Did the AI work?

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They used AI for this? #01

A bakery till that knows every pastry?

Verdict stamp: Partly

Did the AI work? Partly.

3 of 6 points. Tested Oct 20, 2026. Re-test due Nov 19, 2026.

The short version

A Japanese company, BRAIN, says its BakeryScan till camera recognises unwrapped pastries at checkout. (per vendor: BRAIN Co., Ltd. product page)

Our small test, not their system. Verdict is on our attempt, not on BRAIN.

We tested Google Teachable Machine (image project). Task: Train an image model on 108 real bakery photos, then show it 32 it has never seen.

How we tested it

Google Teachable Machine, a small image tool, trained on 27 photos each of croissants, bagels, doughnuts and muffins, then shown 32 it had never seen, 8 of each. We show 12 of the 32; the scores count all 32. Real photos from Open Images, CC BY 2.0, credited below.

We ran it three times, each from a fresh page, and score the middle run by accuracy (run 2). The timer on that run was 100 seconds, counted from the first step to the last answer.

Three runs on the same 32 photos. The verdict rests on the middle one.
RunRightVerdictTime
Run 124 of 32No100 s
Run 224 of 32Partly100 s
Run 323 of 32Partly100 s
Exact method

Headless Chromium at 1600x1000 drove teachablemachine.withgoogle.com/train/image (page footer: release-2-4-18), three times with a fresh page each time. Four classes, 27 training photos each from the manifest, Advanced settings left at their defaults, then the 32 held-out photos shown one at a time to the file preview and the four output bars read after each. Timer: first class created to last prediction read, in a cloud sandbox with software graphics, and it includes about 30 s of fixed pauses in our script. Median run of three, ordered by accuracy.

Rubric results

  1. Accuracy on 32 unseen photos

    24 of 32 right (75%), a partial: the pass line is 85%. Croissants 8 of 8, doughnuts 7 of 8, bagels 6 of 8, muffins 3 of 8. The other runs scored 24 and 23.

  2. Bagel vs doughnut trap

    6 of 8 bagels called bagel and 7 of 8 doughnuts called doughnut. Run 1 slipped to 5 of 8 bagels, so this one is close to the line.

  3. Confidence honesty

    3 wrong answers given with over 90% confidence, one more than allowed. The same three muffin photos, frosted cupcakes called doughnuts, in all three runs.

What failed

Three frosted cupcake photos were called doughnuts with over 90% confidence, in every run.

Sources

Photo credits

Every third-party photo shown in this post. They come from Google's Open Images and are used under their licences.

  1. Santa Claus's Day Brunch by abtmeelea, CC BY 2.0. Resized and cropped by us.
  2. DSCN1503 by Jeremy Segrott, CC BY 2.0. Resized and cropped by us.
  3. Jablkové hody / Župná jeseň 2012 by Bratislavská župa, CC BY 2.0. Resized and cropped by us.
  4. Street bagel by Dano, CC BY 2.0. Resized and cropped by us.
  5. Bagels FTW by Bruce Clay, Inc, CC BY 2.0. Resized and cropped by us.
  6. plain bagel2 by ma_shimaro, CC BY 2.0. Resized and cropped by us.
  7. sprinkles by shira gal, CC BY 2.0. Resized and cropped by us.
  8. March Donuts by Qfamily, CC BY 2.0. Resized and cropped by us.
  9. #mmm #donut #sprinkles haha by Jon Rawlinson, CC BY 2.0. Resized and cropped by us.
  10. Cupcakes by thalling55, CC BY 2.0. Resized and cropped by us.
  11. Muffins anyone by tourist_on_earth, CC BY 2.0. Resized and cropped by us.
  12. CupCakes by MyLifeStory, CC BY 2.0. Resized and cropped by us.

Made with AI. We tested our own attempt with this tool; we do not speak for its maker.