"What if I told you that one of the most well-capitalized AI companies on the planet is asking volunteers to help them uncover “lost cities” in the #Amazonia—by feeding #machinelearning models with open satellite data, #lidar, “colonial” text and map records, and #indigenous oral histories? This is the premise of the #OpenAItoZChallenge, a #Kaggle-hosted hackathon framed as a platform to "push the limits" of #AI through global knowledge cooperation.

In practice, this is a product development experiment cloaked as public participation. The contributions of users, the mapping of biocultural data, and the modeling of ancestral landscapes all feed into the refinement of OpenAI’s proprietary systems. The task itself may appear novel. The logic is not. This is the familiar playbook of Big Tech firms—capture public knowledge, reframe it as open input, and channel it into infrastructure that serves commercial, rather than communal goals."

https://www.techpolicy.press/unpacking-openais-amazonian-archaeology-initiative/