Sebastian Loch, Business Development at FatSecret
It's a very good question. Potentially, you know, short term, this is a big threat. So we, we have been curating, verifying and publishing nutrition data for the past, you know, 17 years. We started back in 07. And back in 07, there was no nutrition API out there. You couldn't just tap into an open API and plug, plug it into your, your mobile app or your web app. And. And receive verified nutrition data. And then that led us to doing this ourselves. So we, we built, um, systems and tools and processes to, to curate nutrition data, and then publishing it on our, our website, which then had many, many companies, corporations come up to us and approach us and ask if we can make this data available to them. So we started very young with APIs and fast forwarding, as you said, to the modern day age of AI. Um, there is no potential threat to our API business, whereby You know, um, developers will not use us as a verified source for nutrition, but they will just ping OpenAI or any other LLM really. So short term, it might be, it might be a threat, but at the same time, we know that a lot of LLMs have, have their downfalls. They, they hallucinate. They often don't have good data when it comes to international markets. So for example, if you want to know how much sugar is in a Snickers bar, You know, you can probably ask JetGPT and it might have a decent result. But if you want to ask the same question for a product in Brazil, in Indonesia, in Japan, in Korea, in Germany, in Australia, the results are not that good. So there is still a need, we believe, for proprietary data, um, you know, to be providing you with verified nutrition information. At the same time, we know that AI needs training data. And I think that's the second part of the conversation, whereby. We know AI is already struggling to be provided with reliable, um, and, and really verified training data. And I think that's potentially another, um, another avenue that, that we might embark on in the coming years.
