> If there are apps targeting people with diabetes that claims to count your carbs with AI, why haven't those been analysed? That would be a far more effective claim.

Because the apps aren’t going to let you submit 29,000 automated requests for statistical analysis.

And if you did, the authors of those apps would just release an update saying they changed models and try to dismiss the study.

The vitriol against this article on HN is sad. Commenters who agree with the article and its conclusions are grasping for reasons to be angry about it anyway

The linked "click bait" article explains this very clearly as well. It clearly explains the methodology: they took the prompt sent to an LLM by a popular open source carb counting iOS app and sent it, together with five different pictures of food that a typical person might take, to all of the frontier models, and checked the responses. They also explain the purpose: to check the possible accuracy of this approach taken by a real app that real people use.

The fact that you somehow perceived this as an attack on LLMs as a technology is a failure entirely on your part. There is nothing in the article that suggests that people shouldn't use LLMs for other purposes - just a statistical verification of the fact that they shouldn't be used for this one particular thing.