Mfakeyi Makayi

The vast majority of ore deposits are still out there waiting to be found.

They're just harder to find.

Of all the past mines we know of, they were easy because they were poking out of the surface and they were near the surface.

So we need to look deeper.

Controversially, we've been taught that these materials will run out.

We don't lack ore body deposits.

We lack information of where they lie.

So if you had a crystal ball, you'd just look into it and start digging out the rocks that are the best and generate the least waste.

But we don't have a crystal ball.

So the thing that we should do is make predictions of where these materials lie.

My colleagues and I at Kobold are doing what the industry has neglected to do.

We aim to predict everything

quantify what we don't know and collect information efficiently.

So we're all going to try that right now.

I'd want you to predict 1,000 meters below your feet what the concentration of copper is right where you're sitting.

I want you to predict how hard it is, how fractured it is, what's its density.

We aim to predict all these things and more.

We're developing machine learning technologies that help us predict all of this and rigorously quantify our uncertainties in these predictions.

So what does this look like in practice?

When we're exploring for mines, we often fly aircraft thousands of kilometers across the Earth to try to collect information, such as the Earth's magnetism, its gravitational field, that tells us something about the rocks beneath.