Niantic announces “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

https://nianticlabs.com/news/largegeospatialmodel

By bookstore-romeo at 12:02 PM

reissbaker | 1 comment | 2 hours ago

I'm confused by both this blog post, and the reception on HN. They... didn't actually train the model. This is an announcement of a plan! They don't actually know if it'll even work. They announced that they "trained over 50 million neural networks," but not that they've trained this neural network: the other networks appear to just have been things they were doing anyway (i.e. the "Virtual Positioning Systems"). They tout huge parameter counts ("over 150 trillion"), but that appears to be the sum of the parameters of the 50 million models they've previously trained, which implies each model had an average of... 3MM parameters. Not exactly groundbreaking scale. You could train one a single consumer GPU.

This is a vision document, presumably intended to position Niantic as an AI company (and thus worthy of being showered with funding), instead of a mobile gaming company, mainly on the merit of the data they've collected rather than their prowess at training large models.

relyks | 27 comments | 9 hours ago

This is pretty cool, but I feel as a pokehunter (Pokemon Go player), I have been tricked into working to contribute training data so that they can profit off my labor. How? They consistently incentivize you to scan pokestops (physical locations) through "research tasks" and give you some useful items as rewards. The effort is usually much more significant than what you get in return, so I have stopped doing it. It's not very convenient to take a video around the object or location in question. If they release the model and weights, though, I will feel I contributed to the greater good.

isodev | 2 comments | 3 hours ago

> I feel … I have been tricked

Everything “free” coming from a company means they’ve found a way to monetise you in some way. The big long ToS we all casually accept without reading says so too.

Other random examples which appear free but aren’t: using a search engine, using the browser that comes with your phone, instagram, YouTube… etc.

It’s not always about data collection, sometimes it’s platform lock-in, or something else but there is always a side of it that makes sense for their profit margin.

9dev | 0 comments | 9 minutes ago

Hiding shady or unexpected stuff in the TOS is illegal in the EU and other countries for example. So just because some companies behave amoral, that doesn’t mean we just have to accept hundreds of pages of legalese being able to dictate us.

hackernewds | 2 comments | 59 minutes ago

only a sith speaks in absolute. plenty of especially free AI products out there

isodev | 0 comments | 38 minutes ago

Which are surely, totally not ingesting every iota of data they can get their hands on (legally or not, including your prompts) for training and the soon-to-be born “embedded ads”.

akritrime | 0 comments | 34 minutes ago

and who is funding them? how are they paying for their servers? a product can't be free, someone somewhere is paying for it. the main question is why are they paying for it.

PittleyDunkin | 3 comments | 6 hours ago

> I have been tricked into working to contribute training data so that they can profit off my labor

You were playing a game without paying for it. How did you imagine they were making money without pimping your data?

ipsum2 | 2 comments | 6 hours ago

Niantic made 700 million dollars last year, mostly selling virtual game items.

PittleyDunkin | 4 comments | 6 hours ago

Why would anyone think niantic would protect user-data from profit?

saxonww | 2 comments | 6 hours ago

Sarcastically, no one should.

Unsarcastically, a lot of people believe user data belongs to users, and that they should have a say in how it's used. Here, I think the point is that Niantic decided they could use the data this way and weren't transparent about it until it was already done. I'm sure I would be in the minority, but I would never have played - or never have done certain things like the research tasks - had I known I was training an AI model.

I'm sure the Po:Go EULA that no one reads has blanket grants saying "you agree that we can do whatever we want," so I can't complain too hard, but still disappointed I spent any time in that game.

PittleyDunkin | 4 comments | 5 hours ago

> Unsarcastically, a lot of people believe user data belongs to users, and that they should have a say in how it's used

I can understand that people believe this, but why do they do? Nothing in our society operates in a way that might imply this.

interroboink | 3 comments | 3 hours ago

> Nothing in our society operates in a way that might imply this.

I beg your pardon?

Consider just about any physical belonging — say, a book. When I buy a book, it belongs to me. When I read a book in my home, I expect it to be a private experience (nobody data-mining my eyeball movements, for example).

This applies to all sorts of things. Even electronic things — if I put some files on a USB stick I expect them to be "mine" and used as I please, not uploaded to the cloud behind my back, or similar.

And if we're just limiting ourselves to what we do in public (eg: collecting pokemon or whatever), it's still normal, I think, to interact relatively anonymously with the world. You don't expect people to remember you after meeting them once, for example.

In summary, I'd say that "things in our society" very much include people (and their tendency to forget or not care about you), and physical non-smart objects. Smart phones and devices that do track your every move and do remember everything are the exception, not the rule.

fromMars | 0 comments | 2 hours ago

Before smart phones or the rise of the internet your information was mined by credit agencies for use by banks, employers and other forms of credit lending.

Credit cards and Banks sold your data to third parties for marketing purposes.

Payroll companies like ADP also shared your data with the credit agencies.

This is not a new phenomenon and has been the currency of a number of industries for a while.

The only thing that has changed is the types of data collected. Personally, I think these older forms of data collection are quite a bit more insidious than some of the data mining done by a game like Niantic for some ml model.

I have a lot more control over and less insidious consequences from these types of data collection. I can avoid the game or service if I like. There isn't much I can do to prevent a credit agency from collecting my data.

PittleyDunkin | 2 comments | 3 hours ago

> Consider just about any physical belonging — say, a book. When I buy a book, it belongs to me. When I read a book in my home, I expect it to be a private experience (nobody data-mining my eyeball movements, for example).

Perhaps this is just my own brain's degradation, but how far removed from society do you need to be to expect your purchases to not be sold to the highest bidder? This practice is certainly older than I am.

