Finds Copper, Gold, and Cobalt Deposits

Finds Copper, Gold, and Cobalt Deposits

 Startup's Algorithms Discover Important Minerals in Overlooked Areas

Last summer, mining startup KoBold made waves when it announced it had discovered one of the world's largest copper deposits in more than a decade in Zambia using artificial intelligence.

Now, startup Earth AI says it has discovered promising deposits of base metals in parts of Australia that other mining companies have ignored for decades. Reports indicate that future base metal supplies are likely to emerge from a combination of field data analyzed by AI, according to a report published by TechCrunch.

"The real frontier in mining is not so much geography as it is technological," Roman Teslyuk, founder and CEO of Earth AI, told TechCrunch. Earth AI identified copper, cobalt, and gold deposits in the Northern Territory and silver, molybdenum, and tin deposits at another site in New South Wales, 310 miles (500 kilometers) northwest of Sydney.

The idea for Earth AI emerged from Teslyuk's graduate studies. Teslyuk, a Ukrainian-born engineer, was pursuing a PhD at the University of Sydney, where he learned about Australia's mining industry. There, the government owns the rights to mineral deposits and leases them for six years. He said that since the 1970s, exploration companies have been required to submit their data to a national archive.

"For some reason, no one uses it," he said. "If I could build an algorithm capable of absorbing all that knowledge and learning from the failures and successes of millions of geologists in the past, I could make much better predictions about where minerals might be in the future."

Teslyuk founded Earth AI as a software company focused on predicting potential deposits and then connecting with clients who wanted to explore the sites further. But clients were reluctant to invest, in part because they didn't want to bet millions of dollars on unproven technology predictions.

"Mining is a very conservative industry," Teslyuk said. "Anything that goes against the accepted dogma is considered heresy." So Earth AI decided to develop its own drilling rig to prove that the sites it identified were as promising as its software indicated. Although the company uses AI to search for minerals like kobold, Teslyuk says it's taking a different approach.

He explained that Earth AI's algorithms are trained to quickly and efficiently scan large areas to find deposits that might otherwise have been overlooked. "The way we explored for minerals in the past, in the 20th century, was very time-consuming," Teslyuk said. "It took decades to find something. With the modern pace of the world, you can't wait that long."