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Comment by chirau | Hacker News Reader

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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I'm sceptical too. Perhaps he verified, but from his blogpost, he doesn't imply that he cross checked anything and instead trusted all agentic output. For example, after getting the patch of ladar with the site, did he manually check NASA's resources to make sure there was no hallucination there? Maybe his agents are really good, but submitting this to INAH after only chatting with the agents is really bold.

Again, maybe he did cross verify things and just left that out of the storytelling, and congrats because this is really cool.

Yeah I agree. There’s a lot of assumptions coming out about what the structures are and what it looks like that give me pause. Very cool to have found this site though. The actual archeology involved though will be slow as it’s a science done layer by layer. It will be interesting to see if any predictions made by the AI match up to the facts.

I’m the same for a couple of reasons. First I want to say it is refreshing that AI is being used for discovery instead of an AI arms race, or something else that just feels dystopian. I understand this is happening but it’s rarely what is shown.

1. They said there is no site there, does that mean no one knew it was there?

If this is official lidar data, I find it hard to believe that this is a true discovery, I assume that it just can’t be claimed as a discovery until someone goes there which can be expensive and requires government oversight.

No universities have created an application to detect irregularities in this dataset, that was possible with ML years ago.

2. Personally I want people to Start sharing how much it cost the agent to do a task, because it feels like cost is becoming the bottleneck. Yes it’s awesome it did X but does that mean this can be utilized by people, businesses, or just governments and big tech.

Also just because we’re skeptical doesn’t make us haters. Being a hater is speaking in bad faith.

But anyone can tell me if I’m wrong on this

He asked authorities, as stated in the article

“INAH replied: they checked their records and found no registered archaeological site at that location. To be clear, it's not official yet. But as far as anyone can tell, nobody had put this one on a map before.“

Am I missing something to your post?

INAH said there's nothing registered there, nothing more than that. The results look fairly convincing but neither the OP, me and (I presume) you nor the commentor have archaeology experience. Perhaps there are other explanations for ground structures like this we just don't know till an expert visits the site and confirms that yes, it is a previously unmapped Mayan pyramid.

One potential reason there's no registered archaeological site at that location is that there _is_ no archaeological site at that location.

For example, the agents could have displaced a known archeological site, or hallucinated or otherwise created one where none exists

There is clearly no registered archeological site because nobody registered it.

Just knowing something is there isn't enough to register a place as an archeological site, you have at least prove it has archeological value (usually done by visiting the place).

I have a place nearby where you can see Trilobites that went extinct 200 million years ago. And you can just take them and go, because historical value of them isn't that high and there is no registered site. It's a well known place, and archeological students sometimes even practice there.

There are other authorities! Such as researchers, academics etc.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50453616

Turns out that an expert archeologist Dr. Francisco Estrada-Belli of Tulane University already found it. You are right to be skeptical and maybe being a hater is in fact not a bad thing (I know I am).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50453616

I'm certainly not one to defend AI bros, this guy's writing is insufferable (and reads like slop to me), but did you read TFA? The LIDAR image (based on measured data, not AI) clearly shows human-made structures, and the Mexican government's response said that it's not registered. The chatbots just found it. Unless he's completely lying about the whole thing, this seems genuine. Now all the bits about what sort of site it probably was and the slopified image of what it might have looked like are garbage, but the find itself doesn't look to be.

TBH the Academic reaction to this could likely be to gatekeep it into oblivion over bad faith or ideological reasons given the perceived hostile takeover of their domain by 'amateurs'.

We saw this with the Dead Sea Scrolls where exclusive control was given to a select group of academics who monopolized the research to the point of refusing to release photographs or transcripts for nearly 40 years. The Huntington Library eventually had to force their hand by releasing their microfiche copies.

Again, we saw this with both the Ochtendung Skull Fraud and the Piltdown Man fraud - systematically falsifying results for clout is an exclusively human pre-occupation.

More to the point, in May 2025 YouTuber MrBeast was allowed to film inside the off-limits areas of Mayan Temples; something banned for both locals and normal tourists.

Academics posit that strict peer review is necessary so as not to allow the hoarding and gatekeeping of knowledge. However in matters of verification, faslification, and justification, they are derelict in their duty to the other half of that contract. The field only has itself to blame if other fields start organically superseding their usefulness and eroding their domain exclusivity by proxy of poor governance and ways of working.

Someone has an axe to grind.

I mean we should all have axes to grind regarding bad actors demeaning academia and stilting academic progress because of ideological issues or financial incentives, should we not?

Pointing out the benefit of removing human malfeasance from a given system, and extrapolating likely outcomes if we don't based on cited recent malpractice, is hardly a polemic against the system. Merely an explanation of anti-scientific stances from a supposed scientific community whose own rules and processes have resulted in issues that likely would not arise from employing responsible agentic prompting as a research tool.

If I can point to exclusively human behaviour in the domain being the largest problem regarding credibility and progress of the field as a whole, I am obviously going to argue against giving that same compromised governance exclusive franchise over discoveries made in spite of its existence.

It does seem amazing how mountains of evidence have to be assembled to disprove academic narratives the whole field defended for decades, even if reports from the time gave us proof hundreds of years ago. Things like the massive human sacrifices that were made (usually by colonized tribes, not the ruling Aztecs) on a systematic scale are basically an anti-thesis to the current national narrative of the state of Mexico itself.

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