Harvesting the critical minerals future

"The purpose of these agents is to collaborate with the scientist by reducing the technical burden of analyzing data across files, scripts and query tools, so the scientist can focus on interpretation, judgment and experimental design," said Renan Souza, who led the ORNL experiment's computational work.

"Even with extensive context, fully contextualized interpretation still requires human judgment," said Daniel Rosendo, ORNL lead for OPAL's Genesis Mission platform deployment. "The scientist remains in control, while the OPAL co-scientist's agentic workflow helps shorten the path from data generation to scientific insight."