AI and FoodDays

"AI and FoodDays"

Well, everyone's talking about it but not us and here's why...

"Artificial Intelligence", sounds like the name of a machine that thinks and feels like a human but is made of chips and wires. It's not.

What is AI really? Well, it seems to be a machine to regurgitate internet content in a way that's relevant to the question we posed it.

Regurgitate is the key, it only reads back what it thinks is the most likely phase or response that it's found on the internet that most people have already said.

It literally contains a compressed copy of everything on the Internet laid out to find the next most likely word that would come after the previous one.

For example, suppose we ask "What is the capital of the UK?" After taking each word and finding it in its database of words, it will start to look for the most likely first word that's ever said in response to that question... 'The'.

Once it's happy that 'The' is the most likely response to most questions like this, it will move to the next, most likely word 'capital'.

It will repeat this until it's satisfied:

   "The capital of the United Kingdom is London."

Based on a whole bunch of parameters, it'll likely go on to include interesting facts about London, which is nice.

Now, don't misinterpret my rather dismissive tone as, for me, the use of AI or more specifically, Large Language Models (LLMs) is, revolutionary.

I ask my LLM questions that range from "How can I detect when the web browser is in dark mode?" to "What's the command to shutdown a 1980's Dec MicroVAX running OpenVMS?" and it will return helpful responses, scouring the wealth of human knowledge in fractions of a second to deliver the most likely response, "SHUTDOWN" - duh! I remember now.

LLMs have helped me learn better programming techniques, speed up product enhancements and more but when I ask it "What would you recommend Jimmy choose for next months lunches?" it's surprisingly obtuse.

LLMs (AI) rely on learned knowledge and, even if I feed the machine all the things that Jimmy has ordered last year, it seldom comes up with any meaningful suggestions... though, when I suggested that Jimmy might be vegan, it did make me chuckle when it suggested that I get him a sandwich of broccoli, carrots and cardboard.

Jimmy, like most children is fickle. He never knows what he wants and you can be sure that if we tell him, he'll probably pick something else because, you know, "You're not the boss of me." Plus, AI processing of a menu is, well, expensive. Yes, there's a cost for every question you ask and, given the results so far and our desire to make FoodDays the most cost-effective and efficient way for schools, PTAs and local tax powered school districts to fundraise whilst providing lunches, we're going to pass for now.

I hope that you're OK with that, the romantic idea that FoodDays will order Jimmy's lunch every week seems so appealing but clashes with the reality that Jimmy is an actual intelligence, and they're tricky to deal with.

AI's interesting, but it's not AI.