AI is the new tractor

Author

David Williams
April 29, 2023

read in 3 min

Hey – David here. In this edition of DRIFFT you’ll get:

💡What’s New: Mining is on the path to going fully autonomous.

🤔 Opinion: My view of the current generation of AI tech.

🛠️ Tips: Some tools and techniques to speed your work.

🎓 Tutorial: Building your own GPT, by Tesla’s former head of AI.

Want to feature your service or product in DRIFFT? Grab an ad spot here.

💡What’s new

Autonomous mining equipment is catching the tailwinds of the AI hype. Everything from self-driving trucks, monitoring equipment, drones, and even undersea mining robots are showing up a lot in my searches (and so on and so forth).

One question: Do these matter in the face of a downward trending global economy (with its obvious implications for the demand in minerals)?

In the 2010s, when oil was hitting bottom dollar, companies like SLB invested heavily in AI capabilities for autonomous exploration platforms. A quick look at their operational efficiencies and profits in this petroleum bull market say more than I ever could.

SLB isn’t just getting rich on the global oil pinch. Automation tends to increase profit margins and shareholder returns for companies that effectively implement it.

I’m watching the companies who are early to adopt, especially those of any size.

🤔 Opinion

Lately I am often asked my opinion on AI. Here’s an antecdote that captures it.

Imagine you’re living in 1890 and plowing your field with an ox. You look next door and see your neighbor has just purchased something called a tractor, a clunky metal box on wheels. At first you laugh at the smoke and noise. But then you see him plow twice as much as you in the same amount of time.

AI is the new tractor.

AI lets you do more with less. If you’re still using a horse in the age of the tractor, you probably won’t be in business for long.

To start using AI, pick a goal you have and find ways to automate it with an AI tool. It’s easy to search for one on an aggregator like this one (https://theresanaiforthat.com/).

🛠️ Tools and Data

Opensource to speed your daily geo tasks

  1. Journeai: a look at how trip search will work in the near future - https://journeai.com/

  2. Tabnine - for anyone coding geo ai workflows, check out this free, full code completion add-on for VSCode https://www.tabnine.com/

  3. Whitebox Geo: array of tools for analyzing data, including DEM data, satellite imagery, LiDAR point clouds, and vector data, embedded in a GIS (e.g., QGIS, ArcGIS) - https://www.whiteboxgeo.com/

  4. Mumbai Semantic Segmentation Data: free dataset for training satellite AI models - https://github.com/GeoAI-Research-Lab/Mumbai-Semantic-Segmentation-Dataset

🎓 See What’s Possible

One thing every day for 365 days makes you unstoppable.

Understand what GPT is and how to build one. Andrej Karpathy, former head of AI at Tesla, spells it out and gives you nanoGPT for free.

My favorite map graphic from the week.

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Know someone looking to level-up their AI and opensource game in mining? Just copy and paste this link: https://drifft.beehiiv.com 

Thanks for reading! I am here for you. Want me to look into a particular topic? Email your suggestions and feedback.

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