Ever see a picture of a friend’s delicious meal on Facebook and say to yourself “I wish I could make that”. Well, the super-geniuses at FAIR  (short for Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research group) have developed AI that can take a look at a picture of food and tell you how to make it.

Yes, you read that correctly. The artificial intelligence will give you the recipe just by looking at a picture. For example, the software can take a look at a photo of an apple pie and determine what ingredients were used and how they were put together.

AI Turns Photos Into Recipes

The system was built by research scientist Adrianna Romero and a team at FAIR’s Montreal lab. The AI was trained on a large dataset of photos and recipes. Through machine learning, the AI would find patterns and make connections between the food images and the corresponding ingredients and recipes.

“Everyone is always taking pictures of their meals these days,” said Joelle Pineau, head of FAIR’s Montreal lab.  “Sometimes there are ingredients you can see but there’s also ingredients you can’t always see, like sugar and salt and things like that,” she added. “So they train the AI with pairs of images and recipes. But then when they test it they just give the image and it generates a recipe.”

Recipe Guessing Software

MIT developed something similar last year. Their neural network trained on a dataset of one million photos and one million recipes. According to researchers, their trial model worked best on desserts and found smoothies and sushi the most challenging.

Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t have any plans to release the recipe guessing software any time soon, but we’re hopeful it’ll eventually appear on the social media platform. Something like this would be a huge resource for any aspiring chefs. It can also help provide insight into healthy eating habits and dietary preferences.

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