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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
Regards, — The world
How to sound like the most insufferable clown.
And such findings are usually praiseworthy and valuable.