Forgive me if I cannot conceive of a consumer who has completely tuned out the last forty years of discourse about consumer protection. Hell, the credit bureaus themselves contradict the concept of consumer privacy.

Syonyk | 0 comments | 2 hours ago

> Perhaps this is just my own brain's degradation, but how far removed from society do you need to be to expect your purchases to not be sold to the highest bidder? This practice is certainly older than I am.

It depends quite a bit on how you make your purchases.

If your purchases are on a credit card, with a loyalty ("tracking") card or App(TM) involved in the purchase? They're absolutely being sold to... well, probably not the highest bidder, but "all bidders with a valid payment account on file."

If you make a habit of paying cash for things and not using Apps or loyalty cards, and don't have your pocket beacon blaring loudly away on a range of radio frequencies when you shop, I expect a lot less data sales. It's a bit of a transition if you're used to credit cards, but once you're used to it, it's not bad at all, and involves a lot less data collection. I don't mind if the local barista or bartender knows me and my preferences, but I do mind if their POS system is uploading that data continuously.

interroboink | 0 comments | 2 hours ago

Perhaps my main objection is that you said "Nothing in our society X" rather than "many things in our society Y."

I was just providing some counter-examples to show that there's more than nothing at play, here.

Certainly there are oodles of examples of our data being sold behind our backs, even well before 40 years ago. But there are also oodles of examples of the opposite.

hmcq6 | 0 comments | 2 hours ago

> This applies to all sorts of things. Even electronic things — if I put some files on a USB stick I expect them to be "mine" and used as I please, not uploaded to the cloud behind my back, or similar.

Every app you open on Mac sends a "ping" to Apples servers.

https://acecilia.medium.com/apple-is-sending-a-request-to-th....

JohnMakin | 2 comments | 5 hours ago

You find it strange that people want something different than the wild west status quo (which is not the status quo everywhere, btw) that they may not even fully understand or be informed enough to understand how it works or what the consequences are? like you actually expect even a savvy user of this game to be like ‘oh, of course they would be using my labor to profit for this technology i dont understand, duh?’ what a strange statement and world view.

thfuran | 1 comment | 4 hours ago

Wanting something to be a certain way is very different from believing that it is. And yes, I would expect any moderately informed and technically savvy user to assume that the company is doing anything they possibly can to profit off of user data.

8note | 1 comment | 3 hours ago

But you don't expect people to also try to profit off whatever said company is doing?

fromMars | 0 comments | 2 hours ago

Sure they can, but niantic offered a free game, I already got some profit out of playing it.

PittleyDunkin | 0 comments | 5 hours ago

I want this, too. Desire is a very different concept than expectation.

rrr_oh_man | 0 comments | 4 hours ago

> Nothing in our society operates in a way that might imply this.

saxonww | 1 comment | 5 hours ago

Is that true?

Off the top of my head I think GDPR in the EU might have something to say about this. I don't know if those protections exist anywhere else or not.

In the US, people get very upset about things like traffic cameras, and public surveillance in general. Those are usually data-for-punishment vs. data-for-profit (...maybe?), but people here resist things like data recorders in their cars to lower car insurance.

At least to me, being unhappy about Niantic's behavior here does not seem the least bit unusual.

PittleyDunkin | 0 comments | 4 hours ago

> In the US, people get very upset about things like traffic cameras, and public surveillance in general.

People get upset about a lot of things in the US. In fact—for some unknown reason we consider it a form of political activity to get upset over things. However, there is not any political party trying to court voters by advocating for dismantling the intelligence state.

hackernewds | 0 comments | 58 minutes ago

there should be a legal framework for data is protected. until then this is what we get

melagonster | 1 comment | 6 hours ago

Maybe they trust Pokemon as a IP? Usually Nintendo keeps your data safe.

HPsquared | 2 comments | 5 hours ago

Is this model not a safe use of the data?

melagonster | 0 comments | 10 minutes ago

Depend on normal users' feelings, I'm sure when I play Switch, they won't sell my data. But when people use Google's service, this is the default setting .

JohnMakin | 0 comments | 5 hours ago

It’s on niantic to prove that it is, not for the millions of unspecting users to prove it isn’t.

stevage | 1 comment | 5 hours ago

Because not everyone is a seasoned IT professional.

PittleyDunkin | 4 comments | 5 hours ago

I don't think you need to be an "IT professional" to understand that not paying money doesn't imply that you aren't giving away value.

chillfox | 0 comments | 2 hours ago

The normal business model for free to play games is that a small number of people pay a lot of money for cosmetics or convenience, this finances the game and is how the company makes its money. The free players then provide value by being there making the game feel alive and being someone, the spenders can show off their cool items to.

That is how monetization for free to play games have worked for a very long time now. Changing that without letting people know up front is absolutely a betrayal of trust.

stevage | 0 comments | 5 hours ago

I would hazard a guess that the vast majority of the people playing Pokemon Go have never even considered the question.

kortilla | 1 comment | 5 hours ago

This is disingenuous. They charge for gems and this model is well understood to make a fortune without selling user data at all

PittleyDunkin | 1 comment | 4 hours ago

> They charge for gems and this model is well understood to make a fortune without selling user data at all

I don't understand what this has to do with the topic at hand. Are you suggesting that people can't conceive of the sale of their data because they can conceive of whales amortizing the cost of their video games? That seems contradictory in your estimation of people's ability to grasp the world.

Dylan16807 | 0 comments | 3 hours ago

Did you forget your original question?

"How did you imagine they were making money without pimping your data?"

