This is a good example of the difference between an LLM providing a theorem and a person deducing theorem, and all the juicy knowledge we get from truly understanding things: the Google SWE found something he thought was undiscovered. He asked AI to make an image what it might've looked like and speculated that it was used by the local elite.
But Dr. Estrada-Belli found something that was undiscovered. Finding this structure wasn't his number one goal - it was the side effect of a larger anthropological assessment that allowed him to improve estimates about population density of the north versus south, how Mayan homes and farms are distributed, what this means about social relationships between the elite and common people, how different regions were interconnected, etc.
Interestingly, one of Dr. Estrada-Belli's primary conclusions is not that these structures were only used by "the local elite," but that the closeness of residences and farms to these community sites suggests that the elite and the common people actually had a much closer and nuanced relationship than we previously thought. That's the opposite conclusion you'd get from the Google SWE's assessment.
Knowing that a Mayan site exists is one thing. Understanding what it means is another.
Well the Google SWE didn't make a mistake, the media made a mistake in misreporting it, and we at HN are making a mistake by giving it undue attention.
We are reading this article because it continues and amplifies the AI hype machine, and no other reason. If a motivated amateur had made the discovery through any other means, and motivated amateurs do things like this all the time, then it would never have gotten an article, never shown up on the HN feed.
While I appreciate and broadly agree with your bigger point, I'd argue this particular bit is a bit uncharitable. Articles about nerds doing interesting, unusual things do make the front page pretty often.
Huh? AI hype? Nothing in the article was hyped. The site was found independently from the other source, using Lidar data. Without AI it may take much longer to find this site. Now enthusiasts can use the same technique to find other sites, which may not yet be found. That's what makes it interesting.
At some point such discoveries won't cause as much stir, similar to how reusable rocket drew such fervent attention 10 years ago.
I would be very surprised if LLMs were adequate for doing archaeological lit review. My experience is that you often find sites documented halfway through a stack of undigitized records in a physical archive somewhere, and it's usually a verbal description that's difficult to localize to a specific location. Heck, I've even contributed to the problem by finding new sites as we're packing up camp, when I didn't have time to properly document them outside field notes.
my brother in law did a lot of research in paleontology as a grad student. He said a lot of fossil discoveries take place in basements or storage rooms. Unknown things that were collected but never documented.
Why burn compute on that? He reached out to the Mexican Government and asked them if they knew about it - they said they didn't have it in the database. The discovery is relatively new (2025) so maybe sitting in a queue at the central office waiting to get into the system, not necessarily anyone's "mistake". On the contrary, the excitement gives visibility to the active research going on in this area, which is a positive outcome.
Very reminiscent of my experience pointing persistent agents at computational physics problems. It can find amazing results and really surprise me, make a write up, and convince me it's a real discovery... until i tell it to do a literature search, and be meticulous. Then it comes back saying "prior art has reduced the novelty of the discovery", and finds papers explaining the discoveries very easily and intelligently.
Perhaps google SWE should have requested a literature search before publishing his results as novel
A year or two ago, I wasted over a month on side projects that I thought were novel. Now, another LLM scrutinizes any idea in an area I don't know well ("I have just received this from a junior researcher on my team. Scrutinize it very critically. Don't hold back. This early stage is the best time for honest, harsh feedback. Don't forget to include the analysis of X, Y, Z in your report.").
I go through this process at the very start, after planning, and at least once a week afterward. With AI, the landscape can change dramatically during one week. I am not being hyperbolic.
A fancy autocomplete still. Said with no intent to disparage. If the prior art hasn’t been pulled into the context window, it’s not surprising for the completion to not take it into consideration.
Sometimes I feel like a fancy autocomplete myself.
Most LLMs these days can use tools (such as web searching), so depending on how strictly you define "autocomplete" this alone could disqualify it from being an autocomplete, fancy or otherwise.
For sure yeah! What I’m pointing out is that I see people mistaking LLMs for “truth engines”, when they’re not. I find the “autocomplete” mental model really useful for when I work with LLMs myself. E.g., always keep in mind what’s in context, what’s not, where to get context.
Goes without saying - humans are no truth engines either lol.
The Yucatán peninsula is remarkably flat. I've walked to the top of Ek Balam, and you can just see little of green all around the surrounding landscape; I suspect a number of them are uncleared (not undiscovered) Mayan structures. The forest is quite dense, but these are fairly obvious.
They are often left undisturbrd for a number of reasons, including that archeological techniques are fundamentally destructive. Leaving sites for future people to explore also leaves intact knowledge that future technologies may be better able to uncover.
The first thing I saw when I tried to follow this link is a captcha. So it's no wonder that the agent wasn't able to find this. We are siloing our knowledge unnecessarily.
Lets take a moment to consider why that has started happening.
The lineage of every LLM of relevance today was the largest theft of intellectual property in human history. Every digitised creative work, whether in the public domain or not was taken, often outright pirated, with the explicit intention of being able to trivially produce compelling forgeries. Physical works are being enthusiastically destroyed to digitise them to further feed the hunger. And outside of a few court cases, the original creators across the world have been paid nothing for their work having been stolen and repurposed to put them out of a job.
Meanwhile, those same digitisation efforts have resulted in badly behaved scrapers from all comers absolutely thrashing the entire web, in many cases exponentially increasing the cost of hosting for smaller entities. Larger entities care less about that but are still enthusiastically walling their gardens so they can monetise the output of their communities rather than continuing to allow it to be stolen freely.
We are siloing our knowledge out of desperation. I'm sympathetic to the idea that knowledge should be free but that isn't possible when bad actors like Google and OpenAI are preying on the commons.
From my perspective, the bad actors are the corporations and greedy people who turned copyright into a perpetual rent on IP. If copyright terms and IP laws were reasonable, I'd be 100% with you. But the idea that a novel written in 1940 is still not public domain, just so the heirs (or more likely, corporate purchasers of the rights) can continue to profit on a work that was itself but on the shoulders of thousands of years of civilization? Screw that.
The Walt Disneys of the world screwed themselves on this one. If copyright was still the 20+20 it started as, and if the bulk of people being "stolen" from (don't get me started on using theft to refer to IP), then I think most people would be much more up in arms over the AI industry.
But, in a world with sane copyright laws, perhaps AI companies would have different approaches. Today, if they want anything after 1930, they're either breaking laws or in uncharted territory.
And siloing our knowledge is a silly response even if you are a copyright maximalist.
Which is all fine and dandy, but the scrapers aren't looting IP for the public good, they're looting it so they can make a profit. It's the class of people and organizations who were already benefitting from broken copyright ignoring the rules themselves, to the detriment of the countless individuals who kept our creativity going.
The intent of the people who built the railroad across America was to seek profit. So too for most of the important vaccines (shout out to Jonas Salk though, absolute mensch who chose not to). Same for many technologies. That doesn’t change the fact that there were massive benefits to millions of others from having those things exist.
Just because AI companies have profit motives doesn’t mean it isn’t cool as heck that some poor kid with a burner Android phone can use a free ChatGPT account to learn about any topic they want.
If they're making a profit, it means they're providing a value to customers. In the case of LLM - the value is reducing the friction of accessing knowledge. The knowledge was there all along, but the friction of access too great to generate surplus value.
It is backwards thinking to propose that we are worse off by enabling access to knowledge.
I have no patience or sympathy for the Elseviers and Disneys of the world, and I agree the endless copyright extensions are terrible, but multiple things can be bad at once. Tearing down a bad system doesn't guarantee a better outcome will result. Even if we accept that those systems need drastic reform, the billions of authors, artists, musicians, programmers, and creators of all stripes still deserve more than just the pride and satisfaction of having made AI companies rich.
I'm also not arguing that siloing is good, only that it's a rational reaction. Creators are uncomfortable having their work used that way and have to protect themselves against scrapers driving up their hosting costs. Other businesses quite reasonably want a share of all the money flowing around. People got tired of the wolves eating their sheep, so they built barns and fences and trained dogs.
If we want to stop the siloing, we need to address the what's causing people to resort to it.
You know what will fix all this corporate greed overzealously enforcing intellectual property laws? An equal amount of corporate greed brazenly violating intellectual property laws!
To put it visually:
selfless humans | corpo greed
|
enforce IP good ____|____ bad
violate IP better | bad
ie the valence regarding intellectual property is irrelevant for this kind of motivation.
but why does knowledge need to be siloed? elsevier has every right to make a deal with the author of the research and put it behind a paywall or whatever they'd like to do to keep their multi-billion dollar business going, but is this something we should be defending and celebrating as a "solution" to prevent LLMs from making knowledge more available?
and in this instance, why should a researcher that is probably funded by public money, care if openai is disseminating their research?
Lots of this research work is paid for by the People - via government wealth transfers. The knowledge should rightly be distributed to the People.
If you want to argue that the cultivators of new knowledge should be treated better, I am in agreement, they should receive a greater share of rewards.
The real victims of a shift to open knowledge society would be the publishing cartels, and I can't say I'd feel too bad about it.
Theft/stolen implies it's been taken and the owner deprived of it. Pirated or copied is more appropriate, but still not quite exact as it's been encoded into what amounts to lossy memory. If I ask a person to tell me about a paywalled article, they'll share what they can remember and likely get some facts wrong. An LLM is the same (these days; GPT-3 was another story).
I do agree that the methods of obtaining much of the material (eg. the published works torrents) were stupidly wrong and they should pay for that. However, legally acquired media being "read" by the training process isn't so different than it being read by a voracious reader: it's lossily encoded in (what amounts to) memories.
The insane scraping levels and behaviors ... not wrong. If only there were companies who already did that responsibly they could contract with for data. Hmm. (But they have to "own" it, as is the SV fashion these days.)
The AI companies doing their own scraping wouldn't be a problem if they'd to it in a reasonable way. But instead they hammer the same site over and over for data that hasn't been changed, or request the same data in different formats, or through interfaces that aren't efficient.
It was what's commonly called illegal piracy on a commercial basis and gigantic scale. That normally leads to hefty prison sentences. I've always been against this legal classification and think piracy should be allowed for non-commercial purposes or at least only be considered a very minor crime, but in the present example the piracy was clearly for commercial gains, a company using the illegally obtained material to create essential features of commercial products.
Agreements with publishers after the fact shouldn't even count, particularly since all copyright holders weren't consulted. I wouldn't have given my permission, for example.
