The AI revolution has divided most of the world.
For generations, scientists dreamed of the day when artificial intelligence would be able to control aspects of our lives. And as the new “agents” from several tech companies are developed, a new experiment has come to light that will have profound implications for the world.
Can AI grow its own forms of life?
What started as a concept has become a trillion-dollar industry
What started as a theoretical quest to develop non-human “thinking machines” has transformed into a global economic engine for our progress as a society.
The growth of the AI sector has been a sight to behold. ChatGPT has become the fastest-growing consumer app in history, reaching the astonishing milestone of 100 million monthly users recently.
To put that into perspective, Instagram took two and a half years to reach that point.
The telephone took 75 years to reach the 100 million mark. And we now know that several tech firms have committed more money to developing the AI market than this nation spent constructing the entire interstate highway system.
The tech “gold rush” has transformed the global industry
The remarkable growth of the AI industry as a whole has been likened to the original gold rush all those years ago.
NVIDIA has become one of the most influential and profitable companies in the world due to the stranglehold it has on the global GPU sector. It has also seen its data centre revenue grow by a mind-boggling 294% in just three years.
Thanks to the efforts of the global tech industry, we now have an ecosystem of astonishing appliances that can perform almost every single daily task for us.
From blowing on your morning cup of Joe to cool it down, to new types of cellphones that have become an annual present for the world, the technology of modern-day society has come a very long way in an exceedingly short time frame.
Some have predicted that this is just the start of how AI will change the world over the coming years.
We even have AI-powered “dreamcatchers” that can turn your nightly snooze into a movie or video to share with friends and family. But a recent experiment called Claude and Sol has taken the artificial intelligence sector to a whole new era, virtually growing life.
AI can now grow its own forms of basic life in a controlled environment
Anthropic’s AI Model, Claude, has reached a key milestone. It was given autonomous control over a living tomato plant named Sol (although the infrastructure and the initial programming came from humans).
The experiment has shifted the AI sector from simple text-based data generation into a “system operator” role. The experiment, which was led by developer Martin DeVido, wanted to answer what could easily be the most important question regarding artificial intelligence.
AI has become a feature in most of the daily tech devices that we use, and thanks to this experiment, it can now act as an operational supervisor of sorts.
Can an AI model grow and sustain a living, breathing form of life with no human input or intervention? The answer is a resounding yes as it turns out.
Claude gave the gift of sustained life to the tomato known as Sol
Claude set up a “biodome” equipped with 13 sensors to monitor Sol’s CO2, soil moisture, light, and even the plant’s internal temperature. It checked the sensors every 15 to 30 minutes to ensure the tomato was in good shape.
It used real-time data to decide whether to turn on grow lights, activate fans for cooling, or perhaps even start up humidifiers to make Sol more comfortable.
The experiment faced a few hiccups, but ultimately the Cluade AI model was able to successfully grow over a dozen tomatos on its own with no human interference in just 100 days. From robots that clean our homes to AI “farmers” that can grow food for us, artificial intelligence is gaining some serious traction.
Would you eat food grown by an AI model?