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
    99·
    28 days 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”.

      • nieminen@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        27 days ago

        While true, and probably pretty common nowadays, if you’re not paying for the product, there’s like a 100% chance you’re the product, at least if you have to pay for it there’s a chance you’re NOT also the product.

        • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.caEnglish
          3·
          27 days ago

          Public company 100% chance you’re the product

          Private company you might not be

          Paying is irrelevant, you are completely neglecting open source

    • paraphrand@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      28 days 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
        0·
        28 days 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
      92·
      28 days 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.

      • Danitos@reddthat.comEnglish
        6·
        27 days ago

        The traffic data is not as good as it appears. It is completely closed, only given to police and goverment agencies. No API, no numerical values for speed (only 5 ‘color codes’ that are relative to location, so are almost useles) and numerical data is not given even to academics. I spent almost a whole month trying to get actual useful data for academic purposes, but Google really went out in their path to make it impossible.

        It has the potential to be an excellent tool: crowsourced real-time data, access to historical data and it is incredibly fine-grained, improving over goverment data (at least in my city) by a 10 or 100x factor. But no, it had to be yet another Google’s tool for spying on people, not giving it away and sell it to police.

        • Glitterbomb@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          26 days ago

          I worked for a company contracted by government agencies (city/county/state/fed) to gather traffic statistics. We were used because they were not able to use Google traffic data as a blanket rule.

    • phoneymouse@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      28 days ago

      I think people will still “contribute” because they also don’t care that their use of certain platforms leaks data used to target ads at them.

      In the same vein though, once AI essentially destroys a site like Stack Overflow, where will AI companies source new training data with updated information? Also, we are likely to see something like 50% of content being AI generated. Are AI models then going to train on the content they themselves created? What is the impact of that? What is the use?

      • SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        28 days ago

        Are AI models then going to train on the content they themselves created? What is the impact of that?

        It leads to model collapse. The second AI starts to focuses on certain patterns in the output of the first AI instead of the actual content and you get degraded output. They are pattern matching machines after all. Repeat the cycle a few times and all output becomes gibberish. Think of it as data incest.

        So the AI companies are pretty desperate for more fresh user data. More data is the only way they have currently to push through the diminishing returns.