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Proof of Corn

proofofcorn.com

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Re: Proof of Corn

#121

Post by PlatoIsADisease »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #41
ppchain wrote: post #22

The 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?

Can't wait to see how much money they lose.

I'll see if my 6 year old can grow corn this year.

Re: Proof of Corn

#122

Post by jdwg »

Is it easy to make money by growing corn? Probably not.

So this is a very legitimate test. We may learn some interesting ways that planting, growing, harvesting, storing, and selling corn can go wrong.

I certainly wouldn't expect to make money on my first or second try!

Re: Proof of Corn

#123

Post by cevn »

santadays wrote: post #86
embedding-shape wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These experiments always seems to end up requiring the hand-holding of a human at top, seemingly breaking down the idea behind the experiment in the first place. Seems better to spend the time and energy on finding better ways for AI to work hand-in-hand with the user, empowering them, rather than trying to find the areas where we could replace humans with as little quality degradation as possible. That whole part fe…

> 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. I think this is the new turing test. Once it's been passed we will have AGI and all the Sam Altmans of the world will be proven correct. (This isn't a perfect test obviously, but neither was the turing test) If it fails to pass we w…

I think once we get off LLM's and find something that more closely maps to how humans think, which is still not known afaik. So either never or once the brain is figured out.

Re: Proof of Corn

#124

Post by Oras »

ppchain wrote: post #22

The 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…

I think that’s the point though. If they succeeded in the experiment, they wouldn’t need to do the same instructions again, AI will handle everything based on what happened and probably learn from mistakes for the next round(s).

Then what you asked “do everything to grow …” would be a matter of “when?”, not “can?”

Re: Proof of Corn

#126

Post by downboots »

Windchaser wrote: post #113
formerly_proven wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Though a computer could also just control robots that actually plant, weed, water, and harvest the corn. That's a pretty big difference from just 'coordinating' the work. An AI that can also plant corn itself (via robots it controls) is much more impressive to me than an AI just send emails.

the corn seed is a program source file

Re: Proof of Corn

#127

Post by sdwr »

marcd35 wrote: post #110
lukev wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The question is whether the system can be responsible for the process. Big picture, AI doing 90% of the task isn't much better than it doing 50%, because a person still needs to take responsibility for it actually getting done.

If Claude only works when the task is perfectly planned and there are no exceptions, that's still operating at the "junior" level, where it's not reliable or composable.

Re: Proof of Corn

#128

Post by pests »

lukev wrote: post #77
ppchain wrote: post #22

The 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.

> But unless they've made a commitment not to prompt the agent again

Model UI's like Gemini have "scheduled actions" so in the initial prompt you could have it do things daily and send updates or reports, etc, and it will start the conversation with you. I don't think its powerful enough to say spawn sub agents but there is some ability for them to "start chats".

Re: Proof of Corn

#130

Post by pixl97 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #39
ppchain wrote: post #22

The 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…

These experiments always seems to end up requiring the hand-holding of a human at top, seemingly breaking down the idea behind the experiment in the first place. Seems better to spend the time and energy on finding better ways for AI to work hand-in-hand with the user, empowering them, rather than trying to find the areas where we could replace humans with as little quality degradation as possible. That whole part fe…

>ather than trying to find the areas where we could replace humans with as little quality degradation as possible

The particular problem here is it is very likely that the easiest people to replace with AI are the ones making the most money and doing the least work. Needless to say those people are going to fight a lot harder to remain employed than the average lower level person has political capital to accomplish.

>seems to end up requiring the hand-holding of a human at top,

I was born on a farm and know quite a bit about the process, but in the process of trying to get corn grown from seed to harvest I would still contact/contract a set of skilled individuals to do it for me.

One thing I've come to realize in the race to achieve AGI, the humans involved don't want AGI, they want ASI. A single model that can do what an expert can, in every field, in a short period of time is not what I would consider a general intelligence at all.

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