The Amazon Rainforest is a dazzlingly huge and sophisticated ecosystem, a six-million-square-kilometer world unto itself. Regardless of its central position in numerous indigenous origin tales and traditions stretching again millennia, it is largely been ignored by mainstream archaeology. Standard considering held that such an apparently uncooked and dynamic expanse of wilderness could not presumably have performed any necessary position within the cultural evolution of human beings.
That is altering, nevertheless, now {that a} raft of recent archaeological discoveries is flipping the unique paradigm on its head and corroborating what indigenous peoples have lengthy insisted: that the Amazon was as soon as house to a wealthy, flourishing civilization.
These discoveries have largely been enabled by applied sciences reminiscent of satellite tv for pc imagery and Mild Detection and Ranging (LiDAR). Now OpenAI needs so as to add synthetic intelligence to that arsenal.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s father or mother firm, filed an April 2025 lawsuit in opposition to OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in coaching and working its AI methods.)
AI-powered treasure hunt
On Friday, the corporate introduced a contest geared toward uncovering beforehand unknown archaeological websites within the Amazon via the usage of its o3/o4 mini and GPT-4.1 fashions. It is a sort of AI-powered treasure hunt that challenges anybody with a Wi-Fi connection and a ardour for exploration to sift via and analyze open-source information — together with, however not restricted to, colonial diaries, indigenous oral traditions, satellite tv for pc pictures, and scientific papers — to pinpoint the potential areas of fabled metropolises just like the Misplaced Metropolis of Z and El Dorado.
“Now, for the primary time in historical past, anybody can conduct archaeological analysis,” OpenAI wrote in a weblog publish saying the competitors, which it is dubbed the OpenAI to Z Problem. “AI empowers us to grasp the historical past of thousands and thousands of people that lived, struggled, and thrived way back.”
The corporate has offered a listing of non-obligatory “checkpoints,” which function a sort of technical roadmap of subchallenges as groups work towards the ultimate objective. Closing submissions are due at midnight Japanese Commonplace Time on June 29 and might be scored by influence, ingenuity, and reproducibility.
Three winners
Following an inside evaluation course of, the work of 5 separate groups deemed most promising might be livestreamed with a panel of consultants and OpenAI group members, together with “a thriller AI chief,” in accordance with the weblog publish. The successful group might be chosen by a vote and can obtain funding to proceed their analysis, together with a chance to go to the Amazon and work immediately with native archaeologists (pending permission from related authorities).
Every of the highest three winners may even obtain a combined cash-and-API-credits prize of $250,000, $100,000, and $50,000, respectively. For extra info and to enter the problem, go to this hyperlink.
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