All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes

(arxiv.org)

109 points | by josefchen 6 hours ago ago

43 comments

  • epsteingpt an hour ago

    The work is very interesting. The title is misleading.

    A better title would be: "all of human ingredients compressed into 1,800 primitives"

    There is little to substantively nothing about the actual cooking: preparation methods, proportions, etc.

    But the idea that tomato goes well with beef the whole world over is very interesting and useful for creating flavors that will go together, perhaps surprisingly. It will be a nice resource in the future.

    • CTDOCodebases an hour ago

      If you are interested in that you might want to check out this paper:

      https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00196

      • HappyPanacea 32 minutes ago

        I would like one day to have a database which measure how strongly every food ingredient in use binds to every human smell receptors.

    • Tade0 36 minutes ago

      > But the idea that tomato goes well with beef the whole world over is very interesting

      I saved a beef stew I was making for twelve people once by adding tomato sauce.

      Beef hardens if stewed incorrectly and tomato acid tenderises it again.

      EDIT: removed incorrect information about store bought tomatoes.

  • bhouston 3 minutes ago

    I saw this on X/Twitter. I do not believe that human cooking, and all of its techniques and ingredients and the various ways that things can be prepared in different cultural contexts can be compressed in to 2 megabytes.

    It is sort of like saying here is a 1GB model that can do tool calling and coding and then you try it out and it barely functions. Yes, it technically is a 1GB coding model, but it isn't a good one.

  • leontrolski 2 hours ago

    Neat.

    I'm trying to compress recipes into little schematics https://leontrolski.github.io/recipes.html

    • Uncle_Brumpus 9 minutes ago

      I really like these. I went through a phase a couple years ago where I got really into cooking new fancy recipes, and having to scroll around on recipe pages, or try and read my own chicken scratch notes or understand the context I was trying to imply when I wrote the notes weeks ago was a struggle. Having everything more or less right there in front of your face seems really nice.

      And I don't know why, but "Beans (green)" is really tickling my funny bone.

    • michelb an hour ago
    • teeray an hour ago

      I like it. Reminds me a bit of the table format on Cooking for Engineers (scroll to the bottom of the recipe): https://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/19/Erics-Chocolat...

    • mapipolo 2 hours ago

      I love this! I bet you could make a successful recipe book based on this concept, with large schematics that a cook can read from a distance while working in the kitchen.

    • karhuton an hour ago

      These are amazing. It feels so clear to see a visual ”map” of the cooking process before you even start.

      This would help coordinate two cooks to make prepping more independent.

      I’m trying to figure out if an landscape Ipad, with interactive elements for extra details if needed, would be a good UI for this.

      -

      Edit: Showed it to my non-Engineer wife and she said ”this is horrible” after staring at it for 10 seconds. Maybe not for everyone…

    • NiloCK an hour ago

      Ahh - the dependency graph recipe card. These are excellent. I've imagined something like this forever. Always annoyed that recipes put ingredients in a giant undifferentiated list and then give an instruction like "mix the dry ingredients in a deep bowl".

      For a while I expected there could be a good return on a good implementation of this, but now as soon as a strong interface itself is created it seems easy to copy.

      • gorgoiler an hour ago

        ”To bake an apple pie from scratch, first you must create the universe.”

        — Carl Sagan

    • vrganj 4 minutes ago

      Now this I love. It respects the craft of cooking and the human element, while giving instructions in an easy to grok and straightforward way.

      Great job!

    • ultimatefan1 43 minutes ago
    • InsideOutSanta an hour ago

      That's really neat and easy to parse, love it!

    • addedGone 17 minutes ago

      Recipes-as-JSON?

    • danielvaughn an hour ago

      It's amazing how much more readable this format is. I love it.

    • hkt an hour ago

      That is brilliant. Going to try some of yours then maybe transcribe my own favourites into the same format. You've struck on a great idea here.

  • coldtea 11 minutes ago

    >from 11 sources spanning seven languages, English, Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, Spanish, Turkish, Indonesian, German, and Indian-English

    So hardly "all of human cooking"...

  • cuechan 4 minutes ago

    I don't really understand, what the Graphs on page 13 represent, but they look somewhat like a world map with the continents. I wouldn't be surprised if there's actually a geographic connection .

  • throwme_123 20 minutes ago

    I would not trust a model/corpus about food that includes English and German, but excludes Italian and French

  • Retr0id an hour ago

    > [Claude] performed all ingredient classification under deterministic decoding (temperature 0–0.1)

    Not that it matters much in this context, but low-temperature is not the same thing as deterministic.

    • cubefox an hour ago

      Yep. Zero temperature is neither necessary nor sufficient for deterministic inference.

      • cj an hour ago

        Why?

        • tempay an hour ago

          You can seed the randomness are still having nonzero temperature.

          Numerical instability can introduce randomness especially on GPU like hardware unless you’re very careful about how you write your algorithms.

  • haaz 2 hours ago

    Published by Kaikaku, a London based startup doing automated restaurants and cooking

  • nyokki 22 minutes ago

    As someone learning to cook from recipes in multiple languages, this is really cool. Curious how it handles the same ingredient called by different names (e.g., "scallion" vs "green onion" vs "long onion").

  • skinfaxi 33 minutes ago

    Cooking/recipes seems like it would be an excellent application for a specialized model.

  • vitto_gioda 24 minutes ago

    Why haven’t you analyzed Italian recipes in Italian?

  • vrganj 8 minutes ago

    You can use it to browse flavor combinations here, seems quite neat!

    https://epicure.kaikaku.ai/

    That being said, I'm not excited about the idea of this being used to automate cooking somehow.

    Food, to me, is part of what makes us human, where we express our soul for lack of a better word.

    The idea of taking that away feels like robbing us of our humanity.

  • suddenlybananas an hour ago

    I don't see why the title needs to be quite so grandiose.

    • muragekibicho an hour ago

      It's an appeal to the attention economy. "All of human cooking compressed into 2 MB" is(mentally) palatable relative to "Navigating the Emergent Geometry of Food Ingredient Embeddings".

      Getting you to click is the ultimate goal.

      • delichon an hour ago

        It's a good title in that it says something interesting about the scale of knowledge needed for functional expertise in the domain. Like a big fluffy cat that's just a wee little cat inside the fur ball.

  • 1970-01-01 an hour ago

    11 sources is not "all of" anything. You have a sample. The title is horrible. Fix the title please.

  • antirez an hour ago

    Odd not including French and Italian recipes.

    • walthamstow 6 minutes ago

      French and Italian languages. There are many recipes from both cuisines written in English which, I assume, will have been included.

    • TripleH 30 minutes ago

      As soon as you start adding our beloved french recipes, frogs, snails and other oddities might substantially increase the 1,790 ingredients count

  • jweisbin an hour ago

    "human cooking"? ewww

    • jagged-chisel 16 minutes ago

      To help you out, this is distinctly different from “cooking human”.

  • baalimago 21 minutes ago

    Great, so now chefs are being replaced too..!

  • pfdietz an hour ago

    Cooking condensed beyond the point of usefulness.

    It's another book for Zach Weinersmith.