The US company DIAGNOS has made a deal with US Gold to use its technologies in the search for natural gold and silver reserves in Mexico. US Gold is paying $230,000 CDN for this service and will get some juicy bonuses if some precious metals are actually found. The “AI” behind the technology DIAGNOS applies, however, is quite a straight forward approach, in which maps (satellite images, topography, geology, etc.) are weighted and combined into a “prospectivity map”.

This technology might be used to dig holes, but is not ground breaking on the AI side. Statistical learning has been around in for quite a while now and there is lots of research on it. However, it is nice to see some of that research actually applied for useful activities, like exploiting natural resources. The slow speed in which actual AI research results are adopted by commercial companies (possibly with the exception of computer vision, i.e., face recognition) can be linked to the often difficult to understand algorithms and almost always impossible to predict outcomes of them. This inherent complexity of AI algorithms (especially of those that aspire world domination!) prevents fast adaptation by the industry and thus limits research to academia somewhat.The algorithms used by DIAGNOS are no exception of that. There is no danger of them (or any other similar algorithm for that matter) becoming conscious, thus no need to panic: As an example of state of the art applied AI, it shows how far we still are from doomsday events, therefore the AI Panic Level changes by -0.1%.

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