Results don’t need to be dramatic or come right away. Even failure is a learning experience. Improving agriculture is a worthy goal, even if it’s not immediately successful.
Is it? It feels like the same money could be given out to thousands of people who actually understand farming to run little experiments. That's how America is supposed to work. Relying on Larry Ellison to succeed in a field he has no experience or instincts by throwing money at it seems like a terrible strategy.
These days Bell and Xerox would maybe merge to "consolidate their market position" and fire half of the researchers to show cost savings at the next board meeting.
The Larry Ellison.
People have been saying that these concentration of wealth will end up hoarding our basic needs and we've seen that already with Housing.
First they come for your House, next they come for your Food.
What kind of rock are you typing under?
Germany leads in engineering and automotive tech (Siemens, BMW, Bosch). Sweden produces global tech giants like Spotify and Klarna. Denmark is a leader in renewable energy (Vestas, Ørsted). Japan? It revolutionized robotics, semiconductors, and high-speed rail while fostering companies like Toyota, Sony, and Nintendo.
The issue isn’t just tax rates—it’s whether a system allows new players to compete or just protects entrenched monopolies. The U.S. is increasingly choosing the latter.
And you can't think of anything the US innovates in?
Your evidence / anecdotes aren't really sufficient to prove the claim .
Go look at the success rate of university research. This sounds like someone who hasn’t been part of research.
The mistakes they made also seem pretty fundamental to farming; things like:
1. they didn't consider that a greenhouse designed for the desert wouldn't work in Hawaii
2. solar panels need to be installed differently depending on their location and never see the theoretical power generation in practice
3. immature/mature plants were growm right next to each other in a way that spread pests
4. they bought marijuana greenhouses without considering that it is grown so differently from other standard crops.
This is pretty basic stuff that should have been caught by someone with knowledge of agriculture. This seems to indicate that while they had a really smart team, they made the mistake of assuming that general AI/robotics would map 1:1 to the problems of agriculture.
The success rate of university research should have been the ultimate warning sign that you shouldn't dump half a billion into "solving agriculture." Progress in established fields like agriculture is expensive, time consuming, and (usually) incremental.
The thought that you could do all of that at once and outcompete an approach that has been refined for thousands of years is wild. Kudos to them for dreaming big, but I just don't see why they thought they had an edge here outside of "AI can solve any problem" hubris.
They buy real estate and sit on it. Since land taxes are so low, you can make money without actually doing anything with the land.
Where did you get that?
So I'd say that it's good that he's throwing his money instead of hoarding it or doing some ruthless exploitation or something with oil pumping.
Expecting billionaires to spend their money in any way that benefits someone other than them is unrealistically high bar. We should apploud them if they at least manage to do less harm.
It is much more efficient for society in the form of its government to fund research. We should not leave it up to rich people to decide whether or not research is conducted.
A lot of everything is of that kind. Larry's folly is of that kind. Most defense spending is of that kind. Most startups are of that kind.
BTW, my brother was one of those officials, judging grants at the NSF in DC. But that was only after a career in physics at Sandia.
Absent price signals, determinations of value inevitably get corrupted by other interests. Look at the long, sorry history of NASA's manned space program. Value there has become "does this deliver $$$ to my district".
Research doesn't work by central planning. Grants to researchers is competitive. There's corruption not because of the scientific method but rather because of the human condition.
Your view of this is very politicized. I'm done here.
Apollo was a national potlatch. It was "look how rich and successful capitalism is; we can put 4% of the federal budget into a pile and set it on fire, we're so good." Spinoffs are an unjustifiable myth. To the extent we can know, they'd have occurred anyway (ICs, for example). The most important thing to remember about Apollo is we didn't go back, which is clear evidence it wasn't needed. But to a true space fan, like a true communist, space programs can never fail, they can only be failed.
With wealth being hoarded by individuals at unprecedented rates and taxes lower than they've been at almost any time in the country's history, there has certainly been a shift away from public research toward private research.
But there are a few instances where a rich person spent a trivial amount of their wealth to fund a project or two in the interest of humanity.
Al Capone's soup kitchens?
Larry is an adult last I checked :)
What people find distasteful in my circles is when rich people do nothing to solve systemic problems within society and instead go about acting as benevolent do-gooders selectively handing out resources to causes they feel an affinity for.
When rich folks act this way - we end up with a bored and cruel aristocracy and piss poor working people, like England. I don't think that's good for anyone.
That very much depends on the cost. History is littered with tragically failed experiments in improving farming ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_farming are some of the worst and most well known, but there are many others).
I think Bill Gates is much better at finding people with the right expertise who are already solving a problem and just adding more funding and I think the results speak for themselves.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/bill-gates-green-tech-fun...
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/03/iron-ox-lays-off-50-amount...
That something is throwing AI and robots at dirt as if there's some kind of labor and knowledge gap in farming that needs a rich guy to throw tech at it.
Few people are truly all bad or all good.