Josh Goldman

Mineral exploration offers venture-scale payoff—a few million dollars can create a 100–1,000x return—but industry productivity has fallen roughly 10x in 30 years, from about eight quality discoveries per $1 billion invested to less than one. Josh Goldman says KoBold targets $50–100 million per discovery, treating mineral supply as an information problem: although deposits occur in many places, they are rare in the Earth as a whole, and “the scarce resource is the information about where the ore deposits are located.”

KoBold’s Mingomba deposit in Zambia demonstrates how ore grade can transform both economics and environmental impact. Its core exceeds 5% copper versus roughly 0.6% across operating mines; compared with a 0.5% deposit, 5% grade can mean “ten times less stuff to haul out of the ground,” a smaller plant, less waste and lower capital intensity.

The data advantage comes from assembling irreplaceable but fragmented evidence, not possessing one magical data set. Tens of thousands of public repositories include satellite imagery, geophysics, samples, regulatory filings and nearly century-old Zambian maps hand-painted on linen: “The rocks haven’t moved. So there’s no expiration date on the data.”

KoBold combines sensors, a unified data system and dozens of models in an active-learning loop that deliberately investigates uncertainty. Field teams collect ground truth where models are least certain, retrain them daily and receive updated predictions; a proprietary airborne system captures 600 colors. Goldman rejects the “silver bullet” narrative: “There is no way to isolate the AI from the HI.”

High-quality deposits, rather than financing, are the binding constraint on new mining supply. Goldman pushes back on Elad Gil’s ESG-capital hypothesis: “Great projects don’t have problems getting funded,” while insecure property rights, inconsistent tax or royalty terms, or a missing social license can still prevent a technically successful discovery from becoming a successful mine.

Rare earths are “not that rare”; the strategic issue is China’s concentration of refining and downstream capacity. Chinese processors can accept lower margins when competing for feedstock, making new private facilities difficult to finance without guarantees or subsidies and pulling subsequent manufacturing stages toward the same geography.

KoBold institutionalizes falsifiability and competing hypotheses because sparse geological evidence permits many possible underground worlds. Its “Epistemology of Exploration” requires disciplined uncertainty reduction. Goldman separately describes a demand case of historic scale: by mid-century, humanity will need, over the next 25 years, to mine more copper than has been mined in all human history and increase lithium production roughly tenfold relative to today.

🔗 Original source & video: Predicting the Earth with Josh Goldman: How KoBold Uses AI to Find Critical Minerals