The site in question was found earlier: https://bsky.app/profile/indyfromspace.bsky.social/post/3n22...
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...
Here is the referenced publication. Pages 13-14 show the structures. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X2...
Did his Gemini AI agents just use Google search, find the publication, check the coords, and claim it as a discovery? Ha
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.
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
It’s like a shell game. It’s likely overfitting on its training data.
I enjoy the contrite rationalizations and turns of phrase LLMs use when encountering a discrepancy.
"Prior art has reduced the novelty of the discovery" is a great one
Maybe LLMs are getting a little too good at emulating humans.
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.
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.
Asking an LLM for criticism is like asking a yes-man to punch you in the face. he'll always swing, but hitting a straw man he built himself.
IMO, his primary mistake was not turning the agent swarm on a proper research task that exhaustively determined whether it had been discovered or not.
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.
I mean, if this were a true novelty, it would have been newsworthy regardless of AI involvement, but ya it does ride the hype train a bit
> 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.
They do but the point point is that this post made it because of the AI hype. Not the discovery itself which should grant more attention than that of a machine doing archeological "work" that happens to misinform.
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.
> Now enthusiasts can use the same technique to find other sites, which may not yet be found. That's what makes it interesting.
This is the hype. The interesting thing is always in the future.
You lost me.
> 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.
That isn't in the future. Anyone can do that today, and with clever judgement and luck, can find some other sites today. Not in the future, although future will likely be easier.
He didn't say wait until next year for Gemini Dysprosium. That'd be hype.
It's also the past - we as humans have been flying multi instrument platforms and crawling through traces for decades now.
Australia's been criss crossed with mag, gravity, lidar, gamma spectrometer, et al. since the 1970s and human operators have scrubbed glitches, filtered data, and composed maps leading to mineral discoveries, impact crater finds, unexpected structures found, etc.
Elsewhere, Angkor was scanned back in 2012 leading to revelations and new structures w/out the use of AI- https://www.siemreapbest.com/temples/blog/angkor-lidar-lost-...
And then another agent swarm to make sure that the research swarm didn't hallucinate any false positive matches!
LLMs are great, and they keep getting better, but I'm so tired of current shortcomings being blamed on the prompter "holding it wrong".
You are supposed to use at least one LLM as judge for all output, in xhigh reasoning. Also important, is to run regular sample validations of output vs predefined input to ensure the model doesn't regress on your kind of data.
That process won't catch everything, but is worth it. that's how to "hold it right".
/s
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.
Yeah we devs call that deduplication.
Not so fable, this llm thing if it's missing a literal pyramid in the room
This is also a good example of the disconnect between what's valuable to scientists, and what members of the public think is valuable.
In this blog post, we have LLMs finding just one site in a 1,220 km^2 search area. And then sent an email to a government agency and got a polite "cool story bro" email in response. And that's probably as far as this will go because, in mesoamerica, "undocumented" sites are a dime a dozen.
Compare, for example, with this paper in which researchers found 6,764 sites in a search area only 1/10 as large: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/ru... , and then proceeded to do real science with all that data.
And I have to point out, part of why they were about 5 orders of magnitude as effective at finding these sites is that they used much more sophisticated methods than what the LLM was able to come up with.
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.
If the "AI" scrapers honored HTTP 402 I'd be happy to let 'em in.
Or necessarily depending on your viewpoint.
Who says the agent was treated the same as you?
Who says it wasn't? American AI providers are sticklers for making sure their users don't colors outside of the lines.
AI is already fully capable of solving the majority of/all captchas, you just aren't supposed to do it due to TOS.
I expect with time these kinds of things will change.
If TOS is the main concern, then surly a “Are you over 18? Yes/No” style page should be enough.
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.
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.
> 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).
They aren't making a legal claim, "What they did was technically legal" is almost never a compelling argument in favor of behavior, and the fact that people can't expect legal protections from this behavior is exactly why they're taking matters into their own hands, leading to the information protectionism that started this comment thread.
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.
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.
> they're looting it so they can make a profit
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.
If they are making a profit.
But that's right, the side effect is that it reduced friction. The most benefit I get from LLMs when I treat them as search engines.
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:
ie the valence regarding intellectual property is irrelevant for this kind of motivation.
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.
>We are siloing our knowledge out of desperation.
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?
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.
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 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.
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
> not going to convince me that corporate IP & knowledge restriction is actually a good thing and elsevier are the good guys.
multiple parties can be opposed to each other's goals with all of them still being "bad guys".
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.
Not we, just Elsevier. As long as Academia sells its research, information will not be free.
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
> I can’t move past
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.
If it was already published a year ago, what are the chances that was already in the training data?
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.
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.
IF the llm did not have the paper on it's training set. Which we do not know.
Or end up searching for it, finding it, and lying about it.
I hope he collaborates with archeologists to apply these methods to their work.
This post can't be seen if you arent signed in.
Those are both dead links...
Could this info have aided AI ?
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.
even if it was discovered, I'd say most of the accolades go to NASA and LIDAR, the fact that AI agents were used to discover it isn't a big deal.
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.
It contributes for sure, I'm just noting that the headlines that media are producing (and people are consuming) tend to be seen through the lens of "AI is doing this"
>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.
open access.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X2...
Not to agents
I told my agent to bypass Cloudflare captcha's and it happily did so.
which agent, out of curiosity?
Probably Sonnet. Just take one of the Cloudflare scrape python modules.
He expects me to click this link with my own finger? And then read it with my own eyes?
> This author has chosen to make their posts visible only to people who are signed in.
I thought Bluesky was supposed to be better than X/Twitter, not worse. Bummer.
Cant open the links as one needs an account. Is there a xitter gor bluesky?
Then the title is misleading, yes? Should be something like "Google SWE uses AI to find a pyramid site that was already discovered".
Not news.
Ironic going to a blue sky link that is blocked by login.
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.
Tomb Raider is a video game.
In real life, that’s actually just vandalism of an archeological site for personal gain.
Potato, po-tah-to.
Don't ruin Indiana Jones for me.
Pretty sure that is the plot of Tomb Raider as well. At least the games from the 1990s were about a bored rich woman going to unexplored archeological sites for personal enrichment and kicks. She'd also fight ghosts and dragons.
So now this apparently amazing feat that was rushed into publication is actually just an out of date DB.
Peer review also protects the authors for making a fool of themselves. QED.
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.
That is not how peer review works typically, but at least the guy did try to confirm with actual experts. So no, no evil here.
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.
I guess you just peer reviewed my comment then, thanks.
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.
He checked with the Mexican government before claiming it was new, which is reasonable due diligence surely?!
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".
>> any archaeologist knows to triple check before saying something is "new"
difficulty: not an archaeologist but a SWE
cut the guy/gal some slack
> 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 post says:
> 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)
Can you please reply this on main thread so that it confirms that this overhyped non-peer reviewed vibecoded approach doesn't work
The approach did work, but the discovery isn't new. Independent re-discovery happens all the time science.
but the paper was probably in the AIs training set and they could have accessed it at any time during the run.
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.
> 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.
[1] Detailed more here: https://resobscura.substack.com/p/using-opus-55-to-discover-...
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.
you can see they're obviously the same structures in the images. just search for the author and you'll find the paper.
Care to share the source without a paywall?
"This author has chosen to make their posts visible only to people who are signed in."
[I withdraw this comment.]
That's a pretty extraordinary claim.
I don't follow, what exactly are you saying? Are you claiming that a scientific article (shared in a sub-thread alongside yours) is fake?
You need a shave, here, use Occam's razor.
hilariously
Don't look beyond the veil, you'll strain your eyes.