It's cute but it seems like it's mostly going to come down to hiring a person to grow corn. Pretty cool that an AI can (sort of) do that autonomously but it's not quite the spirit of the challenge.

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pfdietz 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

User: Claude, determine the height of the building using this barometer.

Claude: Go to the owner of the building and say "if you tell me the height of your building I will give you this fine barometer."

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bwestergard 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Right. If this level of indirection is allowed, the most efficient way to "grow corn" by the light of the original post would simply be to buy and hold Farmland Partners Inc (NYSE: FPI).

	▲	fuzzfactor 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'd like to see Fred follow right along and allocate the same amount of funds for deployment starting at the same time as each of Seth's expenditures or solid commitments. The timing might need to be different but it would be good to see what the same amounts invested would yield from corn on the commodity market as well as from securities in farming partnerships. Would it be fair if AI was used to play these markets too, or in parallel? It would be interesting to see how different "varieties" of corn perform under the same calendar season. Corn, nothing but corn as the actual standard of value :) You don't get much any way you look at it for your $12.99 but it's a start. Making a batch of popcorn now, I can already smell the demand on the rise :)

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fishtoaster 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, this feels right on the cusp of being interesting. I think that, being charitable, it could be interesting if it turns out to be successful in hiring and coordinating several people and physical assets over a long time horizon. For example, it'd be pretty cool if it could:

1. Do some research (as it's already done)

2. Rent the land and hire someone to grow the corn

3. Hire someone to harvest it, transport it, and store it

4. Manage to sell it

Doing #1 isn't terribly exciting - it's well established that AIs are pretty good at replacing an hour of googling - but if it could run a whole business process like this, that'd be neat.

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malfist 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Is that actually growing corn with AI though? Seems to me that a human planted the corn, thinned it, weeded it, harvested it, and stored it. What did AI do in that process? Send an email?

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9rx 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It is trying to take over the job of the farmer. Planting, harvesting, etc. is the job of a farmhand (or custom operator). Everyone is working to try to automate the farmhand out of a job, but the novelty here is the thinking that it is actually the farmer who is easiest to automate away.

But,

"I will buy fucking land with an API via my terminal"

Who has multiple millions of dollars to drop on an experiment like that?

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jt2190 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> [Seth is using AI to try] to take over the job of the farmer. Planting, harvesting, etc. is the job of a farmhand (or custom operator).

Ok then Seth is missing the point of the challenge: Take over the role of the farmhand.

> Everyone is working to try to automate the farmhand out of a job, but the novelty here is the thinking that it is actually the farmer who is easiest to automate away.

Everyone knows this. There is nothing novel here. Desk jockeys who just drive computers all day (the Farmer in this example) are _far_ easier to automate away than the hands-on workers (the farmhand). That’s why it would be truly revolutionary to replace the farmhand.

Or, said another way: Anything about growing corn that is “hands on” is hard to automate, all the easy to automate stuff has already been done. And no, driving a mouse or a web browser doesn’t count as “hands on”.

	▲	9rx 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> all the easy to automate stuff has already been done. To be fair, all the stuff that hasn't been automated away is the same in all cases, farmer and farmhand alike: Monitoring to make sure the computer systems don't screw up. The bet here is that LLMs are past the "needs monitoring" stage and can buy a multi-million dollar farm, along with everything else, without oversight and Seth won't be upset about its choices in the end. Which, in fairness, is a more practical (at least less risky form a liability point of view) bet than betting that a multi-million dollar X9 without an operator won't end up running over a person and later upside-down in the ditch. He may have many millions to spend on an experiment, but to truly put things to the test would require way more than that. Everyone has a limit. An MVP is a reasonable start. v2 can try to take the concept further.

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pfdietz 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Or, just buy some corn futures. By slightly increasing the price of this instrument, it slightly signals farmers to increase production. Corn grown!

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bluGill 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is more than that. He needs to decide which corn seed to plant (he is behind here - seed companies run sales if you order in October for delivery in mid march). He needs to decide what fertilizer to apply, and when. He needs to monitor the crop - he might or might not need to buy and apply a fungicide. He needs to decide when to harvest - too early and he pays a lot of money to dry the corn (and likely money to someone you hired to work who doesn't do anything), but too late and a storm can blow the corn off the cob... Those are just a few of the things a farmer needs to figure out that the AI would need to do (but will it)

	▲	9rx an hour ago \| parent [-]
		There are plenty of CCAs out there that will happily do all those things for you. If hiring someone to come work the field is fair game, surely that is too?

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aprilthird2021 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Also what's the delta b/w Claude Code doing it and you doing it?

I would have to look up farm services. Look up farmhand hiring services. Write a couple emails. Make a few payments. Collect my corn after the growing season. That's not an insurmountable amount of effort. And if we don't care about optimizing cost, it's very easy.

Also, how will Claude monitor the corn growing, I'm curious. It can't receive and respond to the emails autonomously so you still have to be in the loop

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TheRealPomax 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There was no challenge. There was a statement, "AI can write code, but it can't affect the physical world."

	▲	kennywinker 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Tell that to all the car accidents caused by people distracted by siri, the people who’ve done horrible things because of AI induced psychosis, or the lives ruined by ai stock trading algorithms.