Douglas Englebart agrees with your take, too.
Posted on 07/16/2024 10:37:11 AM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom
Google will shutter Mineral, its agricultural technology operation...Mineral was launched as a separate business in January, 2023, after five years of development by X, Alphabet’s innovation lab. With a mission to help scale sustainable agriculture., the Mineral team’s work included robots designed to inspect every plant in a field and the application of artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI to help companies tackle the challenges of food waste, forecasting and the collection of high-quality data.
Mineral CEO Elliott Grant wrote, “Our mission has always been to make a meaningful, positive difference to the global food system - which we knew was an audacious, high-risk undertaking - so we would regularly ask ourselves: ‘is this the best way to maximize impact?’ and ‘are we reaching the diversity of farmers we want to, worldwide?’
Mineral’s work focused on three areas: developing sensing technology that can generate rich data sets about plants, organizing agriculture data from disparate sources for machine learning and building software algorithms and conducting research to advance the understanding of plants.
Mineral said it found that most companies were not collecting the quantity, diversity or quality of data needed to take full advantage of machine learning, which led it to build tools to capture, curate, clean and augment multimodal data. The company developed plant rovers to capture large quantities of high quality images, and then expanded to the construction of generalized perception technology that can work across platforms such as robots, third party farm equipment, drones, sentinel devices and mobile phones.
Mineral said an important discovery from its work was that implementing machine learning as a service was quite unlike software as a service (SaaS). It said models must be monitored and continuously retrained with new data - especially in an agricultural system that changes annually.
(Excerpt) Read more at powerprogress.com ...
I've been hopeful that new robotic tech combined with AI could revolutionize agriculture. But it is a tough business, dirty, and equipment requires lots of maintenance to keep running. A lot of the robotic / AI tech always looked too small and too fragile to be practical in large-scale farming.
Mineral said "...an important discovery from its work was that implementing machine learning as a service was quite unlike software as a service (SaaS)." Talk about a NO SHIT, SHERLOCK! "discovery." You've got to be kidding me. Writing software and running server farms isn't like agriculture? Whoever would have guessed that.
The CEO uses way too much woke, meaningless jargon -- "diversity" rears its ugly head a few times as does "curate." Ugh. Less woke crap, more down-to-earth tech! He sounds like a guy who spends all his time in the mahogany row of a tech company, has soft white hands, and never wore a pair of workboots.
FR farmers -- what do you think? I'm just an old Mechanical Engineer watching from the sidelines and my only ag experience is managing a garden, some fruit trees, and my roses. Not surprisingly, attaching high-tech to ag is a tough thing to do.
Ping!
Not a famer but it seems as though those conglomerate entities that have cornered the market on food production are in it to control it not to improve it
Leveraging the most advanced science and technology to deliver proven ag sustainability products and programs. Our solutions strengthen farmers’ livelihoods and empower companies to meet their goals, today and tomorrow.
Then it dawned on them that in order to have true farm diversity they had to have weeds ...
Good analysis. Do the problems seem specific to Alphabet’s operation or do they extend to the entire sector?
“”You’ve got to be kidding me. Writing software and running server farms isn’t like agriculture? Whoever would have guessed that!””
In the name of diversity, equity sustainability, and all other woke wackism, the server farms will now be watered twice a day.
“Eat More Bugs”
FR farmers — what do you think?
2) Who makes the chemical application decisions? The coop and the warrantee determine the rates applied. Few farmers farm for their particular situation.
3) This technology is just like all the dials and features we buy on our radios but never use
4) I could show farmers their average yields for ten years, but they always fertilized for maximum yield that their “neighbors” got. There is a psychology to management. I would ask them what their avg yield was, thy would quote me the highest yield.
5) mgt goal was seldom profit, which we analyzed. the real goal was max yld which does not always mean profit.
6) many are cash flow managers, not profit managers.
7) Just like banks have to have the newest fancy buildings to attract customers, Farmers need big fancy equipment and fancy reports to attract landlords.
Just a few observations.
LOLOL!
And, in appreciation of weed diversity, they closed up shop.
“…do they extend to the entire sector?” <— I’d wager on this.
Lots of university research on experimental plots, but, so far doesn’t seem to scale up to large ag and simple operations and maintenance.
“…the server farms will now be watered twice a day.”
LOL…don’t give them any ideas!
Not ready for prime time. Large, well-funded companies sometimes fail to develop new technologies properly because they lose sight of practical aspects and of the needs of their customers. Or, like Xerox, they pioneer the world-changing new technology of the personal computer but then give up the effort for the sake of corporate cost-cutting and inability to recognize and develop the potential of what they have created.
Douglas Englebart agrees with your take, too.
Great observations. Thanks.
You wrote “the real goal was max yld which does not always mean profit.”
That is basic economics, isn’t it? Profit maximization occurs when Marginal Cost equals Marginal Revenue, not at maximum revenue.
It sounds like many farmers are caught in keeping up with the Joneses. “I’ll do what Farmer Jones next door is doing.”
I only know of Indigo because they have offices in Boston. They were hiring, but I think they’ve done multiple layoff rounds.
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