I imagined they were making money in the big obvious way they make money!

I can conceive of them selling user data, but it's not their core business model, and they would operate basically the same if they couldn't sell user data. It was never some obvious thing that they would do this.

umanwizard | 0 comments | 4 hours ago

Almost nobody would care about this issue even if they knew it was being done.

brendoelfrendo | 0 comments | 2 hours ago

I'm not a fan of the way you moved the goal posts here. You argued that Niantic would obviously use user data to fund game operations. Then we see that they don't actually need to do that, and that the game could fund itself. Then you argue that well, we shouldn't assume that they wouldn't try to monetize user data, shame on us. I agree that those who know how tech companies operate should be extremely pessimistic as to how users are treated, but I don't think that pessimism has permeated the public consciousness to quite the level you think it has. Moreover, I don't think it's a failing on the part of the user to assume that a company would do something in their best interest. It's a failing of the company to treat users as commodities whose only value is to be sold.

mgiampapa | 0 comments | 6 hours ago

Lots of people are spending a lot of money on in app purchases in these games already.

itpcc | 1 comment | 4 hours ago

> You were playing a game without paying for it.

I CALL BS. We paid ALL THE TIME! We pay even item's capacity so much they need to increase the limit recently[1].

Ref:

[1] https://www.facebook.com/PokemonGO/posts/1102918761192160

rbrown | 2 comments | 9 hours ago

They won't. It's the same data collection play as every other Google project

Just for clarity on this comment and a separate one, Niantic is a Google spin out company and appears to still be majority shareholder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niantic,_Inc.#As_an_independen...

relyks | 1 comment | 9 hours ago

Google actually has released weights for some of their models, but judging by the fact that this model is potentially valuable, they likely will not allow Niantic for this

ysofunny | 3 comments | 8 hours ago

> Google actually has released weights for some of their models, but judging by the fact that this model is potentially valuable, they likely will not allow Niantic for this

which is totally unfair, every niantic player should have access to all the stuff because they collectively made it

try_the_bass | 6 comments | 7 hours ago

> which is totally unfair, every niantic player should have access to all the stuff because they collectively made it

I don't understand this perspective. While all players may have collectively made this model possible, no individual player could make a model like it based on their contributions alone.

Since no single player could replicate this outcome based on only their data, does it not imply that there's value created from collecting (and incentivizing collection of) the data, and subsequently processing it to create something?

It actually seems more unfair to demand the collective result for yourself, when your own individual input is itself insufficient to have created it in the first place.

I don't think producers of data are inherently entitled to all products produced from said data.

Is a farmer entitled to the entirety of your work output because you ate a vegetable grown on their farm?

jzb | 1 comment | 7 hours ago

“Is a farmer entitled to the entirety of your work output because you ate a vegetable grown on their farm?”

Bad analogy. I pay a farmer (directly or indirectly) for the vegetable. It’s a simple, understood, transaction. These players were generally unaware that they were gathering data for Niantic in this way.

If data is crowdsourced it should belong to the crowd.

try_the_bass | 0 comments | 4 hours ago

Niantic pays you for the data you collect, as well. It might pay you with in-game rewards, but if you accept those rewards, this is, as you put it, "a simple, understood transaction".

The farmers you buy the vegetables from are also generally unaware of how you use them, too!

I fail to see how you're differentiating the analogy from the original example.

PittleyDunkin | 3 comments | 6 hours ago

> I don't understand this perspective. While all players may have collectively made this model possible, no individual player could make a model like it based on their contributions alone.

I don't think this is very difficult to sort out: people feel entitled to the products of their labor.

> Is a farmer entitled to the entirety of your work output because you ate a vegetable grown on their farm?

This is comparing apples and oranges: presumably the consumer didn't do anything to produce the vegetable. Hell if anything, under this analogy niantic would owe users a portion of their profits.

theshrike79 | 0 comments | 35 minutes ago

Let's compare apples to oranges then:

You grew apples, I grew oranges.

Are you entitled to my oranges just because you grew apples?

If I mapped the area around my home, am I entitled to your efforts in mapping other areas of the world?

try_the_bass | 0 comments | 4 hours ago

> I don't think this is very difficult to sort out: people feel entitled to the products of their labor.

What labor, though? They took a few pictures and videos (hell, they probably still have a copy of them, so giving a copy to Niantic is essentially free), and were generally compensated for doing that (through in-game rewards, but compensated nonetheless).

The "labor" that transformed the many players' many bits of data was done by Niantic, and thus I would argue that Niantic is the rightful beneficiary of any value that could not be generated by any individual player. To my earlier point, every player could retain a copy of every photo/video they submitted to Niantic, and still be unable to produce this model from it.

> This is comparing apples and oranges: presumably the consumer didn't do anything to produce the vegetable. Hell if anything, under this analogy niantic would owe users a portion of their profits.

The players are also compensated for their submissions, are they not? It doesn't matter that it's not with "real money", in-game rewards are still compensation.

If you agree that a farmer is not entitled to any (much less all!) of your work output because they contributed to feeding you, you agree that the players are not entitled to the models produced by Niantic.

Maybe I'd accept the argument that a player might be entitled to the model generated by training on _only_ that player's data, but I think we'd agree that would be a pretty worthless model.

The value comes from the work Niantic put in to collate the data and build the model. Someone who contributed a tiny fragment of the training data isn't entitled to any of that added value (much less all of it, as the OP was seeming to demand), just like a farmer isn't entitled to any of your work output (much less all of it!) by contributing a fragment of your caloric intake.

