[treis]

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.

[pfdietz]

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."

[bwestergard]

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]

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 :)

[jrmg]

Or just, you know, buy some corn and know that that’s enough to get the market to grow some corn.

[fishtoaster]

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.

[malfist]

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?

[pfdietz]

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

[bluGill]

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]

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?

[tootie]

It's like I can't grow corn, but I can buy corn. That's not the same thing. I can also write code to order corn for me, provided I supply it with a credit card and pay the bill. That is also not very interesting.

Incidentally I clicked through to this guy's blog and found his predictions for 2025 and he was 0 for 13: https://avc.xyz/what-will-happen-in-2025-1

[hahahahhaah]

12 was close - we have bags.fm but twitter not tiktok

[aprilthird2021]

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

[TheRealPomax]

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

[kennywinker]

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.

[moolcool]

I'm going to use AI to bake a pizza from scratch by making getting Claude Code hit the Dominos Pizza API