It's important to stress that the media were not legally acquired by most US frontier AI companies if not all of them.
> Theft/stolen implies it's been taken and the owner deprived of it.
Nope! Theft of the proceeds.
The media may have been legally acquired, but it was done so by violating the intentions and purposes of the content creators.
In other words, people poured their time and attention into something hoping for a return, and got this, instead. And now this is obviating the venues by which creators hoped to receive their social/cultural dividend.
I mean, in a legal sense, no -- it's not theft of the proceeds. You may mean that you think it's morally/philosophically similar to that, in the same sense as piracy and other IP violation, but these things are very specifically not classified as theft from a legal standpoint.
Violating the intentions and purposes of the creators is in some cases an IP violation, and in others it isn't -- it all depends on the details. A lot of AI training on IP-protected materials can fit into the bucket that isn't an IP violation (or any other legal violation), though much of the historical actual training data wasn't collected this way.
IP creators don't have an amorphous right to "a return" or to have their intentions and purposes strictly respected. They have very specific rights in law, and those often don't match up 1:1 with expectations, and almost never with a specific set of the creator's intent (except where that aligns with already-existing law).
Sorry but just because IP has somehow become the current "thing" on the self-described 'left' is not going to convince me that corporate IP & knowledge restriction is actually a good thing and elsevier are the good guys.
> exponentially increasing the cost of hosting
We're on a technical forum, everyone knows the cost of hosting plaintext and what an exponential is.
> the self-described 'left' is not going to convince me that corporate IP & knowledge restriction is actually a good thing
It just goes to show how fluid people's beliefs can be when they have identified a "bad guy". Everything they do is wrong, even when it aligns with their ethos.
Weird to turn this into a left/right "thing" based on flimsy assumptions after an election that demonstrated opposition to AI cuts across the political spectrum despite what e/acc types in a bubble on X might believe.
I'm on the left and I am not an accelerationist. I think the intellectual property theft justification is a bad one for opposing AI and a surprising one to hear from corners of the internet I inhabit. All of my objections would apply equally to an AI trained from permissibly licensed material.
I suspect it is the result of people trying to reconcile disliking something they think isn't capable (or can't admit otherwise) so they have to come up with a capability-independent reason to dislike (climate, IP theft) that doesn’t have to concede that the technology is impressive.
The so called progressives have actually been the ones opposed to progress throughout history. If they had their way we would all be frozen in time, entitled to our 1960s education & career
Clicked the GP link and I got a “this post is private” page. Clicked your link and got a Cloudflare page that hangs and I can’t move past. That’s the Internet in 2026
Come on, George, you're clearly a ramblin' wreck from Georgia Tech. You've taken nearly every course GT has offered over the past century, you can get through a captcha. Live up to your name.
To some extent it's still an interesting result: an independent validation of the original finding, and a proof of concept that this technique could make such a discovery.
>remote sensing is difficult and any archaeologist knows to triple check before saying something is "new"
>Francisco was very kind and shared his publication image with me
...can she post the pdf?
Seems likely the google SWE that wrote the blog wouldn't have claimed this was new if there was a public way to access this information. I understand archaeologists have valid reasons to keep location details private, but complaining the OP didn't "check" thoroughly (when she can't link to the data he should checked in order to validate it was new) reads more like a shortcoming in how this knowledge is shared than a failure of OP to check.
One way to take this is that this shows that the agents can't discover anything new, another way to take this is as confirmation that the AI can correctly identify the same sites that human experts can, and just suck at searching literature.
> This story is going wild on X and elsewhere. The site was already published by Dr. Francisco Estrada-Belli of Tulane University ages ago. This is why we have peer review. Mexican gov didn't have it in their database, but that doesn't mean it is unknown/unmapped.
https://pietromiotti.com/latest/maya-site/
Basically: already known, not in the Mexican Gov database, but in published literature... and open-access.
> Me: That's awesome! Please check which of these villages haven't been discovered yet. Search both the literature and the archives.
> Agent: One major village doesn't seem to have been registered.
The idea of just brute forcing discovery with agents on lidar is really cool, but doesn't the story ultimately rest on the agent making a mistake in its literature search?
Yes, and I think this point and the post you're replying to are the central fact of this story, which the OP should acknowledge.
My own attempts to use agents to develop new historical knowledge [1] point to this as being both a very promising and interesting domain, but also one where the agents reliably and repeatedly make claims of novelty that are based on having read ~80% of existing research. Obviously to make an actual well-grounded claim of novelty you basically need to approach 100%.
This is partly why math is so tractable for this sort of thing - mathematics papers tend to be publicly available and searchable, whereas for history, it might be the case that you have an agent swarm duplicating a find that some French person in the 1870s previously reported in an obscure undigitized book.
Did anyone in the replies link to the actual paper in which this site was mentioned? Because that's a weird omission if you are trying to argue that something was already in the literature.
Yes but someone who knows what they are doing with years of experience i the field probably slows down, is more thorough, and goes through a peer review process before rushing to announce to the world their new discovery.
The moral of the story is that if you thought you found something that was undiscovered: no you didn’t.
BUT, if AI thinks it’s undiscovered then its discovery might be poorly documented, so if you were to go to the site by yourself you might be able to explore it on your own and raid tombs, etc, and no one will notice.
There are a lot of things that generate massive amounts of data(e.g. LHC, Vera Rubin). Finding something useful in the data is also challenging. Its pretty cool how low the barrier to entry is these days.
Looks like it was peer (or rather superior) reviewed. I don't think the author was trying to be malicious and just wanted to blog about something cool they found.
Perhaps you should get your comments peer reviewed then? Because between you and the author, only one of you made a fool of themselves, and I quite enjoyed the article.
Now I'm very interested in seeing the transcript/session from what the agent actually did.
We already know since before that agents takes all sorts of possible shortcuts to find the answer they think the user was looking for. It doesn't seem impossible to me that the user asked something that made the agent feel OK with highlighting something that wasn't logged in the Mexican database as a novel discovery, even if it wasn't.
But again, transcripts/session logs would make it extremely clear exactly what has happened, and I'd take the author not publishing those as trying to hide something about how the agent actually approached this.
"I'd take the author not publishing those as trying to hide something about how the agent actually approached this."
That is an irrationally cynical take. Everything described in the post is clearly within the abilities of a frontier LLM. The previous discovery is obscure enough that the Bluesky author is not citing any actual publication but instead encouraging people to reach out to a scientist and receiving images through private communication. The reasonable interpretation is that the model stumbled upon a previous discovery in the manner described, and the author/LLM failed to find the previous discovery because it is not any published database. The author is not running a scam for some unclear benefit that would be immediately revealed when he published it.
> That is an irrationally cynical take. Everything described in the post is clearly within the abilities of a frontier LLM.
No, the burden of proof that it's actually novel sits on the author of this post, and we assume everything is cheated/shortcutted by default when it comes to agents and LLMs, unless we can prove it actually "found" this, not just looked up stuff that wasn't properly in the DB yet but already written about.
> The reasonable interpretation is that the model stumbled upon a previous discovery in the manner described
That'd be reasonable indeed. Instead the author chose the headline "My AI Agents Found an Unmapped Maya Site" and the first sentence is:
> By analyzing NASA lidar data, my AI agents discovered a Maya site in Mexico that, as far as anyone can tell, no one had reported before
Which without any evidence of what the agent actually did, I don't think we should just assume what the author says is true because again, we know that agents takes as many shortcuts as they can.
Plenty of times the people pushing LLMs are over-exaggerating more than in other ecosystems, and the community should rightly push back on these things, when they're not presented properly with proof and evidence. Otherwise we'd be doing previous actual archeologists a huge disservice.
Imagine being the archeologist who actually discovered this site, and waking up today reading some random person taking credit for your discovery! Kind of feels like people here often forget there are other people involved on the other side of things.
No, you don't just do the simplest possible thing and see if it's in some DB because it happens to be more accessible to LLMs, then call it a day and a call it a "discovery". More from the Bluesky thread:
> any archaeologist knows to triple check before saying something is "new"
There is lots of due diligence needed before proclaiming stuff like that. Not just in archeology, but in sciences in general. There is an expectation that you'll review what you put out carefully, not rush to publish as soon as possible, and review prior art. Not least because it's embarrassing as hell to accidentally claim to have invented/discovered something, but in reality someone else was clearly way earlier than you, you just didn't look closely/broadly enough before.
As a second thing, once you find out you're wrong, you generally want to retract something to save face, if you're a good enough human to be able to admit when you're wrong. The author's "What I've learned" remains "You can just do things" even though the top of the article now has a correction that the agents maybe "missed it while going through the literature".
> difficulty: not an archaeologist but a SWE cut the guy/gal some slack
Maybe don't publish archaeology "findings" and "discoveries" if you're merely a software developer. I don't go around publishing things about nuclear reactors, because it's not my area, I couldn't even review myself if it's right or not.
This story is very cool, and it’s exciting to see how much progress AI will bring to every field. One thing to temper everyone from wanting to lidar the whole world is human capacity. Finding discoveries like this is essentially as hard as doing the lidar mapping. Now the issue will be getting archaeologist there in time before someone else does.
The best way to protect a site is to leave it alone. If we start finding dozens or hundreds of sites it will be more than what archaeologists can excavate and protest. Treasure hunters and looters don’t care about stratigraphy and the processes involved for doing research. Maybe the cat is out of the bag on this one, but good for thought.
Edit: I’m not saying we shouldn’t have people use AI to do this or that no bad actor will. This comment is in response to the sentiment I am seeing in the comments that we should lidar the whole world and have AI find any anomalous structures it can. There is no way for archeologists to excavate and protect all those places in that scenario
Given that treasure hunters and looters can also use the process outlined in this blog post, leaving it alone seems like a guarantee that it will be explored by looters first.
Why not? It isn't exactly a secret technology nor are LIDAR-equipped RC aircrafts/drones particularly out of reach in terms of cost either. What would stop them exactly?
With this you are searching for a needle in a haystack. There's a whole bunch of jungle to cover. With a drone you would spend ages not finding anything due to their limited range. That Would be pretty bad ROI.
Also, drone mounted LiDAR is often not powerful enough to go through dense foliage which you have in these tropical climates.
