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.
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.
> 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?
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
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.
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?
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
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
"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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Ain't the site itself the most important thing? As opposed to items: looters won't steal the site?
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.
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?
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?
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.
It is becoming a boring homogenous world where we are trading deep expertise with being able to query the magic box
The bottleneck will be data. Every possible signal out of publicly available datasets will be squeezed fast.
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.
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.
Again, maybe he did cross verify things and just left that out of the storytelling, and congrats because this is really cool.
“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?
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).
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.
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.
Yes please
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik
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.
Also, I think we're long past the days when "Google SWE" carried special weight vs the rest of the industry.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And such findings are usually praiseworthy and valuable.
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