The Amazon Rainforest is a dazzlingly vast and complex ecosystem, a six-million-square-kilometer world unto itself. Despite its central role in countless indigenous origin stories and traditions stretching back millennia, it’s largely been ignored by mainstream archaeology. Conventional thinking held that such an apparently raw and dynamic expanse of wilderness couldn’t possibly have played any important role in the cultural evolution of human beings.
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That’s changing, however, now that a raft of new archaeological discoveries is flipping the original paradigm on its head and corroborating what indigenous peoples have long insisted: that the Amazon was once home to a rich, flourishing civilization.
These discoveries have largely been enabled by technologies such as satellite imagery and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR). Now OpenAI wants to add artificial intelligence to that arsenal.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
AI-powered treasure hunt
On Friday, the company announced a competition aimed at uncovering previously unknown archaeological sites in the Amazon through the use of its o3/o4 mini and GPT-4.1 models. It’s a kind of AI-powered treasure hunt that challenges anyone with a Wi-Fi connection and a passion for exploration to sift through and analyze open-source data — including, but not limited to, colonial diaries, indigenous oral traditions, satellite images, and scientific papers — to pinpoint the possible locations of fabled metropolises like the Lost City of Z and El Dorado.
“Now, for the first time in history, anyone can conduct archaeological research,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post announcing the competition, which it’s dubbed the OpenAI to Z Challenge. “AI empowers us to understand the history of millions of people who lived, struggled, and thrived long ago.”
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The company has provided a list of optional “checkpoints,” which serve as a kind of technical roadmap of subchallenges as teams work toward the final goal. Final submissions are due at midnight Eastern Standard Time on June 29 and will be scored by impact, ingenuity, and reproducibility.
Three winners
Following an internal review process, the work of five separate teams deemed most promising will be livestreamed with a panel of experts and OpenAI team members, along with “a mystery AI leader,” according to the blog post. The winning team will be selected by a vote and will receive funding to continue their research, including an opportunity to visit the Amazon and work directly with local archaeologists (pending permission from relevant authorities).
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Each of the top three winners will also receive a mixed cash-and-API-credits prize of $250,000, $100,000, and $50,000, respectively. For more information and to enter the challenge, visit this link.
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