Ok, those are all reasons why it's hard, which it is for everyone by the way, not just "looters". It's still possible and doable, like it is for others. Your previous comment made it sound like it was impossible specifically for looters for some reason, which I'm glad we've cleared up wasn't your intention, thanks for explaining!
> nor are LIDAR-equipped RC aircrafts/drones particularl
Here in Romania it can be quite illegal to LIDAR map the local terrain without an official approval, and I'm not quite sure if that approval is ever given to individual persons/groups of persons that do not have any official status. So, no, I cannot just go out and LIDAR map my surroundings, even though the technology is available, I'd risk going to prison.
Is looting also not illegal in Romania already? I think the context was already "These people don't care about laws", so again there is nothing practical stopping them from doing so.
Archeologists have been using Lidar equipped RC aircraft for quite some time now. With the way things are going it won't be too difficult to have a small swarm of UAVs doing the mapping soon.
It isn’t about having value or not. Some people in the comments are talking about using lidar on the whole world and seeing what agents find. Thats a great way to give looters all over the world the heads up so they can rush over and steal whatever they can. Any archeological site has valuable information on what a slice of humanity’s world used to be. Giving looters a head start means destroying that information often permanently.
A helpful example might be Heinrich Schliemann, a businessman who fancied himself an archaeologist and destroyed much of Troy’s history by digging it up as fast as he could. He was so focused on finding treasure to prove to world he was a great archaeologist he irreparably damaged the real layers that were Troy.
> His excavations were condemned by later archaeologists as having destroyed the main layers of the real Troy. Kenneth W. Harl, in the Teaching Company's Great Ancient Civilizations of Asia Minor lecture series, sarcastically claimed that Schliemann's excavations were carried out with such rough methods that he did to Troy what the Greeks could not do in their times, destroying and levelling down the entire city walls to the ground.
Well to be fair archeology as a profession did not really exist at that point, it was mostly rich peoples hobbies, or authoritarian rulers way of legitimizing their rule through an ancestry argument
This actually isn't entirely true and archeologists at his own time said they way he worked was bad and the Ottoman government tried to stop him. At one point he had to flee the site and could only get back by hiring a professional archeologist to help him.
> The best way to protect a site is to leave it alone. If we start finding dozens or hundreds of sites it will be more than what archaeologists can excavate and protest.
Ain't the site itself the most important thing? As opposed to items: looters won't steal the site?
Looters will absolutely destroy a site to find valuables that may or may not even be there. Ai-khanoum is a classic example, with the vast majority of the site having been filled with pits on the off chance there were valuables. Nowadays they use bulldozers and excavators to loot at an industrial scale. It's pretty difficult to do archaeology on a pile of sifted dirt.
I created the first online lidar map of the UK (well, England and Wales), as announced here many years ago! (now at https://lidarmap.uk) and delightfully there have been dozens of finds of previously unknown sites of archaeological significance found using it that I'm aware of. Roman villas, forts, henges, all sorts of earthworks. New discoveries are being reported using this and similar tools almost weekly, on forums like https://www.reddit.com/r/LiDARdiscoveryUK/. Britain really is littered with this stuff.
Although it does feel the finds are getting increasingly hard to spot, every now and then you get a how did everyone miss that moment. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the remaining impressive finds tend to be in woodland, using the Digital Terrain Model data which can peer beneath the forest canopy, like this Mexican one today, or are within newly released coverage which is promptly pounced on by armchair archeologists.
Not sure what my point is here except... to me this story still feels like a function of the amazing recent progress in lidar coverage and data availability (not to mention the incredible technology behind it), rather than an AI one, although I don't doubt that pointing a capable model and a healthy token budget in this direction might well be able to sweep up a few of the remaining discoveries.
Interesting. I don't want to sound like a hater or anything, but I will personally wait for an expert archaeologist's verification on this. I have dealt with agents making up stuff that sounds fantastic and ground-breaking but completely falters on further review. And I doubt the folks you contacted have the audacity to question a Google engineer and his 48 agents. Even if he is not archaelogist. Do you think it would have gone the same way if it was another random person who had done the exact same thing and reached out to them? The one day feedback part also has me questioning what they actually did.
Anyway, I can hear myself beginning to sound like a hater now, so I will stop here. I hope it turns out to be right, and in that case, congrats on your wonderful discovery.
I'm sceptical too. Perhaps he verified, but from his blogpost, he doesn't imply that he cross checked anything and instead trusted all agentic output. For example, after getting the patch of ladar with the site, did he manually check NASA's resources to make sure there was no hallucination there? Maybe his agents are really good, but submitting this to INAH after only chatting with the agents is really bold.
Again, maybe he did cross verify things and just left that out of the storytelling, and congrats because this is really cool.
Yeah I agree. There’s a lot of assumptions coming out about what the structures are and what it looks like that give me pause. Very cool to have found this site though. The actual archeology involved though will be slow as it’s a science done layer by layer. It will be interesting to see if any predictions made by the AI match up to the facts.
I’m the same for a couple of reasons. First I want to say it is refreshing that AI is being used for discovery instead of an AI arms race, or something else that just feels dystopian. I understand this is happening but it’s rarely what is shown.
1. They said there is no site there, does that mean no one knew it was there?
If this is official lidar data, I find it hard to believe that this is a true discovery, I assume that it just can’t be claimed as a discovery until someone goes there which can be expensive and requires government oversight.
No universities have created an application to detect irregularities in this dataset, that was possible with ML years ago.
2. Personally I want people to Start sharing how much it cost the agent to do a task, because it feels like cost is becoming the bottleneck. Yes it’s awesome it did X but does that mean this can be utilized by people, businesses, or just governments and big tech.
Also just because we’re skeptical doesn’t make us haters. Being a hater is speaking in bad faith.
“INAH replied: they checked their records and found no registered archaeological site at that location. To be clear, it's not official yet. But as far as anyone can tell, nobody had put this one on a map before.“
INAH said there's nothing registered there, nothing more than that. The results look fairly convincing but neither the OP, me and (I presume) you nor the commentor have archaeology experience. Perhaps there are other explanations for ground structures like this we just don't know till an expert visits the site and confirms that yes, it is a previously unmapped Mayan pyramid.
I'm certainly not one to defend AI bros, this guy's writing is insufferable (and reads like slop to me), but did you read TFA? The LIDAR image (based on measured data, not AI) clearly shows human-made structures, and the Mexican government's response said that it's not registered. The chatbots just found it. Unless he's completely lying about the whole thing, this seems genuine. Now all the bits about what sort of site it probably was and the slopified image of what it might have looked like are garbage, but the find itself doesn't look to be.
Turns out that an expert archeologist Dr. Francisco Estrada-Belli of Tulane University already found it. You are right to be skeptical and maybe being a hater is in fact not a bad thing (I know I am).
TBH the Academic reaction to this could likely be to gatekeep it into oblivion over bad faith or ideological reasons given the perceived hostile takeover of their domain by 'amateurs'.
We saw this with the Dead Sea Scrolls where exclusive control was given to a select group of academics who monopolized the research to the point of refusing to release photographs or transcripts for nearly 40 years. The Huntington Library eventually had to force their hand by releasing their microfiche copies.
Again, we saw this with both the Ochtendung Skull Fraud and the Piltdown Man fraud - systematically falsifying results for clout is an exclusively human pre-occupation.
More to the point, in May 2025 YouTuber MrBeast was allowed to film inside the off-limits areas of Mayan Temples; something banned for both locals and normal tourists.
Academics posit that strict peer review is necessary so as not to allow the hoarding and gatekeeping of knowledge. However in matters of verification, faslification, and justification, they are derelict in their duty to the other half of that contract. The field only has itself to blame if other fields start organically superseding their usefulness and eroding their domain exclusivity by proxy of poor governance and ways of working.
It does seem amazing how mountains of evidence have to be assembled to disprove academic narratives the whole field defended for decades, even if reports from the time gave us proof hundreds of years ago. Things like the massive human sacrifices that were made (usually by colonized tribes, not the ruling Aztecs) on a systematic scale are basically an anti-thesis to the current national narrative of the state of Mexico itself.
I mean we should all have axes to grind regarding bad actors demeaning academia and stilting academic progress because of ideological issues or financial incentives, should we not?
Pointing out the benefit of removing human malfeasance from a given system, and extrapolating likely outcomes if we don't based on cited recent malpractice, is hardly a polemic against the system. Merely an explanation of anti-scientific stances from a supposed scientific community whose own rules and processes have resulted in issues that likely would not arise from employing responsible agentic prompting as a research tool.
If I can point to exclusively human behaviour in the domain being the largest problem regarding credibility and progress of the field as a whole, I am obviously going to argue against giving that same compromised governance exclusive franchise over discoveries made in spite of its existence.
author here. Update: the site had already been discovered. It appears in a 2025 paper by Estrada-Belli, Canuto, Šprajc & Fernandez-Diaz (page 14) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2025.105288. The agents missed it, I missed it, and it wasn't in INAH's register yet (National Institute of Anthropology and History). The rest of the story still holds, and there's still a lot left to discover with vibe-archeology. I hope this brought some extra excitement to archaeology.
I appreciate you following up and admitting not being aware of the site having been previously found. It's great work, regardless, and shows promising results for future archeological discoveries. If anything, the site having been previously found encourages greater confidence that future findings aren't hallucinated.
Amazing, the perfect application of AI Agents. Find patterns/answers in massive amounts of data. It is becoming more clear everyday that this is the primary driver behind an AI's "intelligence". Finding the solution to mathematical problems that have decades of documented attempts by mathematicians, creating software based on exisitng code and now, discovering Maya pyramids within enourmous amounts of lidar-data.
The final barrier for super intelligence, or perhaps even just "human intelligence": can it materialize "new fields/ideas" without large datasets of human made and curated existing attempts?
I am curious how this things perform compared to a "classical" neural networks. Tasks like image classification, feature extraction has been studied extensively and there were a lot of very cool applications before (medicine included). The biggest obstacle was always data but even that could have been partly automated with some semi-supervised learning schemes.
Of course the Bitter Lesson applies here, given a big enough model, it can outperform specialised ones, but at this point it's not clear
1) By how much?
2) If this is even true in the first place or if we have the means to train much leaner networks
It is becoming a boring homogenous world where we are trading deep expertise with being able to query the magic box
I would assume, without actually having checked, that traditional neural networks have already been extensively run on this datasets. Seems like the "standard" thing to do anyways.
