alt Hacker NewsIMO, his primary mistake was not turning the agent swarm on a proper research task that exhaustively determined whether it had been discovered or not.
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I would be very surprised if LLMs were adequate for doing archaeological lit review. My experience is that you often find sites documented halfway through a stack of undigitized records in a physical archive somewhere, and it's usually a verbal description that's difficult to localize to a specific location. Heck, I've even contributed to the problem by finding new sites as we're packing up camp, when I didn't have time to properly document them outside field notes.
Why burn compute on that? He reached out to the Mexican Government and asked them if they knew about it - they said they didn't have it in the database. The discovery is relatively new (2025) so maybe sitting in a queue at the central office waiting to get into the system, not necessarily anyone's "mistake". On the contrary, the excitement gives visibility to the active research going on in this area, which is a positive outcome.
And then another agent swarm to make sure that the research swarm didn't hallucinate any false positive matches!
LLMs are great, and they keep getting better, but I'm so tired of current shortcomings being blamed on the prompter "holding it wrong".
Yeah we devs call that deduplication.
Not so fable, this llm thing if it's missing a literal pyramid in the room
Well the Google SWE didn't make a mistake, the media made a mistake in misreporting it, and we at HN are making a mistake by giving it undue attention.
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.