Feed: Slashdot
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Title: Two Teenagers Built 'Cal AI', a Photo Calorie App With Over a Million
Users

Link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/04/04/2338220/t...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In a world filled with
"vibe coding," Zach Yadegari, teen founder of Cal AI, stands in ironic, old-
fashioned contrast. Ironic because Yadegari and his co-founder, Henry
Langmack, are both just 18 years old and still in high school. Yet their
story, so far, is a classic. Launched in May, Cal AI has generated over 5
million downloads in eight months, Yadegari says. Better still, he tells
TechCrunch that the customer retention rate is over 30% and that the app
generated over $2 million in revenue last month. [...] The concept is simple:
Take a picture of the food you are about to consume, and let the app log
calories and macros for you. It's not a unique idea. For instance, the big
dog in calorie counting, MyFitnessPal, has its Meal Scan feature. Then there
are apps like SnapCalorie, which was released in 2023 and created by the
founder of Google Lens. Cal AI's advantage, perhaps, is that it was built
wholly in the age of large image models. It uses models from Anthropic and
OpenAI and RAG to improve accuracy and is trained on open source food calorie
and image databases from sites like GitHub. "We have found that different
models are better with different foods," Yadegari tells TechCrunch. Along the
way, the founders coded through technical problems like recognizing
ingredients from food packages or in jumbled bowls. The result is an app that
the creators say is 90% accurate, which appears to be good enough for many
dieters. The report says Yadegari began mastering Python and C# in middle
school and went on to build his first business in ninth grade -- a website
called Totally Science that gave students access to unblocked games (cleverly
named to evade school filters). He sold the company at age 16 to FreezeNova
for $100,000. Following the sale, Yadegari immersed himself in the startup
scene, watching Y Combinator videos and networking on X, where he met co-
founder Blake Anderson, known for creating ChatGPT-powered apps like RizzGPT.
Together, they launched Cal AI and moved to a hacker house in San Francisco
to develop their prototype.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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