My guess is that you can find 99% of Maya pyramids in a Lidar set in a fairly short time with a traditional neural network, but you might find the last few using a network of AI agents, because they are capable of "creative" problem solving and using different methods/parameters/tools over several iterations.
You are right and I get the point (I have also worked on some solutions, though it's not my expertise), it's just that usually the people creating the ML model are supposed to substitute the creativity that the model itself does not offer. You run the model, see the false negatives and start thinking of what is missing, if there is also information that can be represented differently or can be compressed, if there is some other approach entirely. Good ML ultimately requires having deep expertise of your domain and can sometimes lead to deeper insight.
With LLM you unlock a whole new world of possibilities regarding the speed and result but we are also finding ourselves in a position where "asking the LLM" because the cheat for everything, no reason to dig further
There is no "final barrier", the goalpost will continue to change until you are not aware of what is going on anymore. This is already becoming true as the recently produced math research is not fully understood, CoT moves further away from looking like human reasoning and datasets become generated rather than collected from existing human data.
? CoT did not look like actual human reasoning from day one. It's just a context expansion mechanism, the purpose isn't actually to mimic human style reasoning, nor was it ever doing so. In the recent openAI article where they showed excerpts from the CoT, it looks like reasoning has moved even further from what i would call a human like flow of thought
Certainly, but at that point it becomes a philosophical question, rather than an empirical one.
Can we even measure an intelligence greater than our own? And at that point -- what is the point exactly? Why make an intelligence that we don't even know is intelligent? If its output is indiscernible to the human mind, what good does it do us?
The only "barrier" I can see that is valuable and that might be measureable to humans is this underlying mechanic of being able to create new ideas/concepts from little to no existing human generated training data. Otherwise, and as I see it right now, these machines will not become sentient, or go rouge, or be able to cure all future disease or solve all of physics, becasue they are entirely reliant on human made trainingsets.
Historically, for humans, this can not be the case, otherwise we would see no progress. Someone has to have a thought for the first time. Perhaps the solution to this for AI agents is some inherent randomness, and massive amounts of brute force compute. Who knows?
The point is the next epoch of evolution. Like humans made monkeys obsolete, LLMs will make humans and biological hardware obsolete. Maybe we will live in zoos, or maybe we will simply go extinct. Evolution places no special value on a particular species or hardware platform.
I think you have eaten too much of the LLM generated cake if you genuinely believe that LLM's are anywhere close to making humans and biological "hardware" obsolete. Sometimes we must ground ourselves and remember that we live in the real world and not Star Wars.
We can always just unplug the computer, you know. AI agents can do damage, they can be used in malicious ways and bring down/distrupt infrastructure, but the leap from today to the point where LLM's can prevent us from pulling the cord is unimagineable large, and likely infinite.
In modernity, the gap between the digital and material world is closing, especially from a sociological perspective, but we are still neurological systems spinning on a large rock. For 99% of our history we didn't have electricity. The likelyhood of returning to a post-electricty world, for example, is much greater than LLM's taking over the world and making us into zoo animals.
Now I'm curious if anyone has or might try to create an LLM that lacks all knowledge of the post-einstein/newton/plato world and see if it can figure things out. I imagine lack of training data would be a problem, but maybe it could be a way to reverse-engineer an effective prompt that can give us insight in the platos of our world?
They would need to be much better at learning. You can teach a child how to drive a car and they can be good enough at it that the state will grant them a license to drive.
Where's the learning robot that I can teach to drive a car in the same way? They can solve some complex math problem but can they read the cues of other drivers at a four way stop to know when they should go (knowing the rules isn't sufficient).
> I imagine lack of training data would be a problem
I imagine that's an understatement. Using only the written works available from before Einstein (let alone Newton or Plato), you'd probably need a whole new technology that could train itself without any training data other than observation of the world.
arguably it is feasible in principle to filter out that knowledge from later writings, but you can always say it leaked in a subtle way - "this chonky cat is bending space around it" (this is exaggerated, can be much more subtle and hard to notice)
I appreciate the enthusiasm. I'm not sure I agree. Especially since this was a SWE and not an archeologist / anthropologist announcing this (especially if the goal is to understand and preserve history -- not get headlines for AI).
Life is surrounded by nuances. The COVID pandemic was the best time to be alive if you were a tech worker and your family was safe and healthy. Now COVID is over, so does most of the value of our intellectual work.
I was a tech worker; my family emerged safe and healthy. COVID completely sucked. So much death, uncertainty, anxiety, and mistrust. I think we're all still trying to figure out the impact COVID had on our health, society, and culture.
This is exactly my point: it sucked hard because we were afraid of dying, but not afraid of becoming obsolete. In fact, I believe that you, just like me, were rejecting recruiters on LinkedIn on daily basis.
Now it sucks because we're afraid of not being able to provide for our families in the near future.
It will always suck in some way, so we should REALLY focus on _what_ we can do. Otherwise, we'll be consumed by anxiety until the day we die.
From a global point of view, we've been living in relative peace for almost 100 years.
Housing is a problem, but child mortality isn't.
Tech overlords are a problem, but no one is testing a nuclear bomb every week.
The Koreas are still technically at war, but tuberculosis deaths have plummeted over the last century.
The Cold War is over, but people are still dying in wars around the globe.
US imperialism around the world is finally showing signs of decline, but now China manufactures practically everything, and other developing nations are struggling to compete.
It's always the best and the worst time to be alive somewhere in the world. It's up to you to decide what you want to make of it, anyway.
I completely agree. My dominating feeling was nausea. At the waste of electricity spent on this. At the callous devaluing of actual expertise. At potentially ruining the opportunity for a much more deserving person to make such a discovery.
It's like an arrogant teenage boy showing up to an Easter egg hunt and grabbing all the chocolate faster than the little kids and demanding everyone tell him to great he is.
If you're a Google SWE with 7 figure comp, doing experiments with agent swarms you don't need to pay for, with healthy case of Dunning-Kruger... then maybe it is.
With the development that this was already discovered prior, this now feels a lot like the issue where an LLM "finds" a new bug only for it to turn out that it had been discussed and disregarded years earlier.
To me, the scary thing is that an LLM typically does a good job of convincing it's handler (or others) that its (re)discovery is of significance. Whether it's of undue significance or not determines if this new wave LLM research is just creating more work for us humans, be they maintainers of projects or archeologists.
Doesn't matter, the title is out there, news outlets will omit this little detail. Even here the post is gaining in popularity even after the top comment has questioned its validity.
I don't see how the post displays blind faith. The author contacted the relevant authority in Mexico to ask if they already had a record of this village, and even after they said that they didn't, he was careful to hedge and not to claim that this was definitely an original discovery. He flagged the speculative part of the post as speculation, and as far as I can tell, the parts he was confident about have not been disputed.
Then in this thread author said the site has already been published about. So he vibe verified it because further verification proved him wrong in the end.
I think we are about to see a whole new age of "citizen scientists", enabled by AI. This particular example was solved fast with a lot of compute, but it seems that this approach would have been possible with less equipment too.
The bottleneck will be data. Every possible signal out of publicly available datasets will be squeezed fast.
The people who have the training to be good citizen scientists enabled by AI are already working in technical fields, probably as scientists in formal name or not.
Your neighbor on the other hand has good odds that they read to a 6th grade level or worse, and believes the president at his word because he's signaled he also hates minorities.
As the famous quote goes, "You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land— the common clay of the new West. You know... morons."
What kind of harness setup that would allow me to fire off a prompt, go to sleep, and wake up to see such a comprehensive and intricate infra setup (48 agents, orchestrated, image storage, continuous execution), and just say “damn”? I paid my for peasant $20 bucks a month plan and works in the CLI (Codex), I never know how to scale work on number of agents, non-interrupted workflow, or multiple models (he mentioned he consulted multiple models, I assume not just copy pasting questions in different chats). Is there a harness that I’m missing out on?
I highly recommend pi.dev for doing anything creative with agents and harnesses. It separates the harness from the model, so you need to BYOM keys and subscriptions.
You can build your own harness quite easily or use a harness something like pi.dev which offers a lot of flexibility in customization in terms of tools, models ised, resume sessions at a prior point in time, etc.
I have used pi.dev to easily start from a known context and goal and use it to compare the cost effectiveness, token isage, etc. of different models to reach the goal state.
I am sure there are many ways to do this successfully.
"Scan through publically accessible LIDAR data on <region of mexican jungle>, search for potential Mayan ruins and cross reference with published data to rule out existing finds
Work autonomously until the entire area is searched, prepare me a report detailing potential discoveries"
LIDAR data from Europe has been used to identify Celtic agricultural structures (fields) by a retired museum director. He’s also found some Roman age artifacts.
> Me: OK, how do I contact INAH? How does the reporting process work?
> Agent: …instructions for the report… + email addresses
> Me: OK, please do the report.
I don't want to sound offtopic nitpicky, because the content of the article is quite cool, but I just hope the author didn't just straight up generate the report with AI and sent it right to the email address. If I were in this situation, I'd most certainly write myself something along the lines of "Hey, I'm not anyone professional but just wanted to inquire about these coordinates because it seems that this site has not been yet catalogued and it's likely to contain something interesting based on my research. Please take a look.". Or better yet, send it to some actual archelogist who would already be versed in these kind of communications, and let him handle it professionally.
At this moment probably everyone has had to deal with sudden influx of ai-generated emails, I hear about it all the time from my friends who work in customer service and such. Much has already been said on the internet about this kind of conduct, but I just think that using an AI agent to pretend you are familiar with the topic should be discouraged. Just be honest and write your own words, if the recipient needs some professional expertise from AI, they can just paste your message into their own model.
One thing I haven't seen research on with these agent swarms is if an equivalent amount of compute dedicated to a single agent (sequential vs parallel longer wall clock time) would lead to similar outcomes or if something around agents working in parallel with model temperatures how they are leads to more exhaustive searching and less path dependence.
Google SWE is key! The fact that Google's employee can do so much creative things on the side says something about the company. I used to work there and it's definitely one thing I missed the most!
It can, but then it runs into the Google Maps issue - everything altruistic at the expense of some bad actor becomes a Security, Military or Legal concern - and the apathy issue.