Matticus_Rex | 2 comments | 6 hours ago

Niantic was clear about the product of the labor: In exchange for swiping the PokeStop, you'd get the rewards. No one was ever told they'd get more than that, and no one had any reasonable expectation that they'd get more.

icehawk | 0 comments | 2 hours ago

Exactly! Everyone thought that the exchange was them doing something in the game, and Niantic was giving them the rewards in the game, and no one had any reasonable expectation that Niantic would get more outside of the game. (After all, neither Blizzard or Square get anything when one completes quest objectives in their MMO.)

So obviously, now that Niantic is getting things outside the game its reasonable the people who did the work ask for something from that.

PittleyDunkin | 1 comment | 6 hours ago

Expectations are often unreasonable from some perspective. It's not difficult to see why users are upset.

Matticus_Rex | 0 comments | 2 hours ago

For people who've dealt with children a lot, sure. But making an exchange and then expecting a cut of the other side's profits on top of what you exchanged for is possibly the definition of unreasonable expectations.

Larrikin | 0 comments | 59 minutes ago

People who think like this and want to profit off you with KPIs is why players should always maliciously comply with data grabs. Spend the 30 seconds activating the accelerometer and doing sweeps of your shoes and full finger covers of the surroundings to get those poffins and rare candies. It's gross that lately they want to give me 10 pokeballs now instead.

kortilla | 1 comment | 5 hours ago

Most of your analysis is flawed because the model is non-rivalrous so it could easily be given to every player.

Additionally, many people can contribute to make something greater that benefits everyone (see open source). So the argument of “you couldn’t have done this on your own” also doesn’t hold any water.

The only thing that protects niantic is just a shitty ToS like the rest of the games that nobody pays attention to. There is nothing fundamentally “right” about what they did.

try_the_bass | 0 comments | 2 hours ago

> Most of your analysis is flawed because the model is non-rivalrous so it could easily be given to every player.

Sure, copying it is approximately free. But using it provides value, and sharing the model dilutes the value of its usage. The fact that it's free to copy doesn't mean it's free to share. The value of the copy that Niantic uses will be diluted by every copy they make and share with someone else.

> Additionally, many people can contribute to make something greater that benefits everyone (see open source). So the argument of “you couldn’t have done this on your own” also doesn’t hold any water.

Your second sentence does not logically follow from the first. In fact, your first sentence is an excellent example of the point I was making: many people contribute to open-source projects, and the value of the vast majority of those contributions on their own do not amount to the sum total value of the projects they've contributed to. This is what I meant by "your own individual input is itself insufficient to have created it in the first place". Sure, many people contribute to open source projects to make them what they are, but in the vast majority of cases, any individual contributor on their own would be unable to create those same projects.

To rephrase your first sentence: the value of the whole is greater than the value of the parts. There is value in putting all the pieces together in the right way, and that value should rightfully be allocated to those who did the synthesis, not to those who contributed the parts.

Is a canvas-maker entitled to every painting produced on one of their canvasses? Without the canvas the painting would not exist--but merely producing the canvas does not make it into a painting. The value is added by the artist, not the canvas-maker--therefore the value for the produced art should mostly go to the artist, not the canvas-maker. The canvas maker is compensated for the value of the canvas itself (which isn't much), and is entitled to nothing beyond.

> The only thing that protects niantic is just a shitty ToS like the rest of the games that nobody pays attention to. There is nothing fundamentally “right” about what they did.

There's also nothing fundamentally wrong about it, either, which was my point. Well, my point was actually that it's even more shitty to demand the sum total of the output when you only contributed a tiny slice of the input.

Dylan16807 | 0 comments | 3 hours ago

> Is a farmer entitled to the entirety of your work output because you ate a vegetable grown on their farm?

This is more like paying the farmhands.

If we're looking at my work output, eh, everyone that works on a copyrighted thing gets a personal license to it? That sounds like it would work out okay.

> I don't think producers of data are inherently entitled to all products produced from said data.

It depends on how directly the data is tied to the output. This seems pretty direct.

IsopropylMalbec | 2 comments | 7 hours ago

What you say is fair but if an individual's data doesn't matter, what happens when they ask to have their data deleted under GDPR. is there a way to demux their data from existing models?

CaptainFever | 0 comments | 6 hours ago

GDPR isn't a magic spell. It's only relevant for personally-identifiable data: https://gdpr.eu/eu-gdpr-personal-data/

try_the_bass | 0 comments | 2 hours ago

While your example isn't exactly coherent (I don't think GDPR would cover photos/videos taken by the user, unless maybe the user was in the photo/video?), presumably they could just train the model again without that user's data. I doubt the end result would be that much different

eru | 0 comments | 4 hours ago

They got to play the game for free, and I'm fairly sure what Google is doing here is within the terms and conditions that people agreed to.

(And I don't even mean only that it complies with the exact wording of the fine print that nobody reads anyway, but also that everyone expects the terms-and-conditions to say that the company owns all the data. So no surprises to anyone.)

aqfamnzc | 3 comments | 8 hours ago

Welcome to the modern internet. While you're at it, please get me access to Google's captcha models facebook face directory Google's GPS location data hoard, (most every android phone on the planet 24/7 (!) and any iPhone navigating with gmaps) And so on and so on

All of which I've directly contributed to and never (directly) recieved anything in return

eru | 0 comments | 4 hours ago

Well, no one is forcing you to play Poke Mongo.

