Carbon Robotics just dropped what might be agriculture's answer to ChatGPT. The Seattle startup's new Large Plant Model can identify and target any weed species instantly—no retraining required. For farmers using the company's laser-wielding robots across 100+ farms in 15 countries, this means pointing at a problem weed and telling the machine to kill it in real time, instead of waiting 24 hours for engineers to retrain the system. It's a shift from computer vision that needs constant hand-holding to AI that actually understands what it's looking at.
Carbon Robotics just solved one of agriculture's most frustrating AI problems. The company's new Large Plant Model can recognize any plant species on sight—even ones it's never encountered before—and immediately target them for elimination without a single line of new code or hours of retraining.
The Seattle-based robotics company announced the breakthrough Monday, marking a significant leap from traditional computer vision systems that choke every time they see something slightly different. Before LPM, Carbon Robotics' LaserWeeder robots needed roughly 24 hours of retraining whenever a new weed variety showed up—or even when a familiar weed looked different in new soil conditions.
"The farmer can live in real time and say, 'Hey, this is a new weed. I want you to kill this,' and that was something that had never been done before," CEO and founder Paul Mikesell told TechCrunch. "There's no new labeling or retraining because the Large Plant Model understands, at a much deeper level, what it's looking at and the type of plant."
The model powering Carbon AI—the brain inside the company's autonomous weed-killing fleet—learned from more than 150 million photos and data points. That massive dataset comes from the company's robots already operating across more than 100 farms in 15 countries, constantly feeding real-world agricultural data back into the system.
Mikesell knows a thing or two about building neural networks at scale. He cut his teeth developing similar systems at and worked on 's Oculus VR headsets before founding Carbon Robotics in 2018. The company started developing LPM shortly after shipping its first laser-equipped robots in 2022.
