Elemental Informatics

05/28/2026

We operate DJI drones at Elemental Informatics. They're awesome. The arguments about their safety are years old now. There are many valid points on both sides. The reality is that "proving" the safety of any complex technical device like a drone is extremely difficult.

It would be helpful if some trustable authority published a publicly-accessible set of data objects that security professionals and interested organizations could use as a best-practices baseline for network access control.

A respectful technical response: an audit is useful evidence, not proof of permanent safety.

05/10/2026

https://sol.elementalinformatics.com/news/daily-news-summary-2026-05-10.html

This daily news summary is just one example of what you can do with our virtual assistant app, Element. No special tools required. Element is competent across a broad range of tasks. The same app that did this research and created this webpage can manage your calendar, work with your local files and files on your Google Drive, read and draft emails, generate images, manage large codebases, and just be generally helpful. No special tools or training required. You can treat it like a human coworker because it acts like a human coworker. Just talk to it.

Element can use AI you run on your own computer, giving you unparalleled data privacy and enabling compliance with almost any AI governance policies applicable to your org. The news summary you see here was entirely created with Element. It used its image generation tool to call the OpenAI gpt-images-2 API to create all of the graphics.

Element can also use AI available via commercial providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, or OpenRouter. In fact, we use Element to develop and maintain Element itself using GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.7. All you need is an API key. When used with frontier AI, Element's capabilities are state of the art.

08/04/2025

How popular is AI in coding? The short answer is "WAY more popular than it was a year ago."

This graph shows how many tokens were generated through the OpenRouter API. OpenRouter is very popular among coders who use AI so it's a pretty good indicator of overall growth in AI usage. During the week of August 5 2024, 100 billion tokens passed through their API. For the same week in 2025, they expect to see about 3.3 trillion tokens.

The idea that AI generates low quality code and that only low skill devs use it is rapidly fading into the past. Sure, there are low skill coders out there using AI to make some truly useless and buggy software, but there are a lot more genuinely skilled coders using it to greatly increase their output.

In other news, water is wet. Stay tuned to the Elemental Informatics page for more hard-hitting tech journalism.

The unified interface for LLMs. Find the best models & prices for your prompts

05/29/2025

We've been too busy to properly keep up with our social media lately but here's a short video describing what we've been up to. TL/DR: A lot.

02/13/2025

I processed my first dataset from the new DJI Matrice 4E this week and I have to say that I'm impressed. Eric Ebert from Falcon Unmanned Aerial Systems planned and flew this mission with a demo unit provided by Vertex Unmanned Solutions.

The efficiency gains over its predecessor are striking - where the M3E required two batteries and captured around 1,300 photos, the M4E captured over 2,600 photos on a single battery in half the flight time. Both aircraft used the Smart Oblique Profile with 80/80 overlap but, over the same area, the M4E's Smart Oblique takes many more photos than the M3E's Smart Oblique.

I processed the dataset with Metashape on High Quality with minimal setup, i.e., no gradual selection, only 1 "Optimize Cameras" cycle after I removed sinking and floating points manually. I textured the resulting mesh with fourteen 16k textures.

You can see the M4E model for yourself at: https://elemental.nira.app/a/itF80tOQTjqFcDkgOj-_NA/1

And the M3E model for comparison: https://elemental.nira.app/a/FgXgcqWPSVyApgtbmHAZgA/

12/10/2024

Just a quick video showing what we've been up to at Elemental Informatics.

What you're seeing here is a screen recording from a laptop running in my truck.

10/03/2024

Check out this prototype 3D-printed model of the Oxford Square! This physical model was made from this (https://elemental.nira.app/a/S2OsIwMvQJKhPm6bxELZtA/1) photogrammetry model we made last year.

Business card for scale. 🙂

Big shout-out to Eric at Falcon Unmanned Systems for the fantastic printing job and collaboration necessary to make this.

08/21/2024

The 2024 Taranis season is in the books.
93,680.2 acres mapped.
546 hours flown.
250,000+ photos taken.

05/27/2024

We haven't been posting much lately but it's because we've been flying from sunup to sundown every day in Nebraska doing agriculture stuff but don't worry, more cool drone content is coming soon!

03/15/2024

Any time. Any place.