RussianCow | 3 comments | 8 hours ago

> All of which I've directly contributed to and never (directly) recieved anything in return

To be fair, you received a service for free that you may have otherwise had to pay for. I'm not saying it's just, but to say you didn't get anything in return is disingenuous.

aqfamnzc | 2 comments | 7 hours ago

Agreed. I mostly meant that I'll never see the actual dataset that I contributed to. That's why I'd prefer to spend my time on things that I can see, like OpenStreetMap :)

orblivion | 0 comments | 6 hours ago

The people playing Pokemon Go will also see your OpenStreetMap contributions.

fragmede | 0 comments | 5 hours ago

Not the raw data, but if you've used Google maps for directions or looked at traffic, then yeah you have.

PittleyDunkin | 0 comments | 6 hours ago

While you weren't paying for it with currency, the service is most certainly not "free". There's still a transaction happening when you use the service, albeit a transaction the service provider refuses to acknowledge outside the terms of service.

chipsrafferty | 0 comments | 7 hours ago

The some is true of this case, the game is free.

FireBeyond | 0 comments | 5 hours ago

> any iPhone navigating with gmaps

Not saying you are saying this but it amused me how many people believe(d) that Apple wasn’t mining and hoarding location data either because well, they’re Apple and they love you. All those traffic statuses in Apple Maps on minor side streets with no monitoring came from the … traffic fairy, perhaps.

bitwize | 0 comments | 7 hours ago

I kept wondering why a Google spinoff was named after a river and community in Connecticut, one of the least Googley locales in the country.

The connection is a ship, built in Connecticut, which brought gold rushers to San Francisco and was run aground and converted to a hotel there: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niantic_(whaling_vessel)

The company was named after the ship.

thephyber | 2 comments | 6 hours ago

All companies should be truthful, forthcoming, and specific about how they will use your data, but…

If you enjoy the game, play the game. Don’t boycott/withhold because they figured out an additional use for data that didn’t previously exist.

Another way of viewing this: GoogleMaps is incredibly high quality mapping software with lots of extra features. It is mostly free (for the end user). If no one uses it, Google doesn’t collect the data and nobody can benefit from the analysis of the data (eg. Traffic and ETA on Google Maps)

There’s no reason to hold out for a company to pay you for your geolocation data because none of them offer that service.

__MatrixMan__ | 0 comments | 3 hours ago

> If you enjoy the game, play the game

I wish it were that simple but I think it's reasonable to hesitate. We don't know what these models are going to be used for. If by playing you're unwittingly letting something powerful fall into the wrong hands, maybe play something else.

(Generally speaking. I'm not trying to throw stones at Niantic specifically here.)

eru | 0 comments | 4 hours ago

> All companies should be truthful, forthcoming, and specific about how they will use your data, but…

I'm fairly sure, if you read the terms-and-conditions, it probably said that the company owns this data and can do what they want with it.

> There’s no reason to hold out for a company to pay you for your geolocation data because none of them offer that service.

Well, it can make perfect sense (to some people) to hold out forever in that case.

sussmannbaka | 0 comments | 9 minutes ago

Now imagine how artists feel – and they didn’t even get any Pocket Monsters in return.

phendrenad2 | 1 comment | 7 hours ago

Were you really tricked? Hard to believe that someone on Hacker News saw Pokemon Go and didn't immediately think of the data collection possibilities.

JohnMakin | 1 comment | 5 hours ago

It may surprise you to learn pokemon go is nearly a 10 year old game based on 40 year old beloved IP that when it was released did not exist in the same data hellscape we do today, and even if it did, the attraction of the IP would overrule people thinking about this kind of thing. These kinds of comments are extraordinarily disingenuous sounding, particularly when anyone can spend 3 seconds and figure out their primary market is literal children.

eru | 1 comment | 4 hours ago

> [...] when it was released did not exist in the same data hellscape we do today [...]

That was fairly obvious at the time. And people used more or less exactly the same language to describe the world back then, too.

> These kinds of comments are extraordinarily disingenuous sounding, particularly when anyone can spend 3 seconds and figure out their primary market is literal children.

Poke Mongo was popular with people of all age groups, and (most) children have parents or other guardians to help them with these decisions.

viknesh | 0 comments | 2 hours ago

I believe Google explicitly stated that they used data collected from Ingress (arguably a predecessor to Pokemon Go) at the time. It's the reason Niantic was founded. It's hard to take these complaints seriously.

AlphaWeaver | 4 comments | 5 hours ago

Imagine how those of us who played Ingress (Niantic's first game) feel... We were tricked into contributing location data for the game we loved, only to see it reused for the far more popular (and profitable) Pokemon Go.

sangnoir | 0 comments | 5 hours ago

Why would anyone take issue with this? Asking as someone who tried both games at different points.

Niantic was always open with the fact that they gather location data, particularly in places cars can't go - I remember an early blog post saying as much before they were unbundled from Google. No one was tricked, they were just not paying attention.

try_the_bass | 0 comments | 3 hours ago

I didn't feel tricked. Still don't.

They were pretty up-front about it bring a technology demo for a game engine they were building. It was obvious from the start that they would build future games on the same platform.

lithiumii | 0 comments | 5 hours ago

As long as they make enough money from Pokemon Go to sustain Ingress, I OK with that.

jcpham2 | 0 comments | 5 hours ago

The Google - Niantic - Ingress - borg - kubernetes conspiracy must be unraveled

omoikane | 0 comments | 7 hours ago

They did at least published their research, and also dataset for 655 places:

https://research.nianticlabs.com/mapfree-reloc-benchmark

This was linked the news post (search for "data that we released").

denismi | 1 comment | 8 hours ago

Do you honestly feel tricked that a gameplay mechanic which transparently asks you to record 50-100MB videos of a point-of-interest and upload it to their servers in exchange for an (often paid/premium) in-game reward was a form of data collection?

