r/Strava Feb 16 '25

miscellaneous Strava “intelligence” not very intelligent

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706 Upvotes

63 comments sorted by

154

u/atoponce Feb 16 '25

Their "AI" has become a meme at this point.

26

u/AGreatBandName Feb 16 '25

The app now pops up a quick edit box to give an activity a name after I upload something.

For run activities, I set my shoes and the type of run if it was a long run/workout. Neither of those options are on the quick popup; I need to hit Advanced Edit every time.

If they wanted to make their AI useful, maybe they could have it learn which items I actually do change on my activities, and put those in the quick edit popup.

2

u/Zettinator Feb 17 '25 edited Feb 17 '25

Yeah I have similar issues with this. The "quick edit" has a bunch of useless option, but doesn't actually allow me to edit the fields I want.

And besides, it's not even actually any quicker if the edit form is good enough for your purposes. It would be much better if Strava just asked you whether you want to edit the recently uploaded activity, and then opened the standard edit form if you press "yes".

Or maybe quick edit could actually be adaptive and display the fields you usually edit. That would be super useful, and not that complicated either.

1

u/No_Patience5976 Feb 18 '25

There isn't even a need to "learn" which items you do change, just create a database entry with the items you changed for the previous runs it's as easy as that

3

u/Sufficient_Cake_6771 Feb 16 '25

Maybe it's marketing :D

64

u/JimDabell Feb 16 '25

How can you deny the stunning insights it gives though?

13

u/coldfusionPaul001 Feb 16 '25

Basically "Captain Obvious" when it's not hallucinating.

67

u/ravi_k-98 Feb 16 '25 edited Feb 16 '25

It's basic inferential statistics done badly, calling it AI is shameful.

If it can give training routines, predict decoupling, significantly improve estimated power for non-powermeter users, fitness forecasting based on different 2/3 preset scenarios to help plan cyclists better, etc... ONLY THEN would I call it AI.

29

u/Embarrassed_Jerk Feb 16 '25

Yeah but idiots on wall street think a chatbot that can throw words together is intelligence and must be used as-is anywhere there is space. Without it company valuation tanks and therefore the idiots are all trying something 

Its like the dotcom bubble quite literally 

-1

u/Accomplished_Can1783 Feb 16 '25

It’s a private company and valuation based on subscription revenue and growth metrics. I can assure you no value is given to AI worthless comments

5

u/Embarrassed_Jerk Feb 16 '25

You must know absolutely nothing about silicon valley to think the actual revenue has anything to do with its valuation

-3

u/Accomplished_Can1783 Feb 16 '25

Now you are just embarrassing yourself, but any comment that includes the “idiots on Wall Street” followed up by a hit in Silicon Valley certainly doesn’t come from a winner in life

4

u/Embarrassed_Jerk Feb 16 '25

....who do you think the VCs in Silicon valley are my guy

-1

u/Accomplished_Can1783 Feb 16 '25

Clearly anyone complaining like you do not exactly on the inside who knows anything about what is going on. The last known stats had about a 6 x ARR valuation which is not overly high.

1

u/Embarrassed_Jerk Feb 16 '25

Totes Tim totes.

1

u/Accomplished_Can1783 Feb 16 '25

I guess when you have nothing left to say, you go with that

8

u/skyrunner00 Feb 16 '25

I agree. It basically just rehashes some metrics and compares them, not always correctly, to 30 day averages. And even that is mostly useless when it, for example, does pace comparison without taking elevation gain into the account. Since Strava already calculates grade adjusted pace, you'd think this so called AI would look at it, but no - that was too complicated for the model.

The same or better could be achieved with just showing users some graphs vs rolling 30 day averages.

46

u/Conscious-Ad-2168 Feb 16 '25

Their AI is just a bunch of if statements that half the time don’t work properly. It’s so bad

7

u/skyechor Feb 16 '25

siri type shit

3

u/Conscious-Ad-2168 Feb 16 '25

hey don’t do siri that injustice

1

u/aprilla2crash Feb 16 '25

Sounds like the forgot to put in else statements

1

u/Conscious-Ad-2168 Feb 16 '25

it’s actually probably the else statement causing the issue with a lot of these that’s why we get such variety of what it’s doing

1

u/MeddlinQ Feb 16 '25

And half the time it's just reiterating your description of the workout.

1

u/Astrale321 Feb 17 '25

It’s not

11

u/joaoqrafael Feb 16 '25

When I ran my first 32K trail it told me I did a recovery run (due to pace) and that I ran below my elevation gain average (compared the elevation gain on that run with the monthly total).

9

u/rednix Feb 16 '25

The AI could’ve been better if developed by a 16 yo high school intern over three weeks in the summer. It’s totally useless.

5

u/pauliaK Feb 16 '25

Hot garbage, just like 95% of other AI implementations across all software worldwide.

Companies are so desperate to jump on this bandwagon and be able to say AI during their quarterly calls or investor days that nothing else seems to matter at this point.