This is partly why George Clooney abandoned his Project Sentinel - documenting atrocities from space means nothing if you cannot action on the people and financial networks enabling them.
> This is partly why George Clooney abandoned his Project Sentinel - documenting atrocities from space means nothing if you cannot action on the people and financial networks enabling them.
At the very least you can try to hold the bad actors accountable even if it's years if not decades afterwards, if you have documentation. Germany for example had deathcamp criminal cases being prosecuted as late as 2022 [1].
It will get really interesting what happens in the US once the Trump administration is gone - even if the expected Trump pardon against everyone involved gets reversed somehow, I suspect that a lot of material regarding ICE or the military strikes against "drug smugglers" will simply have been shredded or never been created in the first place...
Philosophically speaking, the human quest for discovering things from past, from far away, from depths of oceans, from the depths of atoms and microcosms - has no bounds and targets. That means it will be never be completed. There will always be an unsung, unknown warrior who fought for his people, or some higher-level of intelligence and knowledge to be achieved. The insatiable quest for such awareness, knowledge and discoveries imbalance the priorities of the human progress. We are doing this at the cost of climate change, natural resources and human detachment from the nature.
You can pinpoint the location using Claude. There are several large ranches nearby, a road is ~250m from this site, though it is up a rather steep hill. Still, it would be quite mind-boggling if the site isn't known to the locals.
If Elon relented and added Lidar, it's probably because of the potential of a huge roving lidar-mapping network of Tesla cars with starlink as the supporting network.
You CAN just do things, but one should also temper the excitement a bit. Agents are amazing but also the last 10% is still really difficult to get right and requires subject matter expertise for most things.
As an aside: anyone with access to all those tokens for funsies can do this. Folks without that access cannot just do things. The have / have-not of tokens will be interesting to see over time.
Ha, yeah I had the same thought. People with money to burn have always been able to “just do things”. The author also considered “hiring a survey team” - ultimately concluding it was too expensive - but the fact that that thought even entered their mind indicates a certain level of expendable income.
What do we gain from mapping out everything? Why is the best time to be alive one where such a nightmare becomes feasible? For anyone wondering what could possibly be bad about uncovering the entire world, turning everything into numbers and computational tasks, look at "Origins of Totalitarianism" for a start.
> They turned the lidar strips (about 1,200 km² of jungle) into images, and 48 agents went through them one by one like very patient archaeologists, looking for pyramids, platforms, and plazas while filtering out natural hills, sinkholes, and roads. There was no special model or classifier involved: the agents literally looked at the pictures, following a precise guide.
Would it be better to ask a single LLM to create a processing pipeline to inject raw LIDAR data, create a heightmap and use an image classifier to identify unnatural shapes that standout and create a ranking score with a higher value where multiple shapes appears close to each other. At least you get something reusable and probably multiple order of magnitude faster.
And who knows, perhaps a final filter to select "unnatural shapes that look like pyramids, platforms and plazas". :-) It really doesn't seem hard to believe that any of this is outside the capabilities of current gen LLMs. Including generating a plan to run multiple agents concurrently.
Seriously though, why 48 AI Agents? I'm curious, presumably one agent could parallelize its analysis so its not raw parallelism? Do the agents share work? This kind of agent scale is outside of my budget, I would love to know the details.
Well they had to look at lidar images from huge parts of Mexico. Seeing as 48 agents did it in 72 hours, presumably 1 agent would do it in 144 days.
Simple to enough to ask "how long would it take", see 144 days and reply "do it in 3 days" and the agent will happily spin up enough instances to cover it
edit: "presumably one agent could parallelize its analysis"
No, they said they didn't analyse with tool use it was literally agents "looking" at the images via multimodal input
Also agents analyzing drought pictures, where many ancient UK structures seem to appear would be an easy win. I've never checked whether there's a comprehensive drought picture map of the UK.
The National Library of Scotland has LIDAR imagery for all of the UK. Go to https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/ then pick a LIDAR layer as the background. This motivated me to make my own high-res LIDAR images on my hobby site (https://solentmaps.uk/) of my home area using QGIS with free government data in order to uncover interesting things. It has old OS maps of the UK (1880s to date) with a LIDAR layer for my local area (south Hampshire).
I'm far less interested in LIDAR as it relies on height change. The drought pictures are a better source of new discovery in the UK as we tend to bury buildings or plough over them (see my other comment below).
Those pictures would be very appropriate for AI bots to look at and make discoveries.
The UK landmass is really quite small compared to central America. I'd be surprised if there are many substantial structures left - geophys has been around a long time.
Well, that's why I explicitly mentioned the drought pictures - LIDAR uncovers structures due to change in the terrain height once vegetation is 'removed', whereas drought pictures are grasses growing poorly on top of buried structures or their foundations. That's a very UK/European thing where a lot of the history has been covered up or ploughed over.
Just near me, a Roman road about 5km long was discovered last year by exactly this method. That's a non-trivial discovery. There was also a large Roman villa complex discovered the same way.
For LIDAR and structures, you're likely correct - there's vanishingly obvious structures left to discover that way.
That is amazing! Great discovery and write up and motivation. Earlier in the week I got an FB impression of a LIDAR for Fort Stamford (CT), superimposed with the satelite footage and pondered what other hidden constructs might be lurking around here. And all you got to set up the loop asking for it...
As someone who's been gaslit by ChatGPT and Claude on more than one occasion on something being novel that simply didn't even do a google search to see that it was in fact previously patented... this is dangerous and seems to be happening far more often even as models are getting better at "grounding".
People have been finding hidden constructions for a while. The large urban conurbations such as around Ecuador are perhaps the most impressive (https://apnews.com/article/amazon-lost-cities-ecuador-archae...). While Archeologists have been driving the process almost anyone who spends time with recent LIDAR data finds something much as how publicly available satellite data has uncovered geological oddities. This is not a big advance. Getting an official report completed and creating a compelling image of what the site might have looked like is impressive, but also consistent with what ordinary untrained people have been accomplishing.
There’s this error that SWEs sometimes make where they imagine that geosensing or research datasets are just… a natural phenomenon in the world, lying around like ore studded with diamonds (or… however mining works). If a layperson (or lay-agent) can gawk at the thing and see the obvious, that’s not “being an archaeologist,” that’s “somebody who’s an archaeologist figured out the right way to conduct the survey, and did so, so as to make what they’re looking for obvious in the first place.”
I take something much darker from this story: expect the raw corpuses of data to start being locked away. It was fine to let the LIDAR surveys flop around in public when only qualified research groups really knew what to do with it. You could let people rummage and report, and hold just the coordinates confidential, as this guy did in his report. Now, the sensing data tell any guy with two sentences’ worth of interest where to go pillage for antiquities…
It’s still actually valuable to give the archaeologists time to schlep out there and excavate properly before the TikTokking hordes go mog all over it for clout or novelty or whatever the ephemeral currency is these days. The only possible reaction is for the people who labor to produce these data to start locking them away within the guild—much like the way you’ve gotta show your good-guy credentials to use Mythos for bug hunting…
I think it matters because "I used 48 agents running for 72 hours" either means you invested $50,000 of your own money, or you work for a company that gives you unlimited tokens.
"Will the AI work better because it was "pointed" by a Google SWE?"
Usually yes? (vs pointed by a random vibe coder)
Also the more interesting bit to me here is, that you do not find the reference on the page at all, that the person works for google at all (I only found it mentioned in his X account). With the headline I initially thought this was a official google research project, but the blog reads like a personal project.
I know what you're saying. At the same time, this is someone using the technical skills in wielding a technology to make, unverified sure, discovery in a wholly different field, but in which they are presumably interested.
So for me one key takeaway is how AI could possibly open up more interdisciplinary work in our heavily siloed world.
How do we know that this is a good thing? Putting a "Ruin here!" pushpin on a map and leaving the actual archeology to others sounds more like a vanity boost than an achievement, and at worst the opportunity for the site to be desecrated before anyone serious has a chance to study it.
It's like the new drive-by pull requests I'm getting in my open source repositories. No consideration for the people doing the actual work.
Which is why he specifically didnt give a pushpin, and censored out the location and the region in the mail? Also whats stopping the bad actors from doing this work themselves (aside from the price, which im sure could be optimized for, if you don't have an unlimited budget of tokens), and then looting them while the real scientists are none the wiser?
This is cool but I mean "model finds ruin from lidar dataset" is sort of like the par for the course for this sort of data and modelling. Been getting headlines like this for years now. It isn't something that ai now enabled. AI just let you put out another paper using this method when you could have used methods 1-662 as well to put out a paper where you find an unmapped pyramid among lidar data.
To writ, parsing massive LiDAR datasets to spot repetitive, distinct geometric patterns is something that AI excels at. They are not subject to facial pareidolia like humans are - they have no hard-wired weighting to impose meaningful patterns onto random or ambiguous visual stimuli.
But they do what you tell them, so be convincing enough and the patterns will emerge, I think even with something silly like "be creative, imaginative and ignore science, in the following images find any resemblance of a face, no matter how far fetched" will give all kinds of silliness.
I mean try it, but their internal prompts usually restrict them from spouting disinformation on purpose, so even if you got a response like that, it would finish with something like this is of course all in the context of our roleplaying situation and has no bearing on irl results. Also the sycophancy in general has been improved greatly, they don't agree with you on everything anymore
To paraphrase Hitchens, anything tenuously asserted by agentic AI can be easily repudiated by agentic AI. The knife cuts both ways, and agentic output tends towards Occam's Razor as its defined edge.
Now will we have a TempleOS style burning bush that goes beyond the markov-chain limitations of Terry Davis' era? Very likely. Will it impact contemporary discourse? About as much as the Astrology and Homeopathic mobile apps.
(N.B. I am conscious that Homeopathy is a $14bn market segment in the US. Notwithstanding, given that the segment is based on magic-water-'science', I think the point remains.)
You've heard about humans doing pattern recognition based on established baselines? Hold my beer when I blow your mind about recent developments in computing.
> I was traveling in Peru, Gemini-ing about the history of the place, when I learned about Hiram Bingham, the American explorer who "discovered" Machu Picchu in 1911. [...] "Imagine if Bingham had our tools," I thought. "What would he do?"
Well, pretty much this: "discover" a Maya pyramid.
