The AI evolution has some distance to travel but there is value in current iterations
Data analytics is not a revolution in exploration, it’s an innovation.
It helps with our workflows and creates insight from data in a way geoscientists could not if working with traditional methods alone.
The current buzz around AI risks both under and overstating its impact on mineral exploration. Either would be a mistake. It is important we acknowledge both its limitations and its power.
When we do this and apply analytics practically, we’re seeing outsized results.
For example, we have worked on both large geochemical databases and huge drillcore image banks with great success. For the former, the key was the identification of trends through the combination of very specific datasets analysed with context. For the latter, it was largely the volume of data that was unmanageable and needed a solution. In both cases, the technology delivered huge efficiencies.
In contrast, we’ve done tests on large language models and despite some exciting successes, we found significant limitations to the technology.
This emphasises the need to test what does and doesn’t work with the technology as it stands today in its evolutionary journey. This is about being rational and working within those limitations.
In those examples of successful application, expert knowledge was instrumental in the results.
For the geochemistry project, the context needed was provided by the geoscientists driving the software. They moved the instructions and inputs to ensure the algorithm was trained on relevant in-ground examples. For the drillcore image-recognition project, quality control and selective intervention played a key role in the process.
We are not at the point where we can leave analytical software with a deposit of data and come back to insight. This may be the case one day, but we are not there yet.
In a best-practice example, geologists and data scientists would be working in the same team and combine their expertise to get valuable insight from data.
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This thought leadership piece is in partnership with the Mining Journal's Future of Exploration.
