"Don't Panic"

Welcome to another edition of Software is Feeding the World.

The pace of change in AI has accelerated over the last 2 years. People are calling the release of DeepSeek as America’s Sputnik moment! Time will tell if this is true or not, but if I was a betting person, I would quote Amara’s law.

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

The relevant question for SFTW is how Agrifood organizations should react, plan, prepare, and execute given all these changes.

What should they do tomorrow, and what should they plan for the coming years?

“Don’t Panic”

In the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams, the Hitchhiker’s Guide is an actual book. The book in the novel has the words “Don’t Panic” in large letters on its cover.

The phrase is meant to be comforting advice for intergalactic travelers, especially considering the chaos and absurdity of the universe. However, in the context of the book’s events, such as the earth getting destroyed to build an intergalactic highway, the phrase though pithy and mildly reassuring, is not sufficient.

Image source

We have many people across the world (except maybe in China), who have their underwear in a bunch right now. DeepSeek and subsequent models have leapfrogged existing models in quality and price. You can now run the entire DeepSeek LLM on hardware which costs less than $ 10,000!

So how should agrifood organizations react to all these dramatic and rapid changes?

The AI Venn Diagram

Before we answer the question of how organizations should respond, who are not building foundation model LLMs.

Companies like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, DeepSeek, Meta, and others are investing massive amounts in building foundational technologies which can be used by other companies to build applications. They have ingested billions of data points to train their models.

The foundational models are the infrastructure of generative AI, and they are horizontal in nature. Horizontal means they apply across a broad swath of domains, but might not have the necessary depth in a particular domain.

So they are a mile wide, though they are more than an inch deep, but they are definitely not a mile deep (yet).

This is where players who operate in a given industry or sector come in. Industry specific AI capabilities and models don’t need to be a mile wide, but they need to be a mile deep in their industry.

So the first thing Agrifood organizations should do is “Don’t Panic.”

But just like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the phrase is pithy, but not very useful to take meaningful steps.

AI capabilities sit at the intersection of technology (think models like DeepSeek, vision models, software engineering capabilities like authentication, workflow management etc.) data, and people.

Agrifood companies need to act along those three dimensions to take advantage of the immense power of new technologies like AI.

AI is at the intersection of Technology, Data, and People (Image generated using ChatGPT)

Sector specific companies, for example agrifood businesses need to beef up their technology, data, and people capabilities to be able to harness the power of AI in solving different problems by improving efficiencies, discovering new insights, or solving problems in completely different ways.