[HN Gopher] A.I. Needs Copper. It Just Helped to Find Millions o...
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A.I. Needs Copper. It Just Helped to Find Millions of Tons of It in
Zambia.
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 52 points
Date : 2024-07-14 19:55 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://archive.ph/82UT7
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Copper mining is insane - vast vast machines (like apartment
| buildings on wheels) because the ore extraction rate is so low.
|
| But this is a boon to a democratic light in the Southern Africa,
| (https://georgetownsecuritystudiesreview.org/2023/05/05/zambi...)
| here's hoping they negotiate hard with the miners and stuff as
| much revenue into solid projects (roads hospitals schools etc)
| jm_l wrote:
| Having valuable natural resources historically seems to be a
| big detriment to stable democratic governance.
| fritzo wrote:
| Witness Bougainville
| robocat wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
| The resource curse, also known as the paradox of plenty or
| the poverty paradox, is the phenomenon of countries with an
| abundance of natural resources (such as fossil fuels and
| certain minerals) having less economic growth, less
| democracy, or worse development outcomes than countries with
| fewer natural resources. There are many theories and much
| academic debate about the reasons for and exceptions to the
| adverse outcomes. Most experts believe the resource curse is
| not universal or inevitable but affects certain types of
| countries or regions under certain conditions.
| saulpw wrote:
| Turns out it won't be a paperclip maximizer but a battery
| optimizer.
| mproud wrote:
| Of course they don't explain how it found the copper, but I
| suppose the article is less about A.I. and more about the need
| for copper.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| My imagination tells me that they 'fed' it with all
| geographical/geological data available, and cross referenced
| them with various locations of mines (different ores)(gold,
| cobalt, copper, etc.) and the "machine" "figured out" that
| (silly example) river + mountain + over500m + earthquakes (or
| lack of) + various other parameters = so-and-so ore.
|
| There may be some 'coincidences'/similarities that require many
| parameters that the eye misses, while the "AI" can combine far
| more parameters.
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| Isn't that half the point of new AI, or "AI" stuff? That it
| can't tell you how it knows X?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| So I guess "A.I." is the new buzzword for how we describe all
| digital technology going forward. FWIW I thought this was a
| better article that described the actual tech used by KoBold,
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-mining. Now, that article was
| written by the KoBold CEO, so there are certainly parts of it I'd
| take with a giant chunk of salt, but I think it's easier to read
| that article (and read past some of the AI buzzwords) to see how
| they're probably using (a) better surveying tech and (b) standard
| machine learning techniques to generate maps of potential
| deposits.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I generally dislike the term AI because it _could_ reasonably
| describe most computer programs.
|
| However, in this case machine learning is involved, so even by
| a narrower definition calling it "AI" seems more than fair.
| Mathnerd314 wrote:
| IMO AI means neural net. I get that people use it for other
| things, but that's what I use it to mean - there is just no
| other term that's easy to say. And at this point the idea of
| breaking problems down into "neurons" and activation patterns
| is inherent to most AI models. Here though the keywords are
| "ensemble machine learning" and "Bayesian" - they could have
| used a neural net for the machine learning but most likely it
| is just XGBoost or similar.
| https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2021/the-ml-technology-looking...
| mentions they are also doing full-physics joint inversions and
| computer vision, perhaps the vision is a neural net.
| varjag wrote:
| Historically however AI didn't mean a neural net
| specifically.
| chefandy wrote:
| > So I guess "A.I." is the new buzzword for how we describe all
| digital technology going forward
|
| I wonder if any companies are getting deals on compute for
| making a big splashy deal out of the part ML played in these
| processes. Kind of a B2B meets Twikstogrube Influencer
| marketing strategy, but instead of companies having cachet
| because a bunch of social media followers find them appealing,
| they actually manifest things in the physical world. That is a
| big hole in the Generative AI company sales pitch for a) non-
| early-adopter potential customers, and b) many others looking
| uneasily at the kind of resources they're tearing through when
| the only tangible things they've seen from it are a pitches for
| features they never asked for and don't care about, and very
| concerning faked images and videos for extortion, bullying,
| porn, and political shit. I'm not saying those things are all
| its good for, but the communication about the real-world value
| of this stuff has been pretty lacking, and the drawbacks have
| been understandably shouted from the rooftops, so they're
| probably preeeetttyyy thirsty for stories like this.
| shhsdydywhwhb wrote:
| Ml became ai because it's the base for ai.
|
| It's just what it is.
|
| Nonetheless LLM Made it a lot easier for people to understand
| that investment in ml is really really helpful
| pgorczak wrote:
| "That means the conventional predictions are largely inference
| --and worse, they result in unquantified uncertainty."
|
| Wild claim given the fact that Gaussian process regression /
| Kriging was invented in the 1960s in geoscience to do exactly
| what the article claims only their models do: "quantify
| uncertainty, which in turn guides our data collection, as the
| most uncertain rocks often represent the most valuable ones to
| sample"
| ViktorRay wrote:
| The article you linked was written by the CEO of the company.
|
| So it's not going to go into detail about possible negative
| impacts of the mining in the same way that the original NYtimes
| article does.
| kristianp wrote:
| > We need 25 times as much cobalt as we currently mine
|
| Is that really true? I've lost significant money investing in
| explorers that hoped the Cobalt price would stay high. It hasn't,
| but also its hard to compete with Congo's mines.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Well... _most_ current lithium battery chemistries absolutely
| require cobalt, and given the demand for EVs and grid-scale PV
| storage there 's bound to be a lot of interest for it.
|
| Unfortunately for cobalt miners, there's _significant_ r &d
| investment into chemistries free of materials which are
| dominantly sourced from questionable countries/conditions -
| some driven by preparation for trade conflicts, and some driven
| by law (EU supply chain / anti slavery acts). And that is
| yielding its first results, e.g. [1].
|
| [1]
| https://www.global.toshiba/ww/technology/corporate/rdc/rd/to...
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