Google SWE points 48 AI agents at NASA Lidar, finds unmapped Maya pyramid in 72h

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.

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?

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...

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.

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?

Do West/Central Africa next?

well done! Actual good use of AI.

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

Amazing!

Why only 48?

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.

In a few days:

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.

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.

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

Regards, — The world

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

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

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

We got vibe archaeologists before GTA 6

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

>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.

How to sound like the most insufferable clown.

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

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

Now find Atlantis.