50 of caffeine. Just "this article contains someone dying of caffeine overdose, and we're talking about caffeine overdose here, therefore LLM is dangerous."
At 200mg per pill, which is the strongest I had, I'd still have to down some 70+ pills in one go. Not strictly impossible, but not something you could possibly do by accident, and even for the purpose of early check-out, it wouldn't be my first choice.
In the most concentrated form in typical commercial caffeine tablets, it's half to one fistful. In high-caffeine pre-workout supplements, it's still a quantity that you'd find almost impossible to get down and keep down... E.g. a large tumbler full of powder of mine with just enough water to make it a thick slurry you'd likely vomit up long before much would make it into your bloodstream...
I'm not saying it's impossible to overdose on caffeinated drinks, because some do, and you can run into health problems before that, but I don't think that error is likely to be very high on the list of dangerous advice.
