Looks like proof of cheating to me, at least for now. Definitely a step in an interesting direction, but not exactly SkyNet.
Proof of Corn
101–110 of 325 posts
Re: Proof of Corn
#102The point they seem to be making is that AI can "orchestrate" the real world even if it can't interact physically. I can definitely believe that in 2026 someone at their computer with access to money can send the right emails and make the right bank transfers to get real people to grow corn for you. However even by that metric I don't see how Claude is doing that. Seth is the one researching the suppliers "with the h…
So Seth, as presumably a non-farmer, is doing professional farmer's work all on his own without prior experience? Is that what you're saying?
I would say that Seth is farming just as much as non-developers are now building software applications.
Re: Proof of Corn
#103This isn't really an impressive test; growing corn is an extremely well-documented solved problem, the sort of thing that we already know LLMs excel at. An LLM that couldn't reliably tell you what to do at each step of the corn-farming process would be a very poor LLM.
This seems like something along the lines of "We know we can use Excel to calculate profit/loss for a Mexican restaurant, but will it work for a Tibetan-Indonesian fusion restaurant? Nobody's ever done that before!"
Re: Proof of Corn
#104The point they seem to be making is that AI can "orchestrate" the real world even if it can't interact physically. I can definitely believe that in 2026 someone at their computer with access to money can send the right emails and make the right bank transfers to get real people to grow corn for you. However even by that metric I don't see how Claude is doing that. Seth is the one researching the suppliers "with the h…
Yes. In other words, this is a nice exemplification of the issue that AI lacks world models. A case study to work through.
Re: Proof of Corn
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using the example from the article, I guess restaurant managers need handholding by the chefs and servers, seemingly breaking down the idea behind restaurants, yet restaurants still exist. The point, I think, is that even if LLMs can't directly perform physical operations, they can still make decisions about what operations are to be performed, and through that achieve a result. And I also don't think it's fair to sa…
> And I also don't think it's fair to say there's no point just because there's a person prompting and interpreting the LLM. That happens all the time with real people, too. Yes, what I'm trying to get at, it's much more vital we nail down the "person prompting and interpreting the LLM" part instead of focusing so much on the "autonomous robots doing everything".
I feel you're still missing the point of the experiment... The entire thing was based on how Claude felt empowering -- "I felt like I could do anything with software from my terminal"... It's not at all about autonomous robots... It's about what someone can achieve with the assistance of LLMs, in this case Claude
Re: Proof of Corn
#106Polk County Iowa is where Des Moines is - the largest city in Iowa. (I live the next county over, but I bike to Polk county all the time) This is not a good location to run this because the farm land is owned by farmer/investors or farmer/developers - either way everybody knows the farm will become a suburb in the next 20 years and has priced accordingly (and if the timeline is is less than 5 years they have switched…
what is Bill Gates wanting to do with Iowa farm land?
Collect rent.
That's all rich people do. The premise of capitalism is that the people best at collecting rent should also be in total control of resource allocation.
Re: Proof of Corn
#107Polk County Iowa is where Des Moines is - the largest city in Iowa. (I live the next county over, but I bike to Polk county all the time) This is not a good location to run this because the farm land is owned by farmer/investors or farmer/developers - either way everybody knows the farm will become a suburb in the next 20 years and has priced accordingly (and if the timeline is is less than 5 years they have switched…
what is Bill Gates wanting to do with Iowa farm land?
Same as any other big real estate investor: speculate.
Re: Proof of Corn
#108"Can AI grow corn?" Let's step back. "there's a gap between digital and physical that AI can't cross" Can intelligence of ANY kind, artificial or natural, grow corn? Do physical things? Your brain is trapped in its skull. How does it do anything physical? With nerves, of course. Connected to muscle. It's sending and receiving signals, that's all its doing! The brain isn't actually doing anything! The history of human…
It's extremely funny to me but this is basically the literal premise of season two of Person of Interest. Yeah d'uh it's just a computer how would it actually do anything? Well it just goes ahead and tells people to do stuff and wires them money. Easy.
Re: Proof of Corn
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
So Seth, as presumably a non-farmer, is doing professional farmer's work all on his own without prior experience? Is that what you're saying?
1) You are right and its impressive if he can use AI to bootstrap becoming a farmer 2) Regardless, I think it proves a vastly understated feature of AI: It makes people confident. The AI may be truly informative, or it may hallucinate, or it may simply give mundane, basic advice. Probably all 3 at times. But the fact that it's there ready to assert things without hesitation gives people so much more confidence to act…
> "...a vastly understated feature of AI: It makes people confident."
Good point. AI is already making regular Joes into software engineers.Re: Proof of Corn
#110The point they seem to be making is that AI can "orchestrate" the real world even if it can't interact physically. I can definitely believe that in 2026 someone at their computer with access to money can send the right emails and make the right bank transfers to get real people to grow corn for you. However even by that metric I don't see how Claude is doing that. Seth is the one researching the suppliers "with the h…
Right. This whole process still appears to have a human as the ultimate outer loop. Still an interesting experiment to see how much of the tasks involved can be handled by an agent. But unless they've made a commitment not to prompt the agent again until the corn is grown , it's really a human doing it with agentic help, not Claude working autonomously.
Why wouldn't they be able to eventually set it up to work autonomously? A simple github action could run a check every $t hour to check on the status, and an orchestrator is only really needed once initially to set up the if>then decision tree.