> 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.
> 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?
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-...
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Perhaps google SWE should have requested a literature search before publishing his results as novel
"Prior art has reduced the novelty of the discovery" is a great one
Besides, the LLM can use tools such as search via its harness, so depending on how strictly you define "autocomplete" this alone could disqualify it from being an autocomplete, fancy or otherwise.
Goes without saying - humans are no truth engines either lol.
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.
LLMs are great, and they keep getting better, but I'm so tired of current shortcomings being blamed on the prompter "holding it wrong".
I expect with time these kinds of things will change.
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.
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.)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
> exponentially increasing the cost of hosting
We're on a technical forum, everyone knows the cost of hosting plaintext and what an exponential is.
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.
multiple parties can be opposed to each other's goals with all of them still being the "bad guys".
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.
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.
Peer review also protects the authors for making a fool of themselves. QED.
>Reply with any new idea (you can brainstorm one with the AI of your choice or just create any new idea or a new combination of ideas), wait about 20 minutes (the time it takes HN scrapers to turn ideas into knockoffs), and you'll see references to it going back decades.
Rather than debate me about it, please follow my instructions and reply with any new idea. It doesn't have to have any commercial value, the knockoffs are automatic without regard for judging the value of the ideas. (I guess their business plan is that if they knock off every idea, surely some of them would have some value. Or at least they can sell the audience's data.)
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.
In real life, that’s actually just vandalism of an archeological site for personal gain.
Don't ruin Indiana Jones for me.
Not news.
"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.
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...