MIT Created an AI That Knows the Ingredients in Your Food

The days of looking at food on Instagram in ignorant bliss are coming to an end. According to a new study from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a deep-learning AI algorithm called "Pic2Recipe" is able to retrieve the likely ingredients of a meal based on just a picture. Researchers gathered 1,029,720 recipes and 887,706 meal images from popular cooking websites such as All Recipes and Food.com and manually removed duplicate images as well as unwanted characters such as exclamation points or question marks. This culminated in a robust database of common meals and their ingredients. When the Pic2Recipe AI was asked to view an image of a meal, it was able to use the database to identify the correct ingredients 65 percent of the time.