Comment by jdthedisciple
1 day ago
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 day ago
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?
Nobody is denying that this is AI-enabled but that's entirely different from "AI can grow corn".
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
I think is that a lot of professional work is not about entirely novel capabilities either, most professionals get the major revenue from bread and butter cases that apply already known solutions to custom problems. For instance, a surgeon taking out an appendix is not doing a novel approach to the problem every time.
In this case the LLM is just acting as a super-charged search engine.
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.
I think we are pretty much past the "LLMs are useless" phase, right? But I think "super-charged search engine" is a reasonably well fitting description. Like a search engine, it provides its user with information. Yes, it is (in a crude simplified description) better at that. Both in terms of completeness (you get a more "thoughtful" follow up) as well as in finding what you are looking for when you are not yet speaking the language.
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
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.
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.
More confidence isn't always better. In particular, confidence pairs well with the ability follow through and be correct. LLMs are famous for confidently stating falsehoods.
Of course. It must be used judiciously. But it completely circumvents some thought patterns that lead to slow decision making.
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.
> "...a vastly understated feature of AI: It makes people confident."
Management is so confident in this, they are axing developers/not hiring new ones.
I started to write a logical rebuttal, but forget it. This is just so dumb. A guy is paying farmers to farm for him, and using a chatbot to Google everything he doesn't know about farming along the way. You're all brainwashed.
What specifically are you disagreeing with? I dont think its trivial for someone with no farming experience to successfully farm something within a year.
>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.
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>A guy is paying farmers to farm for him
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.
Grifters gonna grift.
> A guy is paying farmers to farm for him
Pedantically, that's what a farmer does. The workers are known as farmhands.
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I would say that Seth is farming just as much as non-developers are now building software applications.
trying. until you can eat it, you're just fucking around.
Thats not the point of the original commenter. The point of the original commenter is that he expects Claude can inform him well enough to be a farm manager and its not impressive since Seth is the primary agent.
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.
> I think it is impressive if it works.
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.
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He's writing it down, so it's also science.
exactly, its science/research, until you can feed people its not really farming.
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Anyone can be a farmer. I've got veggies in my garden. Making a profit year after year is much much harder.
Can't wait to see how much money they lose.
I'll see if my 6 year old can grow corn this year.
> 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.