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.
Its 2030. your state of the art AR glasses have a bug. mr. mime is lurking behind every corner… always watching
Ever wonder why websites that use Captchas prefer pictures of cars, busses, crosswalks, stop signs, bicycles, motorcycles and stairs?
They’re using YOU to train their AI models.
Now let’s wait and see how google trains Earth 2 AI with their streetview data. We will be able to hallucinate places too just like that AI Minecraft project.
This Pokémon Go player has unwittingly poisoned an AI dataset by spoofing across bodies of water for years.
Gunna have cars attempt to fly!
same way an LLM is able to produce coherent and convincing sentences by statistically determining what word is likely to follow another
To me this implies that the navigation AI is going to hallucinate parts of its model of the world, because it’s basing that model on what’s statically the most likely to be there as opposed to what’s actually there. What could go wrong?
I presume the idea is to generate a base idea with ai then correct it with real time data.
Like the way go AI has one part to make a ‘policy’ of moves and a second part to simulate (‘read’) the results of those moves many steps ahead.
AI: Dave, turn right and walk across the bridge.
Dave : But AI, there is no bridge
AI: I am 99% sure based on 99 billion images that there should be a bridge
Dave: ok , you’re the smart one
Dave: aaaargh . . . .
SPLAT
Reminds me of Morrowind’s directions, with the frequent east-west mixups, and sporadic north-south mixups.
Fun fact, I worked with several other people on a localization patch for polish version of Morrowind, and we had so many of those east-west mixups fixed. Of course the publisher just translated strings and didn’t QA anything.
It’s only going to hallucinate until it gets new input from reality. Not nearly as precarious as generative models.
From all the apps invading your privacy and abusing your data, I didn’t suspect Pokemon GO to be one of them.
This should be so extremely illegal that it should bring criminal charges to all the members of their board.
Hu? Really? I thought that was known even when pkm go wasn’t released and only ingress existed.
Niantic is a google split up after all, if they were not collecting data, I would have been very surprised
And this software will probably be able to route soumeone from one special Pokemon point to the other. Wow. There are three of them in our town. It will be very smart in speedrunning that triangle.
They have added tasks that make you photograph your surroundings or Objects and give them real world lidarr data linked with geo data for some in-game benefits, last I checked.
OK, that is actually something usable. So far what they could learn from here is how to take a shortcut through the fields ;-)
It’s almost like listening to my crazy rants predicts the future.
Hope you guys don’t have those loyalty rewards cards to grocery stores or pharmacies. Oh, who am I kidding? All of you do.
Hope you guys don’t have those loyalty rewards cards to grocery stores or pharmacies. Oh, who am I kidding? All of you do.
Does it count if they’re all just copies of someone else’s cards?
I mean, good luck shopping without them. All shops artificially inflate the prices without them and then act like you’re getting a huge discount. For example, Tesco, as much as 100% price increase without their loyalty card, and most products have some. At least a 25% price increase.Yeah, I just stopped buying products.
So slavery, then. No surprise.
Bro…