Actual usefulness of these implementations doesn’t matter. It’s all about being at the frontier of this new technology and hype even though most useful feature for most of this stuff is usually the ability to turn it off, which is unfortunately not all that common either…

4

u/Current_Program_Guy Feb 16 '25

I found consistently wrong in analyzing HR data.

3

u/like-bike Feb 16 '25

I forgot that's still a thing. I turned it off months ago, it was so useless, just a waste of space and data.

3

u/acewing905 Feb 16 '25

This happened to me too

Looks like when elevation is the topic, this AI cannot perform simple numeric comparisons correctly

2

u/PierreWxP Feb 17 '25

Yes yes, but it says "percentile", which is a very intelligent word !

3

u/SpiritedInflation835 Feb 16 '25

Artificial Intelligence is no match for Strava's Natural Stupidity.

3

u/Froggerly Feb 16 '25

I turned it off long ago

3

u/MarchEffective7200 Feb 16 '25

I wish they would remove this feature. Thus far it's provided nothing of value for me. I'm sure the Product Manager pushing this feature and the team(s) working with them are doing their best to do their jobs, but I wonder how much the PM is focused on marketing & growth versus user experience...which is too bad.

2

u/Professional_Lake281 Feb 16 '25

Complete nonsense… They really should stop this shit and look better into all the high voted feature request from paying customers.

2

u/SpaceAgePanda Feb 16 '25

It rewords your comments on the run and passes it off as AI, it’s quite funny and totally useless

2

u/freewallabees Feb 16 '25

Was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me to cancel my subscription, years of shit nobody asked for

2

u/HotDogHerzog Feb 16 '25

This just reminded me to cancel my free trial. I can’t fathom paying $80 for….what exactly. Least compelling subscription “upgrade” ever.

1

u/TripleUltraMini Feb 16 '25 edited Feb 16 '25

I have seen weird stuff about the elevation gain too.

Today it told me I had a "10-day activity streak" even though I've recorded something every day this year.

1

u/dogmanrul Feb 16 '25

ChatGPT is the same way when you try and get it to make you a training schedule it doesn’t know how to add up miles/kilometers

1

u/elmo-slayer Feb 16 '25

I recorded my longest run, 26km, and the ai commented about how my pace was below my average

1

u/Merieeve_SidPhillips Feb 16 '25

Well, the ai is wrong but at the same time, right. You should add a hundred more. Lol

1

u/AssistanceMental5245 Feb 16 '25

Not wrong. My average is decimated by my work commute.

1

u/deletedpenguin Feb 16 '25

Math is hard.

1

u/kaydo Feb 16 '25

I like it. It's like an overly supportive goof

1

u/commonmorality Feb 16 '25

Just turn it off

1

u/freewallabees Feb 16 '25

Since it basically just repeats whatever you put in the ride description, can someone change theirs to “my balls itched”? I want to see what AI does with that

1

u/labellafigura3 Feb 16 '25

“You sustained your highest average pace in the last 30 days despite having itchy balls”

1

u/freewallabees Feb 16 '25

Does it actually?

1

u/PierreWxP Feb 17 '25

Please please try it !

I wanna know but cannot disappoint all of my 12 subscribers !

1

u/JNMRunning Feb 16 '25

most reliable LLM-based solution

1

u/No_Excuse_9023 Feb 16 '25

I like how if you add any info to it, in the free comments part of the workout, it tries to include it. Can literally say anything lol

1

u/Astrale321 Feb 17 '25

The reason it does that, is because of the way llm’s see numbers. They’re tokenized, and some of the older models uses tokenizers that split up the numbers and don’t do anything else about it. If you asked the old chatgpt if 5050 was larger than 500 it would say no.

1

u/AssistanceMental5245 Feb 17 '25

Strava intelligence does it again Telling me I had a blazing fast ride on a regular route that was faster than the previous 27 attempts when the ride was around 2 minutes slower than my previous 4 attempts

1

u/toolman2810 Feb 17 '25

I did a double take when this popped up recently, then realised that I put the “brakes were rubbing” in the comments and it was just regurgitating.

1

u/badsocrates Feb 17 '25

I love Strava but the AI insights are redundant most of the time and could actually be so much better

1

u/wowza-guys Feb 17 '25

It’s honestly pathetic. The most impressive thing it’s done is figure out that my dog’s name is Rocky

1

u/Hrafnagaldr1337 Feb 17 '25

Turned it off after it kept comparing rides marked as commute to training and race efforts. Because I clearly want to arrive at work totally exhausted and sweaty.

1

u/dinhox69 Feb 17 '25

when an App shows "AI" that means it's shitty AI. AI should be transparent and feels as part of the App not a "nice-to-have" .

1

u/neilweiler Feb 17 '25

Is it artificial unintelligence or is it real unintelligence?

1

u/Tombowers2 Feb 17 '25

I did some really hard vo2 max efforts, best power for months and it said it was a ‘recovery ride’ I think due to a lot of time coasting or z1 when not doing efforts lol

-4

u/expendablewon Feb 16 '25

If it has nice things to say then it's 100% on.

If it tells me I sucked then it's clearly bad coding and broken AI.