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.