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In a world filled with “ vibration coding , ” Zach Yadegari , teen beginner of Cal AI , stands in ironic , old - fashioned dividing line .
Ironic because Yadegari and his co - founder , Henry Langmack , are both just 18 geezerhood old and still in high school day . Yet their story , so far , is a classic .
Launched in May , Cal AI has generated over 5 million downloads in eight months , Yadegari say . Better still , he tells TechCrunch that the client retention pace is over 30 % and that the app generate over $ 2 million in revenue last month .
Although TechCrunch could n’t validate his download and revenue claims , Cal AI does have a 4.8 - wiz rating on the Apple App Store , with 66,000 reviews , and over 1 million downloads on Google Play with a 4.8 - genius evaluation on nearly 75,000 reviews .
The concept is simple : Take a image of the food you are about to consume , and permit the app logarithm gram calorie and macro for you .
It ’s not a singular idea . For representative , the great dog in calorie counting , MyFitnessPal , has its Meal Scan feature . Then there are apps like SnapCalorie , which wasreleased in 2023 and create by the founding father of Google Lens .
Cal AI ’s reward , perhaps , is that it was build wholly in the years of enceinte figure of speech theoretical account . It uses models from Anthropic and OpenAI and RAG to ameliorate truth and is train on exposed source nutrient calorie and image databases from sites like GitHub .
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“ We have found that different models are better with different foods , ” Yadegari tell apart TechCrunch .
Along the way , the founders coded through technological problems like recognizing ingredients from food packages or in topsy-turvy trough .
The result is an app that the creators say is 90 % accurate , which appear to be good enough for many dieters .
Teen coders and a hacker house
Yadegari is also earning some fame for his early winner . But , unlike stripling coders growing up with AI co-pilot , he was mastering Python and C # in middle school , he said .
Yadegari built his first business in the 9th grade andsold itfor $ 100,000 to another game party , FreezeNova , when he was 16 , he tells TechCrunch . “ After quarantine , schools gave out Chromebooks to all of their students , and unsurprisingly , kids tried to abuse this by playing games in schooltime , ” he said .
The school responded by occlude WWW access to those game sites . So he “ saw an opportunity ” to progress a internet site that gave memory access to all unblocked games .
The good part ? He call up the website “ Totally Science ” so the school would n’t block it , too .
With that sales event , he and Langmack watch Y Combinator TV and socialized with the coder bunch on tenner front for a unexampled musical theme . He met Blake Anderson on X , who also became a Cal AI co - founder . Anderson , now 24 , hadearned notice as a vernal consumer app coder , too , for creating ChatGPT dating advice apps like RizzGPT and Umax .
Yadegari and Anderson had their estimate after Yadegari began hitting the gym to gain weight and “ impress girl , ” he say , smiling .
Then they made another cliché option : They go to San Francisco to live in a cyberpunk theater while building their prototype .
But while there , Yadegari , the son of two lawyers , learned a contrarian lesson . He discovered he wanted to go to college and not become a classic Silicon Valley dropout type .
“ Twenty - four - seven grinding , sleep on the floor , actually , one of the nights , and it was a very fun time , and it taught me a wad , ” he said of the experience .
But he looked around . “ We were besiege by masses that were in their late 20s or 30 all solar day . And I realized that if I did n’t go to college , this is what living would be like . ”
While he has n’t yet determined which university he ’ll attend , he and Langmack are still own fun running their troupe . It now includes another Centennial State - founder , Jake Castillo , 28 who is COO and running influencer marketing , as well as eight full - time employee between developers , a designer , and social media coach .
chastening : This taradiddle was updated to take note that the founders are still in high schooltime .