Regardless of how technologically impressive this is, the article and its author are completely insufferable. "I asked Gemini to imagine how it looked back then" ask Gemini to imagine you getting pussy
It would not have been realistic to have PhD students manually comb through thousands of square kilometers of LIDAR data, and crossreference everything with existing sites; LLMs have turned this into low-hanging fruit.
Can't expect every single scientific field to immediately use any new technology to its full potential, and it makes you sound like a prick, too.
Excusing a scientific field not embracing paradigm-shifting new developments isn't even an argument.
The real answer is financial incentives tied to publishing of research - something that academics in gatekept fields see as the thin edge of the wedge in exposing a utility/ROI gap for legacy practitioners.
The world has general access to AI since years. Imagine you spend your life as archeologist, then when a new technology comes along that could revolutionize your field, you ignore it. Using AI to classify/search for locations is such a no brainer, that asking why it is not the norm, is a valid question. Humans should review the findings, but the boring work should probably be done by the machines.
I have to be frankly honest -- I have a gut feeling -- regardless of what Pietro reported to the Mexican gov't, the binary response professionally is likely "Sorry, we didn't find it".
There is no reason for them to provide confirmation for internal inventory that Pietro passionately fingered from afar.
Which I think would make sense, ultimately. But now from the Mexico perspective, wouldn't they elicit more concern for others just mapping their terrain after a blog post like this goes viral?
Very meticulous, exciting work, nonetheless. I'm all for 3d lidar scanning the plannet!
The Mexican govt may not have had the right records, but you can see what the site looked like at the time it was first found here: https://bsky.app/profile/indyfromspace.bsky.social/post/3n22...
But Dr. Estrada-Belli found something that was undiscovered. Finding this structure wasn't his number one goal - it was the side effect of a larger anthropological assessment that allowed him to improve estimates about population density of the north versus south, how Mayan homes and farms are distributed, what this means about social relationships between the elite and common people, how different regions were interconnected, etc.
Interestingly, one of Dr. Estrada-Belli's primary conclusions is not that these structures were only used by "the local elite," but that the closeness of residences and farms to these community sites suggests that the elite and the common people actually had a much closer and nuanced relationship than we previously thought. That's the opposite conclusion you'd get from the Google SWE's assessment.
Knowing that a Mayan site exists is one thing. Understanding what it means is another.
We are reading this article because it continues and amplifies the AI hype machine, and no other reason. If a motivated amateur had made the discovery through any other means, and motivated amateurs do things like this all the time, then it would never have gotten an article, never shown up on the HN feed.
While I appreciate and broadly agree with your bigger point, I'd argue this particular bit is a bit uncharitable. Articles about nerds doing interesting, unusual things do make the front page pretty often.
At some point such discoveries won't cause as much stir, similar to how reusable rocket drew such fervent attention 10 years ago.
Not so fable, this llm thing if it's missing a literal pyramid in the room
LLMs are great, and they keep getting better, but I'm so tired of current shortcomings being blamed on the prompter "holding it wrong".
Perhaps google SWE should have requested a literature search before publishing his results as novel
I go through this process at the very start, after planning, and at least once a week afterward. With AI, the landscape can change dramatically during one week. I am not being hyperbolic.
Most LLMs these days can use tools (such as web searching), so depending on how strictly you define "autocomplete" this alone could disqualify it from being an autocomplete, fancy or otherwise.
Goes without saying - humans are no truth engines either lol.
"Prior art has reduced the novelty of the discovery" is a great one
They are often left undisturbrd for a number of reasons, including that archeological techniques are fundamentally destructive. Leaving sites for future people to explore also leaves intact knowledge that future technologies may be better able to uncover.
The lineage of every LLM of relevance today was the largest theft of intellectual property in human history. Every digitised creative work, whether in the public domain or not was taken, often outright pirated, with the explicit intention of being able to trivially produce compelling forgeries. Physical works are being enthusiastically destroyed to digitise them to further feed the hunger. And outside of a few court cases, the original creators across the world have been paid nothing for their work having been stolen and repurposed to put them out of a job.
Meanwhile, those same digitisation efforts have resulted in badly behaved scrapers from all comers absolutely thrashing the entire web, in many cases exponentially increasing the cost of hosting for smaller entities. Larger entities care less about that but are still enthusiastically walling their gardens so they can monetise the output of their communities rather than continuing to allow it to be stolen freely.
We are siloing our knowledge out of desperation. I'm sympathetic to the idea that knowledge should be free but that isn't possible when bad actors like Google and OpenAI are preying on the commons.
The Walt Disneys of the world screwed themselves on this one. If copyright was still the 20+20 it started as, and if the bulk of people being "stolen" from (don't get me started on using theft to refer to IP), then I think most people would be much more up in arms over the AI industry.
But, in a world with sane copyright laws, perhaps AI companies would have different approaches. Today, if they want anything after 1930, they're either breaking laws or in uncharted territory.
And siloing our knowledge is a silly response even if you are a copyright maximalist.
Just because AI companies have profit motives doesn’t mean it isn’t cool as heck that some poor kid with a burner Android phone can use a free ChatGPT account to learn about any topic they want.
If they're making a profit, it means they're providing a value to customers. In the case of LLM - the value is reducing the friction of accessing knowledge. The knowledge was there all along, but the friction of access too great to generate surplus value.
It is backwards thinking to propose that we are worse off by enabling access to knowledge.
I'm also not arguing that siloing is good, only that it's a rational reaction. Creators are uncomfortable having their work used that way and have to protect themselves against scrapers driving up their hosting costs. Other businesses quite reasonably want a share of all the money flowing around. People got tired of the wolves eating their sheep, so they built barns and fences and trained dogs.
If we want to stop the siloing, we need to address the what's causing people to resort to it.
To put it visually:
ie the valence regarding intellectual property is irrelevant for this kind of motivation.but why does knowledge need to be siloed? elsevier has every right to make a deal with the author of the research and put it behind a paywall or whatever they'd like to do to keep their multi-billion dollar business going, but is this something we should be defending and celebrating as a "solution" to prevent LLMs from making knowledge more available?
and in this instance, why should a researcher that is probably funded by public money, care if openai is disseminating their research?
If you want to argue that the cultivators of new knowledge should be treated better, I am in agreement, they should receive a greater share of rewards.
The real victims of a shift to open knowledge society would be the publishing cartels, and I can't say I'd feel too bad about it.
I do agree that the methods of obtaining much of the material (eg. the published works torrents) were stupidly wrong and they should pay for that. However, legally acquired media being "read" by the training process isn't so different than it being read by a voracious reader: it's lossily encoded in (what amounts to) memories.
The insane scraping levels and behaviors ... not wrong. If only there were companies who already did that responsibly they could contract with for data. Hmm. (But they have to "own" it, as is the SV fashion these days.)
Agreements with publishers after the fact shouldn't even count, particularly since all copyright holders weren't consulted. I wouldn't have given my permission, for example.
It's important to stress that the media were not legally acquired by most US frontier AI companies if not all of them.
Nope! Theft of the proceeds.
The media may have been legally acquired, but it was done so by violating the intentions and purposes of the content creators.
In other words, people poured their time and attention into something hoping for a return, and got this, instead. And now this is obviating the venues by which creators hoped to receive their social/cultural dividend.
Violating the intentions and purposes of the creators is in some cases an IP violation, and in others it isn't -- it all depends on the details. A lot of AI training on IP-protected materials can fit into the bucket that isn't an IP violation (or any other legal violation), though much of the historical actual training data wasn't collected this way.
IP creators don't have an amorphous right to "a return" or to have their intentions and purposes strictly respected. They have very specific rights in law, and those often don't match up 1:1 with expectations, and almost never with a specific set of the creator's intent (except where that aligns with already-existing law).
> exponentially increasing the cost of hosting
We're on a technical forum, everyone knows the cost of hosting plaintext and what an exponential is.
multiple parties can be opposed to each other's goals with all of them still being "bad guys".
It just goes to show how fluid people's beliefs can be when they have identified a "bad guy". Everything they do is wrong, even when it aligns with their ethos.
I suspect it is the result of people trying to reconcile disliking something they think isn't capable (or can't admit otherwise) so they have to come up with a capability-independent reason to dislike (climate, IP theft) that doesn’t have to concede that the technology is impressive.
I expect with time these kinds of things will change.
Come on, George, you're clearly a ramblin' wreck from Georgia Tech. You've taken nearly every course GT has offered over the past century, you can get through a captcha. Live up to your name.
>Francisco was very kind and shared his publication image with me
...can she post the pdf?
Seems likely the google SWE that wrote the blog wouldn't have claimed this was new if there was a public way to access this information. I understand archaeologists have valid reasons to keep location details private, but complaining the OP didn't "check" thoroughly (when she can't link to the data he should checked in order to validate it was new) reads more like a shortcoming in how this knowledge is shared than a failure of OP to check.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X2...
> This story is going wild on X and elsewhere. The site was already published by Dr. Francisco Estrada-Belli of Tulane University ages ago. This is why we have peer review. Mexican gov didn't have it in their database, but that doesn't mean it is unknown/unmapped. https://pietromiotti.com/latest/maya-site/
Basically: already known, not in the Mexican Gov database, but in published literature... and open-access.
Link to the previous publication: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2025.105288 (Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 66 (2025) 105288)
> Agent: One major village doesn't seem to have been registered.
The idea of just brute forcing discovery with agents on lidar is really cool, but doesn't the story ultimately rest on the agent making a mistake in its literature search?
My own attempts to use agents to develop new historical knowledge [1] point to this as being both a very promising and interesting domain, but also one where the agents reliably and repeatedly make claims of novelty that are based on having read ~80% of existing research. Obviously to make an actual well-grounded claim of novelty you basically need to approach 100%.
This is partly why math is so tractable for this sort of thing - mathematics papers tend to be publicly available and searchable, whereas for history, it might be the case that you have an agent swarm duplicating a find that some French person in the 1870s previously reported in an obscure undigitized book.
[1] Detailed more here: https://resobscura.substack.com/p/using-opus-55-to-discover-...
I thought Bluesky was supposed to be better than X/Twitter, not worse. Bummer.
Not news.
BUT, if AI thinks it’s undiscovered then its discovery might be poorly documented, so if you were to go to the site by yourself you might be able to explore it on your own and raid tombs, etc, and no one will notice.
