My AI agents found an unmapped Maya site?

iLoveOncall

It's often easy to find what nobody has been looking for.

raynhardt

well done! Actual good use of AI.

Aozora7

You've heard about vibe coding, but have you heard of vibe archeology?

thomasben

@openai @anthropic @google @spacexai: can you please proceed with scanning the entire planet and let us know what you found? Regards, — The world

elmer2

This and spotting cancers are some of the best uses of AI.

chirau

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.

varispeed

Why only 48?

thibran

What a failure of archeology, they should have done that before.

glimshe

Why is "Google SWE" relevant here? Shouldn't the evidence speak for itself? Will the AI work better because it was "pointed" by a Google SWE? Also, I think we're long past the days when "Google SWE" carried special weight vs the rest of the industry.

civvv

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?

jo-m

After OSS maintainers, archaeologists will be the next ones now to be swamped with AI generated reports...

TSiege

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

pingou

Wasn't it extremely expensive to analyse so many images? 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?

ashleyn

We got vibe archaeologists before GTA 6

nelsnelson

Now find Atlantis.

59percentmore

Do West/Central Africa next?

HIP_HOP

So this is now another proof that Graham Hancock and Giorgio Tsoukalos are totally right. Right? Right?

HIP_HOP

This should go on Joe Rogan so that Michael Button explains what happened here.

neomantra

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...