A.I. Needs Copper. It Just Helped to Find Millions of Tons of It in Zambia.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/11/climate/kobold-zambia-copper-ai-mining.html

by bookofjoe • 2 years ago

90 55 2 years ago

bookofjoe• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Having valuable natural resources historically seems to be a big detriment to stable democratic governance.

fritzo• 2 years ago

Witness Bougainville

robocat2• 2 years ago

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.

testrun• 2 years ago

Not always. Australia, Canada, Norway and USA as counter examples.

oliwarner• 2 years ago

Historically speaking, the people and the environment come a very, very distant second and third place to mine owners.

Even moreso these days because China and North Korea have sponsored so much infrastructure in Africa over 20 years as European colonisation has pulled out, and bought so many mines and in-field processing plants that the local people are just an ablative grease for mechanised and chemical mining.

saulpw• 2 years ago

Turns out it won't be a paperclip maximizer but a battery optimizer.

tonetegeatinst• 2 years ago

Surprised it wouldn't be the rare silicon needed to make the AI chips...or the data storage it uses

mproud• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Isn't that half the point of new AI, or "AI" stuff? That it can't tell you how it knows X?

technothrasher• 2 years ago

When I was last in Zambia, I saw truck after truck full of huge copper sheets lined up at the border waiting to pay duty. I don't think it is any big news to anybody that there's copper there. It sounds like the AI just help find the extents of this particular deposit, not that it surprised anybody with secret copper.

hn_throwaway_992• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

varjag3• 2 years ago

Historically however AI didn't mean a neural net specifically.

mistrial9• 2 years ago

my friend, XGBoost is not a neural net-based method, it represents a best-of-breed for an alternative family of methods.

"While the XGBoost model often achieves higher accuracy than a single decision tree, it sacrifices the intrinsic interpretability of decision trees. For example, following the path that a decision tree takes to make its decision is trivial and self-explained, but following the paths of hundreds or thousands of trees is much harder."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XGBoost

chefandy• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

“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• 2 years ago

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.

kristianp3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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...

ClassyJacket• 2 years ago

But notably, LFP batteries do not use cobalt, which includes the Rear Wheel Drive Tesla Model 3.

wyldfire• 2 years ago

Don't make the mistake of bringing about Roko's basilisk too slowly.

Loughla• 2 years ago

The problem with that is that someone like myself offers nothing for the AI. So why would it waste resources keeping me alive to torture me?

entangledqubit• 2 years ago

To set an example for others... :-P

iftheshoefitss• 2 years ago

Turns out Roko boy is a few years off until the giant computer learns how to manipulate matter other stuff we can adapt to

ta988• 2 years ago

Humans need copper for building more machines that help them in everyday task. Humans used the machine to find more copper.

awinter-py2• 2 years ago

telegraph needs copper. it just helped find some

big-green-man• 2 years ago

Paperclip maximizer confirmed.

floppiplopp• 2 years ago

FEED ME, MEATBAGS!

kristianp3• 2 years ago

Ive heard that incresed demand for copper is through electrification of vehicles and increased demand on the grid to charge them, not so much AI.

A.I. Needs Copper. It Just Helped to Find Millions of Tons of It in Zambia.

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