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- Undersea mining and the broader trends
Undersea mining and the broader trends
read time: 3 min
Hey – David here. In this edition of DRIFFT you’ll get:
💡What’s New: Undersea mining is part of a broader trend.
🤔 Opinion: Opensource or OpenAI?
🛠️ Tools: Speed up your work and discover something new.
🎓 Tutorial: LangChain for building AI apps.
Want to feature your service or product in DRIFFT? Grab an ad spot here.
💡What’s new
Soon we’ll have a global lidar map of earth’s surface.
Impossible Metals shares a roadmap for undersea mining robots.
Battle lines are being drawn in undersea mining.
If the battery metals thesis plays out, the World Bank says, global demand could reach +500%.
In an automated world, AI and robotics are keys to controlling mining.
A short video introduction to subsea mining issues.
Get acquainted with undersea geology and monitoring technology.
Mine automation is growing, though not as fast as the earth observation market.
Geopolitical risk lowers global investment in terrestrial mining, but brings opportunity for profits based on higher volatility.
Asteroid mining isn’t science fiction after all, but space tech stock prices aren’t inspiring me.
🤔 Opinion
Should we use OpenAI or opensource?
It depends. Though most are opting for opensource.
The big tech companies know they have no mote. A leaked memo from Google describes how they’d lose to opensource. META has announced their desire to release foundational models. (This answers a question I’ve been asking for several weeks–why hasn’t Apple rushed in like the others to release a chat product?)
So if you’re thinking of integrating chat assistants into your company or your products, you probably want to keep the AI startups at arm’s length while you build in-house competency.
I’m guessing most are going to trial OpenAI’s API. But as skills build, you can bet they’ll move to open solutions, especailly if they turn out to be as useful as the incumbents.
That also means that AI skills are here to stay, and ALL companies will inevitably end up having AI business units. First movers win again.
🛠️ Tools and Data
Opensource to speed your daily tasks
HuggingChat - opensource ChatGPT from Hugging Face https://huggingface.co/chat
ExplainPaper - A tool that helps you understand research papers, https://www.explainpaper.com/
ChatPDF - upload PDFs and chat with them, https://pdf.chat/
SegmentGeospatial - use Meta’s SAM model on your geospatial data, https://6452ae31057d2610e3302e55--opengeos.netlify.app/examples/automatic_mask_generator/
🎓 See What’s Possible
One thing every day for 365 days makes you unstoppable.
Learn how to use LangChain to combine your data and other AIs into your own personal super ai.
My favorite graphic for the week year.
A reminder of how not so long ago a deep sea project owned by Nautulis Minerals was in default.

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