I don't think I've done any in PoGo (so I know it's very optional), but I've done plenty in Ingress, and I honestly don't see how it's possible to be surprised that it was contributing to something like this? It is hardly an intuitively native standalone gameplay mechanic in either game.

JohnMakin | 1 comment | 5 hours ago

Oh yes, children, their primary market, definitely consider this. Definitely.

eru | 0 comments | 4 hours ago

Most children have parents or other guardians.

tgsovlerkhgsel | 0 comments | 3 hours ago

Weren't they pretty open about this being their business model?

chii | 0 comments | 4 hours ago

> I have been tricked into working to contribute training data so that they can profit off my labor.

you werent tricked - your location data doesn't belong to you when you use the game.

I don't get why people somehow feel that they are entitled to the post-facto profit/value derived from the data that at the time they're willingly giving away before they "knew of" the potential value.

jjallen | 0 comments | 2 hours ago

At some point can we agree that if we don't pay anything for something and we experience something fun, it's ok for the company to get something for investing millions of dollars in creating the experience for us in return?

If you weren't aware until now and were having fun is this outcome so bad? Did you have a work contract with this company to provide labor for wages and they didn't pay you? if not, then I don't think you can be upset that they are possibly profiting from your "labor".

Every time we visit a site that is free, which means 99.9% of all websites, that website bore a cost for our visit. Sometimes they show us ads which sometimes offsets the cost of creating the content and hosting it.

I am personally very glad with this arrangement. If a site is too ad filled, I just leave immediately.

With a game that is free and fun, I would be happy that I didn't have to pay anything and that the creator figured out a way for both parties to get something out of the deal. Isn't that a win-win situation?

Also, calling your experience "labor" when you were presumably having fun (if you weren't then why were you playing without expectation for payment in return?) is disingenuous.

At some point we need to be realistic about the world in which we live. Companies provide things for free or for money. If they provide something for "free", then we can't really expect to be compensated for our "labor" playing the game and that yes, the company is probably trying to figure out how to recoup their investment.

RobRivera | 0 comments | 5 hours ago

One of the reasons i never played pokemon go is because there was no guarantee I didnt have my data sold.

I can't tell you why other people wouldn't think of this concern

Taylor_OD | 2 comments | 7 hours ago

> and give you some useful items as rewards

Were you tricked, or were you just poorly compensated for your time?

stouset | 2 comments | 6 hours ago

Frankly given the numbers of hours of entertainment most people got out of Pokémon Go, I suspect this might be one of the cases where people have been best compensated for their data collection.

neolefty | 0 comments | 4 hours ago

Friendships too!

sangnoir | 0 comments | 5 hours ago

Frankly, with the amount of real-world walking required to progress in Ingress and Pokémon Go, most players were compensated by the motivation to get a decent amount of exercise, which had a net positive impact on their health. Most exercise apps require users to pay subscriptions for the pleasure of using them.

markcerqueira | 0 comments | 3 hours ago

> They consistently incentivize you to scan pokestops (physical locations) through "research tasks" and give you some useful items as rewards.

There are plenty of non-scan tasks you can do to get those rewards as well but I do think Poffins (largely useless unless you are grinding Best Buddies) are locked behind scan tasks.

Source: Me. This is the one topic I am very qualified to speak to on this website.

fragmede | 5 comments | 9 hours ago

You've also been tricked into making your comment, which will undoubtedly be fed into an LLM's training corpus, and someone will be profiting off that, along with my comment as well. What a future we live in!

numpad0 | 0 comments | 45 minutes ago

If anything, it makes me sad that Google sat and watched OpenAI tarnish public recognition of AI, and meanwhile no one had figured out realistic digital persona reconstruction from Twitter logs applicable to arbitrary users. I've made so much of my "effort" into the Internet digital corpus with that purpose in mind!

Note to future digital me, do as I did 2007-2014. I approve.

RobRivera | 0 comments | 4 hours ago

Baba booy bbaba booy Batman bats badly barring the baristers bearing.

Magic schoolbus!

Yea, take that llm model maker

rbrown | 1 comment | 9 hours ago

NooooooooooOooOooOo!

relyks | 1 comment | 9 hours ago

Lol, do you really think that? I did it from having a desire to contribute to the conversation and I was aware that that would be a future possibility :) I'm not really getting much in return or being incentivized by Y combinator

CaptainFever | 3 comments | 9 hours ago

I think the joke was that it's kind of the same with Pokemon GO. You play the game mainly because it's fun or lets you get some exercise in, so it's not really a bad thing that the company used the data to train a useful model. You're still having fun or doing exercise regardless of what they do with the data. Essentially, it's a positive externality: https://www.economicshelp.org/micro-economic-essays/marketfa...

But I think your point, if I understand it correctly, is that the in-game rewards kind of "hacked your brain" to do it, which is the part you're objecting to?

spencerflem | 0 comments | 8 hours ago

I think that's part of it- but another part is a lot of people do not like what Gen AI is doing and are offended that what was a fun game is now part of that project.

Like when captchas were for making old books readable it felt a lot more friendly than now where its all driverless car nonsense

eru | 0 comments | 4 hours ago

Technically, it's not an externality, because the company that benefits is clearly part of the transaction.

Nitpicking aside, I agree with you.

