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?
Also Seth a non-farmer was already capable of using Google, online forums, and Sci-Hub/Libgen to access farming-related literature before LLMs came on the scene. In this case the LLM is just acting as a super-charged search engine. A great and useful technology, sure. But we're not utilizing any entirely novel capabilities here
And tbh until we take a good crack at World Models I doubt we can
It isn't, because that implies getting everything necessary in a single action, as if there are high quality webpages that give a good answer to each prompt. There aren't. At the very least Claude must be searching, evaluating the results, and collating the data in finds from multiple results into a single cohesive response. There could be some agentic actions that cause it to perform further searches if it doesn't evaluate the data to a sufficiently high quality response.
"It's just a super-charged search engine" ignores a lot of nuance about the difference between LLMs and search engines.
But that's not what OP was contesting. The statement "$LLM is _doing_ $STUFF in the real world" is far less correct than the characterisation as "super-charged search engine". Because - at least as far as I'm aware - every real-world interaction had required consent from humans. This story including
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.
You even see it with basic emails. Myself included. I'm just writing a simple email at work. But I can feed it into AI and make some minor edits to make it feel like my own words and I can just dispense with worries about "am i giving too much info, not enough, using the right tone, being unnecessarily short or overly greating, etc." And its not that the LLMs are necessarily even an authority on these factors - it simply bypasses the process (writing) which triggers these thoughts.
>A guy is paying farmers to farm for him
Read up on farming. The labor is not the complicated part. Managing resources, including telling the labor what to do, when, and how is the complicated part. There is a lot of decision making to manage uncertainty which will make or break you.
I would submit that pretty much any joe blow is capable of growing some amount of crops, given enough money. Running a profitable farm is quite difficult though. There's an entire ecosystem connecting prospective farmers with money and limited skills/interest to people with the skills to properly operate it, either independently (tenant farmers) or as farm managers so the hobby owner can participate. Institutional investors prefer the former, and Jeremy Clarkson's farm show is a good example of the latter.
>I would submit that pretty much any joe blow is capable of growing some amount of crops, given enough money
Yeah in theory. In practice they wont - too much time and energy. This is where the confidence boost with LLMs comes in. You just do it and see what happens. You don't need to care if it doesn't quite work out it its so fast and cheap. Maybe you get anywhere from 50-150% of the result of your manual research for 5% of the effort.
Family of farmers here.
My family raises hundreds of thousands of chickens a year. They feed, water, and manage the healthcare and building maintenance for the birds. That is it. Baby birds show up in boxes at the start of a season, and trucks show up and take the grown birds once they reach weight.
There is a large faceless company that sends out contracts for a particular value and farmers can decide to take or leave it. There is zero need for human contact on the management side of the process.
At the end of the day there is little difference between a company assigning the work and having a bank account versus an AI following all the correct steps.
Pedantically, that's what a farmer does. The workers are known as farmhands.
Good point. AI is already making regular Joes into software engineers.Perhaps I need to say it again: that doesn't mean blindly following it is good. But perhaps using claude code instead of googling will lead to 80% of the conclusions Seth would have reached otherwise with 5% of the effort.
So if I grow biomass for fuel or feedstock for plastics that's not farming? I'm sure there are a number of people that would argue with you on that.
I'm from the part of the country where there large chunks of land dedicated to experimental grain growing, which is research, and other than labels at the end of crop rows you'd have a difficult time telling it from any other farm.
TL:DR, why are you gatekeeping this so hard?
I think it is impressive if it works. Like I mentioned in a sibling comment I think it already definitely proves something LLMs have accomplished though, and that is giving people tremendous confidence to try things.
It only works if you tell Claude..."grow me some fucking corn profitably and have it ready in 9 months" and it does it.
If it's being used as manager to simply flesh out the daily commands that someone is telling it, well then that isn't "working" thats just a new level of what we already have with APIs and crap.
I'll see if my 6 year old can grow corn this year.
Sure..put it in Kalshi while your at it and we can all bet on it.
I'm pretty sure he could grow one plant with someone in the know prompting him.