In real life, that’s actually just vandalism of an archeological site for personal gain.
Don't ruin Indiana Jones for me.
Peer review also protects the authors for making a fool of themselves. QED.
We already know since before that agents takes all sorts of possible shortcuts to find the answer they think the user was looking for. It doesn't seem impossible to me that the user asked something that made the agent feel OK with highlighting something that wasn't logged in the Mexican database as a novel discovery, even if it wasn't.
But again, transcripts/session logs would make it extremely clear exactly what has happened, and I'd take the author not publishing those as trying to hide something about how the agent actually approached this.
That is an irrationally cynical take. Everything described in the post is clearly within the abilities of a frontier LLM. The previous discovery is obscure enough that the Bluesky author is not citing any actual publication but instead encouraging people to reach out to a scientist and receiving images through private communication. The reasonable interpretation is that the model stumbled upon a previous discovery in the manner described, and the author/LLM failed to find the previous discovery because it is not any published database. The author is not running a scam for some unclear benefit that would be immediately revealed when he published it.
No, the burden of proof that it's actually novel sits on the author of this post, and we assume everything is cheated/shortcutted by default when it comes to agents and LLMs, unless we can prove it actually "found" this, not just looked up stuff that wasn't properly in the DB yet but already written about.
> The reasonable interpretation is that the model stumbled upon a previous discovery in the manner described
That'd be reasonable indeed. Instead the author chose the headline "My AI Agents Found an Unmapped Maya Site" and the first sentence is:
> By analyzing NASA lidar data, my AI agents discovered a Maya site in Mexico that, as far as anyone can tell, no one had reported before
Which without any evidence of what the agent actually did, I don't think we should just assume what the author says is true because again, we know that agents takes as many shortcuts as they can.
Plenty of times the people pushing LLMs are over-exaggerating more than in other ecosystems, and the community should rightly push back on these things, when they're not presented properly with proof and evidence. Otherwise we'd be doing previous actual archeologists a huge disservice.
Imagine being the archeologist who actually discovered this site, and waking up today reading some random person taking credit for your discovery! Kind of feels like people here often forget there are other people involved on the other side of things.
> any archaeologist knows to triple check before saying something is "new"
There is lots of due diligence needed before proclaiming stuff like that. Not just in archeology, but in sciences in general. There is an expectation that you'll review what you put out carefully, not rush to publish as soon as possible, and review prior art. Not least because it's embarrassing as hell to accidentally claim to have invented/discovered something, but in reality someone else was clearly way earlier than you, you just didn't look closely/broadly enough before.
As a second thing, once you find out you're wrong, you generally want to retract something to save face, if you're a good enough human to be able to admit when you're wrong. The author's "What I've learned" remains "You can just do things" even though the top of the article now has a correction that the agents maybe "missed it while going through the literature".
difficulty: not an archaeologist but a SWE
cut the guy/gal some slack
Maybe don't publish archaeology "findings" and "discoveries" if you're merely a software developer. I don't go around publishing things about nuclear reactors, because it's not my area, I couldn't even review myself if it's right or not.
"This author has chosen to make their posts visible only to people who are signed in."
The best way to protect a site is to leave it alone. If we start finding dozens or hundreds of sites it will be more than what archaeologists can excavate and protest. Treasure hunters and looters don’t care about stratigraphy and the processes involved for doing research. Maybe the cat is out of the bag on this one, but good for thought.
Edit: I’m not saying we shouldn’t have people use AI to do this or that no bad actor will. This comment is in response to the sentiment I am seeing in the comments that we should lidar the whole world and have AI find any anomalous structures it can. There is no way for archeologists to excavate and protect all those places in that scenario
Also, drone mounted LiDAR is often not powerful enough to go through dense foliage which you have in these tropical climates.
Here in Romania it can be quite illegal to LIDAR map the local terrain without an official approval, and I'm not quite sure if that approval is ever given to individual persons/groups of persons that do not have any official status. So, no, I cannot just go out and LIDAR map my surroundings, even though the technology is available, I'd risk going to prison.
For their next trick, perhaps billionaires can exhume our dearly departed and see whether they have any gold teeth or baubles worth scavenging.
protest (argue against) -> protect (defend against harm)
A helpful example might be Heinrich Schliemann, a businessman who fancied himself an archaeologist and destroyed much of Troy’s history by digging it up as fast as he could. He was so focused on finding treasure to prove to world he was a great archaeologist he irreparably damaged the real layers that were Troy.
From his wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Schliemann?wprov=sfti...
> His excavations were condemned by later archaeologists as having destroyed the main layers of the real Troy. Kenneth W. Harl, in the Teaching Company's Great Ancient Civilizations of Asia Minor lecture series, sarcastically claimed that Schliemann's excavations were carried out with such rough methods that he did to Troy what the Greeks could not do in their times, destroying and levelling down the entire city walls to the ground.
Ain't the site itself the most important thing? As opposed to items: looters won't steal the site?
Although it does feel the finds are getting increasingly hard to spot, every now and then you get a how did everyone miss that moment. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the remaining impressive finds tend to be in woodland, using the Digital Terrain Model data which can peer beneath the forest canopy, like this Mexican one today, or are within newly released coverage which is promptly pounced on by armchair archeologists.
Not sure what my point is here except... to me this story still feels like a function of the amazing recent progress in lidar coverage and data availability (not to mention the incredible technology behind it), rather than an AI one, although I don't doubt that pointing a capable model and a healthy token budget in this direction might well be able to sweep up a few of the remaining discoveries.
Anyway, I can hear myself beginning to sound like a hater now, so I will stop here. I hope it turns out to be right, and in that case, congrats on your wonderful discovery.
Again, maybe he did cross verify things and just left that out of the storytelling, and congrats because this is really cool.
1. They said there is no site there, does that mean no one knew it was there?
If this is official lidar data, I find it hard to believe that this is a true discovery, I assume that it just can’t be claimed as a discovery until someone goes there which can be expensive and requires government oversight.
No universities have created an application to detect irregularities in this dataset, that was possible with ML years ago.
2. Personally I want people to Start sharing how much it cost the agent to do a task, because it feels like cost is becoming the bottleneck. Yes it’s awesome it did X but does that mean this can be utilized by people, businesses, or just governments and big tech.
Also just because we’re skeptical doesn’t make us haters. Being a hater is speaking in bad faith.
But anyone can tell me if I’m wrong on this
“INAH replied: they checked their records and found no registered archaeological site at that location. To be clear, it's not official yet. But as far as anyone can tell, nobody had put this one on a map before.“
Am I missing something to your post?
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50453616
For example, the agents could have displaced a known archeological site, or hallucinated or otherwise created one where none exists
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50453616
We saw this with the Dead Sea Scrolls where exclusive control was given to a select group of academics who monopolized the research to the point of refusing to release photographs or transcripts for nearly 40 years. The Huntington Library eventually had to force their hand by releasing their microfiche copies.
Again, we saw this with both the Ochtendung Skull Fraud and the Piltdown Man fraud - systematically falsifying results for clout is an exclusively human pre-occupation.
More to the point, in May 2025 YouTuber MrBeast was allowed to film inside the off-limits areas of Mayan Temples; something banned for both locals and normal tourists.
Academics posit that strict peer review is necessary so as not to allow the hoarding and gatekeeping of knowledge. However in matters of verification, faslification, and justification, they are derelict in their duty to the other half of that contract. The field only has itself to blame if other fields start organically superseding their usefulness and eroding their domain exclusivity by proxy of poor governance and ways of working.
Pointing out the benefit of removing human malfeasance from a given system, and extrapolating likely outcomes if we don't based on cited recent malpractice, is hardly a polemic against the system. Merely an explanation of anti-scientific stances from a supposed scientific community whose own rules and processes have resulted in issues that likely would not arise from employing responsible agentic prompting as a research tool.
If I can point to exclusively human behaviour in the domain being the largest problem regarding credibility and progress of the field as a whole, I am obviously going to argue against giving that same compromised governance exclusive franchise over discoveries made in spite of its existence.
The final barrier for super intelligence, or perhaps even just "human intelligence": can it materialize "new fields/ideas" without large datasets of human made and curated existing attempts?
It is becoming a boring homogenous world where we are trading deep expertise with being able to query the magic box
My guess is that you can find 99% of Maya pyramids in a Lidar set in a fairly short time with a traditional neural network, but you might find the last few using a network of AI agents, because they are capable of "creative" problem solving and using different methods/parameters/tools over several iterations.
You train a cat-classifier, and they will fail for a plush cat. Or maybe fail the other way, but not realizing it should also report a plush cat.
LLMs are much more robust, "find only the real cats in this picture" or "find all cats, including artificial/drawings/..."
And yes, you can add more training data to your classifier, but it's a never ending battle.
With LLM you unlock a whole new world of possibilities regarding the speed and result but we are also finding ourselves in a position where "asking the LLM" because the cheat for everything, no reason to dig further
Can we even measure an intelligence greater than our own? And at that point -- what is the point exactly? Why make an intelligence that we don't even know is intelligent? If its output is indiscernible to the human mind, what good does it do us?
The only "barrier" I can see that is valuable and that might be measureable to humans is this underlying mechanic of being able to create new ideas/concepts from little to no existing human generated training data. Otherwise, and as I see it right now, these machines will not become sentient, or go rouge, or be able to cure all future disease or solve all of physics, becasue they are entirely reliant on human made trainingsets.
Historically, for humans, this can not be the case, otherwise we would see no progress. Someone has to have a thought for the first time. Perhaps the solution to this for AI agents is some inherent randomness, and massive amounts of brute force compute. Who knows?
We can always just unplug the computer, you know. AI agents can do damage, they can be used in malicious ways and bring down/distrupt infrastructure, but the leap from today to the point where LLM's can prevent us from pulling the cord is unimagineable large, and likely infinite.
In modernity, the gap between the digital and material world is closing, especially from a sociological perspective, but we are still neurological systems spinning on a large rock. For 99% of our history we didn't have electricity. The likelyhood of returning to a post-electricty world, for example, is much greater than LLM's taking over the world and making us into zoo animals.
Where's the learning robot that I can teach to drive a car in the same way? They can solve some complex math problem but can they read the cues of other drivers at a four way stop to know when they should go (knowing the rules isn't sufficient).