1024core | 1 comment | 3 hours ago

As the old adage goes, "if you're not paying for the product, you ARE the product"...

erk__ | 0 comments | 3 hours ago

It should just be "you ARE the product" giving that they don't care if you paid them or not.

weird-eye-issue | 0 comments | 5 hours ago

Please don't tell me you were just now realizing this

rlt | 0 comments | 4 hours ago

“If you're not paying for the product, you are the product”

(I realize you can pay, but are not required to)

Schnouki | 0 comments | 9 hours ago

Yeah, they did the same in Ingress: film a portal (pokéstop/gym) while walking around it to gain a small reward. I've always wondered what kind of dataset they were building with that -- now we know!

dogcomplex | 1 comment | 5 hours ago

Did anyone here on hackernews not seriously assume this was the real reason for the existence of that game since day 1?

eru | 0 comments | 4 hours ago

I'm not sure about the 'real reason'.

It's perhaps more like: some folks an Niantic wanted to make a Pokemon game, and this way they could make it financially viable?

UltraSane | 1 comment | 8 hours ago

Honestly you should have assumed they were using the collected data for such a purpose. It would be shocking if they weren't doing this directly or selling the data to other companies to do this.

lozf | 0 comments | 6 hours ago

Assumed … or just read the Terms & Conditions / AUP like we did 10 years ago when they were using "Ingress" for location collection & tracking.

aeternum | 0 comments | 52 minutes ago

I mean it was ultimately a research task

underlipton | 0 comments | 6 hours ago

My reaction, also.

"You used me... for LAND DEVELOPMENT! ...That wasn't very nice."

invariantviola | 0 comments | 2 hours ago

Really? You feel … tricked? Are you new around here??

bastloing | 2 comments | 7 hours ago

The game is free, there has to be some way for them to profit, interesting to see this was it.

kortilla | 0 comments | 5 hours ago

This wasn’t it. It was from gems

earleybird | 1 comment | 6 hours ago

When ever it's free, it's all about the data.

I recall having a conversation circa 2004/5 with a colleague that Google was an AI company, not a search company.

eru | 0 comments | 4 hours ago

Search is AI. Or would have been considered AI in eg the 1980s.

The goalposts of what counts as AI are constantly moving further and further away. Simple algorithms like A* once counted as part of AI.

kjkjadksj | 0 comments | 5 hours ago

Well now by posting your thoughts to hn, you have been tricked yet again to give up free labor to train ai models.

CaptainFever | 8 comments | 9 hours ago

This title is editorialized. The real title is: "Building a Large Geospatial Model to Achieve Spatial Intelligence"

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

My personal layman's opinion:

I'm mostly surprised that they were able to do this. When I played Pokémon GO a few years back, the AR was so slow that I rarely used it. Apparently it's so popular and common, it can be used to train an LGM?

I also feel like this is a win-win-win situation here, economically. Players get a free(mium) game, Niantic gets a profit, the rest of the world gets a cool new technology that is able to turn "AR glasses location markers" into reality. That's awesome.

relyks | 1 comment | 9 hours ago

I'm pretty sure most of the data is not coming from the AR features. There are tasks in the game to actually "scan" locations. Most people I know who play also play the game without the AR features turned on unless there's an incentive.

CaptainFever | 0 comments | 9 hours ago

That's good information, thank you!

anigbrowl | 1 comment | 8 hours ago

It's OK to adjust the title to have more relevant facts or to fix a poorly worded one. Editorializing is more like 'Amazing: Niantic makes world-changing AI breakthrough'.

n2d4 | 0 comments | 7 hours ago

The original title was not poorly worded though. The new one was editorialized to get a certain reaction out of readers — I promise you the responses on this thread would look different with the original title.

rendaw | 0 comments | 3 hours ago

Many articles only make it to the front page because the submitted title was editorialized. The rules may say one thing, but the incentives are to a subtle balance between editorialization and avoiding flagging due to extreme editorialization with mods only stepping in to correct the title once it's gotten loads of upvotes and comments already.

PittleyDunkin | 0 comments | 3 hours ago

> the rest of the world gets a cool new technology

The rest of the world gets an opportunity to purchase access to said new technology, you mean! It's not like they're releasing how they generated the models. It's much more difficult to get excited about paid-access to technology than it is about access to tech itself.

vachina | 0 comments | 2 hours ago

Google branded AR glasses. Not any AR glasses.

refulgentis | 0 comments | 7 hours ago

I feel like I'm going mad, if you actually read the article it's a theoretical thing they'd like to lead in, yet literally every comment assumes it launched. The title being "announces model" rather than the actual title certainly doesn't help.

jsemrau | 0 comments | 4 hours ago

The Harry Potter game had much better AR integration

bongodongobob | 0 comments | 9 hours ago

All they needed was a shit ton of pictures. The AR responsiveness (and Pokemon Go) have nothing to do with it. It was just a vehicle for gathering training data.

dankwizard | 12 comments | 4 hours ago

We do this at MyFitnessPal.

When users scan their barcode, the preview window is zoomed in so users think its mostly barcode. We actually get quite a bit more background noise typically of a fridge, supermarket aisle, pantry etc. but it is sent across to us, stored, and trained on.

Within the next year we will have a pretty good idea of the average pantry, fridge, supermarket aisle. Who knows what is next

noduerme | 2 comments | 3 hours ago

This is outrageously unethical. Someone scanning a barcode would have every reason to think that the code was being parsed locally on their phone. There would be no reason to upload an entire photo to read a barcode. Beyond which, not even alerting the user visually that their camera is picking up background stuff???

