Abhi is a software engineer turned farmer and the co-founder and CEO of Living Roots. In this episode, he shares how he's using large language models and AI to transform agriculture—achieving remarkable results for smallholder farmers with minimal costs.
Topics Discussed
- Abhi's journey from software engineering to farming
- Using Google Gemini's expanded context windows to process thousands of agricultural science papers
- Achieving 30% yield increases for smallholder farmers in the first season
- Combining reinforcement learning with LLM reasoning to forecast outcomes of agricultural interventions
- Living Roots' mission to optimize farming practices through AI-driven analysis
- How research institutions could adopt similar AI pipelines for extracting insights from scientific literature
About the Guest
Abhi is the co-founder and CEO of Living Roots, a company that applies cutting-edge AI to agriculture. His background in software engineering gives him a unique perspective on how large language models and reinforcement learning can be applied to solve real-world problems in farming and food production.
Key Takeaways
One of the most striking results discussed in this episode is the 30% yield increase achieved for smallholder farmers in the very first season—using AI to extract actionable insights from thousands of agricultural research papers. This approach of using LLMs to synthesize scientific literature into practical recommendations has implications far beyond agriculture, suggesting a model that research institutions across disciplines could adopt.
About Bio2040
There are so many challenges in drug discovery. We are a group of entrepreneurs and scientists who want to improve things.
Subscribe to the Podcast on iTunes
Be in the know and sign up for the newsletter.
Follow Flavio on Twitter here.