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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
> I imagine lack of training data would be a problem
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.
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 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.
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...
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.
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.
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 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 done by the machines.
>You can just do things. I'm not an archaeologist, so I didn't know this was supposed to be hard. I just picked an old problem, tried the most obvious thing and threw some compute at it. Being a naive outsider might be a superpower now.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Yes please
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?
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.
Also, I think we're long past the days when "Google SWE" carried special weight vs the rest of the industry.
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.
Regards, — The world
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.
And such findings are usually praiseworthy and valuable.
How to sound like the most insufferable clown.
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