How a company is using AI to track climate changes to help protect agriculture
The AI platform Gro Intelligence is working to predict the future of agriculture. On this week&# x2019; s episode of the Leaders in Innovation podcast, Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker discusses her hopes for the future of the company&# x2014; and for AI technology. When Gro Intelligence made its first predictive model in 2016, it was on a much smaller scale, measuring...
The AI platform Gro Intelligence is working to predict the future of agriculture.
Using huge data sets from around the world, Gro Intelligence creates predictive models that can map how climate change might impact agriculture. The technology can help agriculture companies understand how the climate will change in the future, so that they can decide where to plant, develop plans for building sustainable food supply chains, and map the drivers of food insecurity to inform aid strategies. The company’s mission statement sums it up concisely: “Gro is the story of what on Earth is going on.”
On this week’s episode of the Leaders in Innovation podcast, Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker discusses her hopes for the future of the company—and for AI technology.
When Gro Intelligence made its first predictive model in 2016, it was on a much smaller scale, measuring U.S. corn yields at the county level during the growing season. Menker says that others were often skeptical when she explained her expansive vision for the company.
“People thought we were crazy for implying that we could model the whole world and do crop yields,” Menker says. “And we were like, ‘No, we’re going to do demand, and we’re going to do trade, and we’re going to do all these things.’ I think a lot of people would look at it with sort of glossy eyes of like, ‘Sure, yeah, how many people is that going to take?’ And today we have over three million models in the system.”
Menker attributes much of the company’s success to the quality of the data it uses, which is the function of the experts that curate and train Gro Intelligence’s AI software. All of the domains that Gro Intelligence tracks—factors like wildfires, floods, sea level rise, and even crop varieties like potatoes and corn—have human experts tracking them. “An AI is only as good as the data behind it; garbage in, garbage out,” Menker says. Her employees certainly aren’t using garbage.
Gro Intelligence is a “deep vertical” form of AI, meaning that it’s highly trained in one specific area and doesn’t generate mistakes (or, as they’re known in the AI world, “hallucinations”). However, vertical AI can’t reason the way that platforms like ChatGPT can. ChatGPT and other reasoning engines are called horizontal AI, which are impressive in their own right but more prone to making mistakes. What’s going to be truly groundbreaking, Menker says, is when we’re able to merge the best qualities of both forms.
“The thing that excites me about where AI is going, and where we’re going in the world, is actually this world of the horizontal coming together with the vertical,” Menker says. “So when horizontal AI interfaces with vertical AI, you then start to be able to ask questions in a very human way.”
While Menker cautions that climate change’s consequences are inevitable, she’s optimistic about our growing capacity to prepare for the future. This way, she says, business and world leaders can act proactively rather than reactively.
“Much of what we’re experiencing in climate change today is a function of actions that we took 20, 30 years ago,” Menker says. “So when we talk about averting a crisis, we’re really talking about averting a crisis for the next generation. It’s not this thing of the future. Climate change is something that we’re living through today and will continue to live through no matter what we do as humanity. What platforms and data like ours help us do, though, is see around the corner and prepare for what’s coming.”
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