Niantic says it is using data generated by Pokémon Go players to create a “Large Geospatial Model” that can navigate the real world and power robots.

Niantic, the company behind the extremely popular augmented reality mobile games Pokémon Go and Ingress, announced that it is using data collected by its millions of players to create an AI model that can navigate the physical world.

In a blog post published last week, first spotted by Garbage Day, Niantic says it is building a “Large Geospatial Model.” This name, the company explains, is a direct reference to Large Language Models (LLMs) Like OpenAI’s GPT, which are trained on vast quantities of text scraped from the internet in order to process and produce natural language. Niantic explains that a Large Geospatial Model, or LGM, aims to do the same for the physical world, a technology it says “will enable computers not only to perceive and understand physical spaces, but also to interact with them in new ways, forming a critical component of AR glasses and fields beyond, including robotics, content creation and autonomous systems. As we move from phones to wearable technology linked to the real world, spatial intelligence will become the world’s future operating system.”

By training an AI model on millions of geolocated images from around the world, the model will be able to predict its immediate environment in the same way an LLM is able to produce coherent and convincing sentences by statistically determining what word is likely to follow another.

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyzEnglish
    6·
    1 month ago

    I’ll copypaste an interesting comment here:

    [Stephen Smith] This article is a great example of a trend I don’t think companies realize they’ve started yet: They have killed the golden goose of user-generated content for short-term profit. // Who would willingly contribute to a modern-day YouTube, Reddit, StackOverflow, or Twitter knowing that they are just feeding the robots that will one day replace them?

    You don’t even need robots replacing humans, or people believing so. All you need is people feeling that you’re profiting at their expense.

    Also obligatory “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product”.

    • paraphrand@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      I’ve found myself thinking “well, you just helped teach the AI about that one…” various times when reading content online.

      It’s a strange thing to know that a form of the basilisk is real. Things posted will help AI get better, if only my teeny tiny increments each time.

      • webghost0101@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        AI learning isn’t the issue, its not something we will be able to put a lid on either way. Either it destroys or saves the world. It doesn’t need to learn much to do so besides evolving actual self-agency and sovereign thought.

        What is a huge issue is the secretive non-consentual mining of peoples identity and expressions.

        And then acting all normal about It.

    • milicent_bystandr@lemm.eeEnglish
      01·
      1 month ago

      Thing is, consider Google maps. It’s been harvesting data secretly and openly for a long time. I vaguely remember a time when Street View cars were found to be harvesting WiFi information in Australia and their response was, “oops, our engineers made a mistake.” Yeah, right.

      But, Google maps is an amazing tool. All that traffic info? All those time estimates? Maybe it’s worth it. Maybe if people knew what they were providing, and the result they’d get, they’d still be happy to give all that “free” data to Google.

      Putting aside the ethics of a company taking (stealing? or shall we call it, pirating?) all the ownership of that knowledge asset, if they make a really useful tool from it perhaps Pokémon players will be glad to have been part of such an epic achievement.