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.
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.
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.
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.
Universities do it, Google search does it, broadcasters do it.
The only place that doesn't really do it is public libraries, which are all subsidized either by governments or donations.
Because agents can do labor this is more than just "knowledge sharing". It undercuts human labor power and allows for even grosser concentration of capital.
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.
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.
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.
Like Alaric, Temujin, Teach, and Burham!
But now that it's individual creators that need protection suddenly copyright law needs to be reformed to serve the interests of large corporations once more. What a scam.
To put it visually:
selfless humans | corpo greed
|
enforce IP good ____|____ bad
violate IP better | bad
Is it theft?
Does knowledge belong to a person, or to the civilization? After all, their knowledge could not have come from nothing, as they too stand on the shoulders of giants - all of us do.
If we took the different route - opening knowledge up instead of focusing on gatekeeping - we'd probably allow people to achieve more.
Multiple times I've hit the gate when it was not necessary. Just yesterday: - Want to read a research paper? Pay up. - Want to access tax funded satellite images? Pay up. - Want to dig through some old parts of the public archives? Pay up. - Want to read an old publication that might contain knowledge, written for the public, which somehow ended up in a collection that requires you to pay up just so you can read 1 paragraph from a 188 paperbck or verify a certain catalogue number exists? Well well, open up your wallet.
In which case are we talking about theft?
Someone's NYT bestselling novel? Those are mostly so cookie cutter it ain't hard to copy them without an AI.
Music? How many times have musicians riffed and ripped off of one another? And now someone can just more easily create a similar song/tune.
Art? You cannot copy a physical art piece. You can reproduce it, but you cannot copy it - it won't have the same value as the original. Even in cases such as Warhol's mass produced art, the original prints have much more value than a random print on a dollar store t-shirt.
And after all, even Google and Open AI are sharing their models for free. You can use Gemini and ChatGPT without paying a dime to any of them. And they are also so kind to share the knowledge on how to build these magic machines AND even give you their machines for free so you can train one of your own.
So I wouldn't call all of this "the largest theft", more like "the largest liberation".
Well we certainly didn't get paid for it, and now our livelihoods are at stake. So yes.
also,
> Someone's NYT bestselling novel? Those are mostly so cookie cutter it ain't hard to copy them without an AI.
lol then why weren't you a bestselling NYT novelist, had something better to do?
I can't say how strongly and completely I think this framing should be rejected.
What is the point of knowledge if not to learn from.
> Physical works are being enthusiastically destroyed
This makes me sad.
> 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.
Google and OpenAI are expanding access to the commons like nothing before.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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).
> 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 "bad guys".
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.
There is a difference between a story in which a robin hood liberated knowledge and freely, without any caveats or exchange, delivers it to the masses (think Aaron Swartz) and a story in which a power hungry empire systematically scoops up all the world's resources and decides to permit the masses access so long as they exchange (at a premium) other resources the empire needs to continually solidify its position.
If you don't see how these are different I don't know what to tell you. People making IP theft arguments are more disgruntled about the massive power imbalance between, say, a massive corporation, and a small time creator who can barely even earn a subsistence off their work in the first place, and the former taking from the latter in impunity.
The left rightly sees it as unfair because it is a power imbalance that leads to asymmetrical power of exchange. The companies get the power to continue to extract data from you, all you get is the privilege to then pay them for it.
I expect with time these kinds of things will change.
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.
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.
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.
At some point such discoveries won't cause as much stir, similar to how reusable rocket drew such fervent attention 10 years ago.
This is the hype. The interesting thing is always in the future.
> 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.
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-...
LLMs are great, and they keep getting better, but I'm so tired of current shortcomings being blamed on the prompter "holding it wrong".
That process won't catch everything, but is worth it. that's how to "hold it right".
/s
Not so fable, this llm thing if it's missing a literal pyramid in the room
Perhaps google SWE should have requested a literature search before publishing his results as novel
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.
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.
Goes without saying - humans are no truth engines either lol.
People latched onto the bs marketing terms like "thinking" way too easily. I don't know where all the classic hacker skepticism and desire to know how things actually work went the past four years.
"Prior art has reduced the novelty of the discovery" is a great one
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.
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.