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  LordOmlette
  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...
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  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
• strix_varius
  Given that we can all see the mapped pyramid in the previously published paper https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X2..., the title of this seems incorrect ("finds unmapped Maya pyramid").
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  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.
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  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?
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  zingerlio
  What kind of harness setup that would allow me to fire off a prompt, go to sleep, and wake up to see such a comprehensive and intricate infra setup (48 agents, orchestrated, image storage, continuous execution), and just say “damn”? I paid my for peasant $20 bucks a month plan and works in the CLI (Codex), I never know how to scale work on number of agents, non-interrupted workflow, or multiple models (he mentioned he consulted multiple models, I assume not just copy pasting questions in different chats). Is there a harness that I’m missing out on?
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  danesparza
  "This is by far the best time ever to be alive."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).
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  octocop
  This post turned out to be a perfect example of the blind faith in LLM agents. Their outputs are not to be trusted and must be rigorously checked.
• sailfast
  You CAN just do things, but one should also temper the excitement a bit. Agents are amazing but also the last 10% is still really difficult to get right and requires subject matter expertise for most things.As an aside: anyone with access to all those tokens for funsies can do this. Folks without that access cannot just do things. The have / have-not of tokens will be interesting to see over time.
• agnosticmantis
  The title reads as if the 48 agents took 72 hours to find this. The text doesn't exactly say that:> "It took less than 72 hours to go from a random thought while traveling to an official reply from the Mexican government."> "That night, I asked the agents to analyze it and went to bed." ... "I woke up and checked the agents' reports. 'DAMN!'"> "Me: OK, please do the report. And I went to bed."(The actual agents-on-the-job time and compute seems much less than 48 agents * 72hours from the report.)
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  pu_pe
  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.
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  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?
• fefaOd
  Oh, this is really cool. Things like this inspire me, and I believe we can figure this out using AI—without ending up with a "Skynet" scenario.
• windowshopping
  How much does this cost though? Who can afford 48 agents working overnight? I pay $100 a month to Claude to have one agent...
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  escapecharacter
  If these type of subtle finds interest you, this account is great: https://x.com/MoundLore
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  y04nn
  Cool story but:> 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.Would it be better to ask a single LLM to create a processing pipeline to inject raw LIDAR data, create a heightmap and use an image classifier to identify unnatural shapes that standout and create a ranking score with a higher value where multiple shapes appears close to each other. At least you get something reusable and probably multiple order of magnitude faster.
• 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...
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  reedf1
  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.
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  DrBazza
  I'd very much like to see this done in the UK.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.
• koolba
  This is neat! Might be risky depending on the region if you end up discovering a covert drug cartel production facility.
• dotemacs
  This is probably one of the coolest AI related news
• raynhardt
  well done! Actual good use of AI.
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  Kuyawa
  "At this point, we should probably lidar the whole planet and let the agents discover the rest"Yes please
• freddealmeida
  Saw this on X. Pretty cool. Does he get to name it?
• eloto333
  HEllo
• TheRealPomax
  The title is "My AI Agents Found an Unmapped Maya Site"
• 59percentmore
  Do West/Central Africa next?
• m0llusk
  People have been finding hidden constructions for a while. The large urban conurbations such as around Ecuador are perhaps the most impressive (https://apnews.com/article/amazon-lost-cities-ecuador-archae...). While Archeologists have been driving the process almost anyone who spends time with recent LIDAR data finds something much as how publicly available satellite data has uncovered geological oddities. This is not a big advance. Getting an official report completed and creating a compelling image of what the site might have looked like is impressive, but also consistent with what ordinary untrained people have been accomplishing.
• smugma
  What Would Indiana Jones Do?
• elmer2
  This and spotting cancers are some of the best uses of AI.
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  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.
• StrLght
  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.
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  joshdata
  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.
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  jo-m
  After OSS maintainers, archaeologists will be the next ones now to be swamped with AI generated reports...
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  Aozora7
  You've heard about vibe coding, but have you heard of vibe archeology?
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  thomasben
  @openai @anthropic @google @spacexai: can you please proceed with scanning the entire planet and let us know what you found?Regards, — The world
• ashleyn
  We got vibe archaeologists before GTA 6
• PinkaDunka
  > At this point, we should probably lidar the whole planet and let the agents discover the rest.Or! Maybe we should not look too close, because you never know what you will find!
• justplay
  Launch a cancer agent too. Find a cure, deliver a breakthrough.That will be impressive
• musha68k
  AI driven UAP detection incoming ;) It's SETI/BOINC all over again!
• tumdum_
  > You can just do things.I’m sorry, but you didn’t do much. The work was done by clankers.
• HIP_HOP
  This should go on Joe Rogan so that Michael Button explains what happened here.
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  thibran
  What a failure of archeology, they should have done that before.
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  iLoveOncall
  It's often easy to find what nobody has been looking for.
• HIP_HOP
  So this is now another proof that Graham Hancock and Giorgio Tsoukalos are totally right. Right? Right?
• Iolaum
  Amazing!
• anon
  undefined
• varispeed
  Why only 48?
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  nelsnelson
  Now find Atlantis.
• tushar_kr
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• klaus20
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• thisisauserid
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• cnczeric
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• tomloveai
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• mmwon
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• anon
  undefined
• anon
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• sam1r
  I have to be frankly honest -- I have a gut feeling -- regardless of what Pietro reported to the Mexican gov't, the binary response professionally is likely "Sorry, we didn't find it".There is no reason for them to provide confirmation for internal inventory that Pietro passionately fingered from afar.Which I think would make sense, ultimately. But now from the Mexico perspective, wouldn't they elicit more concern for others just mapping their terrain after a blog post like this goes viral?Very meticulous, exciting work, nonetheless. I'm all for 3d lidar scanning the plannet!
• sdadsa
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  throwaway384034
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