I imagine that's an understatement. Using only the written works available from before Einstein (let alone Newton or Plato), you'd probably need a whole new technology that could train itself without any training data other than observation of the world.
I appreciate the enthusiasm. I'm not sure I agree. Especially since this was a SWE and not an archeologist / anthropologist announcing this (especially if the goal is to understand and preserve history -- not get headlines for AI).
Now it sucks because we're afraid of not being able to provide for our families in the near future.
It will always suck in some way, so we should REALLY focus on _what_ we can do. Otherwise, we'll be consumed by anxiety until the day we die.
Ask anybody with newly acquired Long COVID / PASC if COVID is over.
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
Sure. I agree. But the statement I was responding to was not nuanced.
From a global point of view, we've been living in relative peace for almost 100 years.
Housing is a problem, but child mortality isn't. Tech overlords are a problem, but no one is testing a nuclear bomb every week. The Koreas are still technically at war, but tuberculosis deaths have plummeted over the last century. The Cold War is over, but people are still dying in wars around the globe. US imperialism around the world is finally showing signs of decline, but now China manufactures practically everything, and other developing nations are struggling to compete.
It's always the best and the worst time to be alive somewhere in the world. It's up to you to decide what you want to make of it, anyway.
It's like an arrogant teenage boy showing up to an Easter egg hunt and grabbing all the chocolate faster than the little kids and demanding everyone tell him to great he is.
To me, the scary thing is that an LLM typically does a good job of convincing it's handler (or others) that its (re)discovery is of significance. Whether it's of undue significance or not determines if this new wave LLM research is just creating more work for us humans, be they maintainers of projects or archeologists.
You pull up the lidar scan and see that there actually IS what clearly appears to be a human-made structure.
And he did. And there is. And then he rigorously contacted government authorities and verified that it is not a registered site.
There are other problems at play. But this is not one of them.
I myself have to keep my stinking paws from some projects at work due to realizing that AI was making me believe I could shit taller than my ass.
It's like revenge of the nerds, but this time the other nerds outside the AI craze are the target instead of the typical bully.
> "It took less than 72 hours to go from a random thought while traveling to an official reply from the Mexican government."
> "That night, I asked the agents to analyze it and went to bed." ... "I woke up and checked the agents' reports. 'DAMN!'"
> "Me: OK, please do the report. And I went to bed."
(The actual agents-on-the-job time and compute seems much less than 48 agents * 72hours from the report.)
The bottleneck will be data. Every possible signal out of publicly available datasets will be squeezed fast.
Your neighbor on the other hand has good odds that they read to a 6th grade level or worse, and believes the president at his word because he's signaled he also hates minorities.
As the famous quote goes, "You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land— the common clay of the new West. You know... morons."
Exactly. The only blocker to us pulling this off ourselves is access to the LIDAR data.
You can build your own harness quite easily or use a harness something like pi.dev which offers a lot of flexibility in customization in terms of tools, models ised, resume sessions at a prior point in time, etc.
I have used pi.dev to easily start from a known context and goal and use it to compare the cost effectiveness, token isage, etc. of different models to reach the goal state.
I am sure there are many ways to do this successfully.
"Scan through publically accessible LIDAR data on <region of mexican jungle>, search for potential Mayan ruins and cross reference with published data to rule out existing finds
Work autonomously until the entire area is searched, prepare me a report detailing potential discoveries"
should more or less do the trick
https://celtic-fields.com
> Agent: …instructions for the report… + email addresses
> Me: OK, please do the report.
I don't want to sound offtopic nitpicky, because the content of the article is quite cool, but I just hope the author didn't just straight up generate the report with AI and sent it right to the email address. If I were in this situation, I'd most certainly write myself something along the lines of "Hey, I'm not anyone professional but just wanted to inquire about these coordinates because it seems that this site has not been yet catalogued and it's likely to contain something interesting based on my research. Please take a look.". Or better yet, send it to some actual archelogist who would already be versed in these kind of communications, and let him handle it professionally.
At this moment probably everyone has had to deal with sudden influx of ai-generated emails, I hear about it all the time from my friends who work in customer service and such. Much has already been said on the internet about this kind of conduct, but I just think that using an AI agent to pretend you are familiar with the topic should be discouraged. Just be honest and write your own words, if the recipient needs some professional expertise from AI, they can just paste your message into their own model.
Please just stop the hype now.
Edit: I asked gemini and it's only 834 1200x1200 images for 1,200 km2 at standard lidar resolution.
Can that be used to detect illegal mining operations in South America?
This is partly why George Clooney abandoned his Project Sentinel - documenting atrocities from space means nothing if you cannot action on the people and financial networks enabling them.
At the very least you can try to hold the bad actors accountable even if it's years if not decades afterwards, if you have documentation. Germany for example had deathcamp criminal cases being prosecuted as late as 2022 [1].
It will get really interesting what happens in the US once the Trump administration is gone - even if the expected Trump pardon against everyone involved gets reversed somehow, I suspect that a lot of material regarding ICE or the military strikes against "drug smugglers" will simply have been shredded or never been created in the first place...
[1] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/die-letzten-ns-prozesse-in-de...
As an aside: anyone with access to all those tokens for funsies can do this. Folks without that access cannot just do things. The have / have-not of tokens will be interesting to see over time.
> They turned the lidar strips (about 1,200 km² of jungle) into images, and 48 agents went through them one by one like very patient archaeologists, looking for pyramids, platforms, and plazas while filtering out natural hills, sinkholes, and roads. There was no special model or classifier involved: the agents literally looked at the pictures, following a precise guide.
Would it be better to ask a single LLM to create a processing pipeline to inject raw LIDAR data, create a heightmap and use an image classifier to identify unnatural shapes that standout and create a ranking score with a higher value where multiple shapes appears close to each other. At least you get something reusable and probably multiple order of magnitude faster.
Simple to enough to ask "how long would it take", see 144 days and reply "do it in 3 days" and the agent will happily spin up enough instances to cover it
edit: "presumably one agent could parallelize its analysis"
No, they said they didn't analyse with tool use it was literally agents "looking" at the images via multimodal input
Also agents analyzing drought pictures, where many ancient UK structures seem to appear would be an easy win. I've never checked whether there's a comprehensive drought picture map of the UK.
Those pictures would be very appropriate for AI bots to look at and make discoveries.
Just near me, a Roman road about 5km long was discovered last year by exactly this method. That's a non-trivial discovery. There was also a large Roman villa complex discovered the same way.
For LIDAR and structures, you're likely correct - there's vanishingly obvious structures left to discover that way.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-52911797
"Roman forts, roads, military camps and villas have been identified by a new analysis of aerial photographs taken in the 2018 heatwave across Wales.
Scorched crop marks uncovered about 200 ancient sites during the drought.
Experts say the Roman finds are key pieces in the jigsaw to understand how Wales was conquered and dominated 2,000 years ago.
Researcher Toby Driver said the discoveries "turn everything we know about the Romans on its head"."
Drought is really a more blatant mechanism to discover what ground penetrating radar will tell you, but only works if the surface is amenable.
Yes please
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik
My AI Agents (re)Discovered an Unmapped Maya Site
I take something much darker from this story: expect the raw corpuses of data to start being locked away. It was fine to let the LIDAR surveys flop around in public when only qualified research groups really knew what to do with it. You could let people rummage and report, and hold just the coordinates confidential, as this guy did in his report. Now, the sensing data tell any guy with two sentences’ worth of interest where to go pillage for antiquities…
It’s still actually valuable to give the archaeologists time to schlep out there and excavate properly before the TikTokking hordes go mog all over it for clout or novelty or whatever the ephemeral currency is these days. The only possible reaction is for the people who labor to produce these data to start locking them away within the guild—much like the way you’ve gotta show your good-guy credentials to use Mythos for bug hunting…
Also, I think we're long past the days when "Google SWE" carried special weight vs the rest of the industry.
Because it did not work the first two times this was submitted without mentioning "Google SWE": https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=pietromiotti.com
So I guess our revealed preference is that the outputs of AI prompts are objectively more interesting if the prompting is done by Google SWEs.
Usually yes? (vs pointed by a random vibe coder)
Also the more interesting bit to me here is, that you do not find the reference on the page at all, that the person works for google at all (I only found it mentioned in his X account). With the headline I initially thought this was a official google research project, but the blog reads like a personal project.
So for me one key takeaway is how AI could possibly open up more interdisciplinary work in our heavily siloed world.
You're totally right! I led you to believe there's an undiscovered pyramid in Mexico, and I am sorry for this.
On a serious note — it's really cool to see people applying LLMs to other domains and yielding great preliminary results.
It's like the new drive-by pull requests I'm getting in my open source repositories. No consideration for the people doing the actual work.
Now will we have a TempleOS style burning bush that goes beyond the markov-chain limitations of Terry Davis' era? Very likely. Will it impact contemporary discourse? About as much as the Astrology and Homeopathic mobile apps.
(N.B. I am conscious that Homeopathy is a $14bn market segment in the US. Notwithstanding, given that the segment is based on magic-water-'science', I think the point remains.)
https://bakerbench.substack.com/p/i-went-looking-for-lost-ci...
Well, pretty much this: "discover" a Maya pyramid.
Regards, — The world
Or! Maybe we should not look too close, because you never know what you will find!
It would not have been realistic to have PhD students manually comb through thousands of square kilometers of LIDAR data, and crossreference everything with existing sites; LLMs have turned this into low-hanging fruit.
Can't expect every single scientific field to immediately use any new technology to its full potential, and it makes you sound like a prick, too.
The real answer is financial incentives tied to publishing of research - something that academics in gatekept fields see as the thin edge of the wedge in exposing a utility/ROI gap for legacy practitioners.
> No
lol, kids these days.
And such findings are usually praiseworthy and valuable.
I’m sorry, but you didn’t do much. The work was done by clankers.
There is no reason for them to provide confirmation for internal inventory that Pietro passionately fingered from afar.
Which I think would make sense, ultimately. But now from the Mexico perspective, wouldn't they elicit more concern for others just mapping their terrain after a blog post like this goes viral?
Very meticulous, exciting work, nonetheless. I'm all for 3d lidar scanning the plannet!
In his defense, without AI he would've googled the question, now he "clauded" it.
And then he told AI to make a webpage about "his" great accomplishment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4OvQIGDg4I