AI is How America Builds Again

So can you talk about a few of them? It would be great to hear some examples, 'cause I think when people h-hear, like, manufacturing, for instance, they're not thinking, "Oh, that's at the cutting edge of tech." What are some examples of how the portfolio is investing in the, for the physical world?

Yeah, sure.

Um, I'll, I'll, I'll give you o-one example that I love because I think it sort of captures a pretty broad spectrum, uh, of, uh, of what we're talking about here.

We, we have a portfolio company called Mariana Minerals.

Uh, it's founded by a former l-longtime Tesla engineer.

He was at Tesla for a decade, uh, working across Gigafactory and, um, the building out the lithium plant in Corpus Christi and the battery metals and minerals supply chain.

Um, did lots of really important things working very closely with Elon Musk.

And he recognized, uh, which has...

You know, it's been a topic of conversation over the last year that we are dangerously dependent on China for our critical minerals, uh, and materials that are, are important for powering economy, and not just our defense base, but our broader industrial base.

So the m- the, the materials that go into the things that we use every single day, um, you know, 60-something percent of them are probably mined in China, and 90-something percent of them are refined in China.

So all roads kind of lead through China when it comes to things like copper, zinc, aluminum, magnesium, steel, many of the materials that we use, like, in our day-to-day lives as critical, cr-critical materials.

So he was like, "How do I solve this? How do I bring technology to this problem, to this industry that basically hasn't changed for 100 years, that's using lots of the same techniques that it used, you know, in the beginning of the industrial age?" Um, and he took his experience at Tesla, which is this real factory mindset, like, how do we h-how do we construct everything as a factory, and is bringing it to verticalized mining and refining.

Um, so the way he's thinking about it is like, how do we deconstruct the process of what it means to build and operate a mine and a refinery into its kind of core components and understand how to turn those core components into, like, mini factories using technology? And how do we basically, like, inject technology into every single process of owning and operating a mine? Uh, which is just not how current mining comp-companies work.

So, um, everything from how do you use, uh, like, LLMs to basically handle a lot of the complicated coordination between all of the different parties that you have operating at a mine.

You have EPCs, you have lots of different types of contractors, you have internal employees, you have folks working in the pit, you have technologists and geologists.

All of these people have kind of complicated and overlapping responsibilities, and one of the big challenges, like one of the reasons why it takes 20 years to permit and build a new mine today, is it's just a lot of different people to coordinate across with regulators, et cetera.

So they've, they, th- they've come and said, "Okay, well, how do we use AI to make this problem better? How do we use AI to make sure that we have all the data we need when we need it? How do we use AI to make sure we're quickly responding to all of the requests that are coming from regulators on various parts of the permitting process? How do we use AI to make sure all of these, um, all of these complicated contractor groupsUh, you know, who have sort of overlapping needs are communicating effectively, and when something updates at one, one part of the plan, it sort of flows down through to every other part of the plan.

All the way through to how do we use like autonomous systems to actually do the mining? Like what are all the latest and greatest cutting-edge technologies in robotics that we can actually apply to a mine site? And, you know, we're technologists, so we know how to do that.

So, you know, whether it's, uh, drill rigs or autonomous trucks or, you know, security systems, like what are all the latest and greatest in robotics that we can apply? And then all the way down to the refining, like how do we use the latest in reinforcement learning and control systems to actually control the chemistry, uh, for the, for, for, you know, for how we're extracting copper from, you know, the slush that comes out of a copper mine.

Um, and those are really expensive chemicals.

That's like mainly the driver of cost in mines.

So if we can use AI to do all that better, you know, you operate your mine more ef-efficiently.

So I know that's like a very long answer, but I think it just goes to show if you're doing something complicated and physical, we're talking about interjecting AI at basically every single stage of that business and turning it from something that's like not economical to do into something that's very economical to do, um, and doing it more safely, more cleanly, um, and just like overall better.