What if it's on their desk and there are sensitive legal documents next to it? How are you safeguarding all that private data? You could well be illegally in possession of classified documents, unconsenting nudes, all kinds of stuff. And it sounds like it's not even encrypted.

hackernewds | 0 comments | 57 minutes ago

please don't feed the trolls

onionisafruit | 3 comments | 3 hours ago

This post’s replies makes it clear a lot of us don’t recognize humor. Do people really think MyFitnessPal is trying to build a model of the average pantry?

gretch | 0 comments | 7 minutes ago

The humor isn’t recognized because the humor isn’t there. To be funny there has to be a setup, a punchline, some kinda joke structure. Humor isn’t just saying false things…

Imagine a comedian saying this on stage, how many laughs would that get?

> Do people really think MyFitnessPal is trying to build a model of the average pantry?

We’ve all seen dumber things that are real. Juicero is my personal favorite example.

ryanschaefer | 0 comments | 3 hours ago

Who knows what is next

tgsovlerkhgsel | 1 comment | 3 hours ago

The problem is that it's not possible to make a parody of an unethical company so blatant that it wouldn't also be a 100% plausible description of a business practice that some company actually does...

hackernewds | 0 comments | 57 minutes ago

Silicon Valley TV show is a documentary

tgsovlerkhgsel | 0 comments | 2 hours ago

If this is real, I hope MyFitnessPal doesn't operate in the EU.

Or rather, I hope they do, and receive an appropriate fine for this, if not even criminal prosecution (e.g. if the app uploaded nonconsensual pornography of someone visible only in the cropped out space).

BigGreenJorts | 1 comment | 3 hours ago

Whoa, that's a p crazy admission. Is this known publicly?

kridsdale1 | 0 comments | 3 hours ago

I am just assuming the post was sarcasm and the user doesn’t work there.

Otherwise, someone is FIRED

ryanschaefer | 2 comments | 3 hours ago

I’d be interested in how your privacy policy allows this. I can’t find where it mentions photos are stored or used for training purposes…

Cheer2171 | 2 comments | 3 hours ago

The MyFitnessPal privacy policy says "We use photos, videos, or other data you provide to us to customize our Services." [1]

That's all they need to do to cover themselves.

[1] https://www.myfitnesspal.com/privacy-policy

moreofthis | 1 comment | 3 hours ago

The policy defines "Services" as the mobile app and website. How is building a general purpose model for what the average fridge looks like used to customise either the website or the app? This feels like the kind of flimsy reasoning that only holds so long as no one is challenging it.

Cheer2171 | 1 comment | 3 hours ago

Easy. They provide this new general purpose model through the website. Bam, that's a Service that uses photos to customize. They can also expand what counts as a Service unilaterally.

With this broad of a privacy policy, they can start MyFitnessPal.com/UncroppedCandidPhotos where they let people search for users by name, email, or phone and sell your photos to the highest bidder, and that still would count as a Service that uses photos to customize. You consented to it!

> This feels like the kind of flimsy reasoning that only holds so long as no one is challenging it.

No, it is written by professional lawyers to be as permissive as possible.

moreofthis | 0 comments | 3 hours ago

> No, it is written by professional lawyers to be as permissive as possible.

But you repeat myself.

OK, say they do all that, that isn't customisation (I would argue) it is a new service that was built from unconsented data scraped from users of the pre-existing services. Call that splitting hairs if you like, but this looks like a risk to me.

tgsovlerkhgsel | 0 comments | 2 hours ago

> That's all they need to do to cover themselves.

If this is real and not a joke, I bet some DPA will disagree if this is brought to their attention. Effective consent under GDPR requires informed consent.

ipaddr | 2 comments | 3 hours ago

I would be more interested on why you believe something like this isn't baked into most privacy policies.

I'm not shocked but I'm shocked you are shocked.

moreofthis | 0 comments | 3 hours ago

Giving their policy an (admittedly quick) skim there doesn't seem to be any section that mentions AI, LLMs, training any kind of model, using image data from barcode pictures, etc. I'd be very curious to see the explanation of how this is baked into the policy.

ryanschaefer | 1 comment | 3 hours ago

I’m not exactly shocked that it could exist. But this usage (beyond the scope of processing barcodes) seems like it couldn’t be construed to fit into the normal avenues of data collection under a privacy policy. Also with regard to training specifically, this policy was created in late 2020 so I don’t know how it would cover generative models.

1zael | 0 comments | 2 hours ago

I really hope this is a joke, as someone who diligently uses the barcode feature on MFP everyday.......

luigi23 | 0 comments | 3 hours ago

Was here before comment got removed!

dangoodmanUT | 1 comment | 3 hours ago

brother definitely just violated an NDA

worthless-trash | 0 comments | 2 hours ago

For when this is in court:

Hello court jurors ! I hope you're having a great day. One of the attorneys breath smells pretty bad, am I right ?

wellthisisgreat | 0 comments | 3 hours ago

Holy shit thats some big whistleblowing if true

ggm | 6 comments | 8 hours ago

Not wanting to over-do it, but is there possibly an argument the data about geospatial should be in the commons and google have some obligation to put the data back into the commons?

I'm not arguing to a legal basis but if it's crowdsourced, then the inputs came from ordinary people. Sure, they signed to T&Cs.

Philosophically, I think knowledge, facts of the world as it is, even the constructed world, should be public knowledge not an asset class in itself.

bhl | 0 comments | 7 hours ago

Four Square just open sourced their places dataset. https://location.foursquare.com/resources/blog/products/four...

Given how expensive it is to query Google places, would love a crowdsourced open-source places API.

john_minsk | 0 comments | 3 hours ago

No. it should be owned by the owners of the land on which these objects are located. You should be able to provide access at different levels of detail to public or private entities that need said access and revoke it at your own will. May be make some money out of it.

3D artist can create a model of a space and offer rights to the owner of the land, who in turn can choose to create his own model or use the one provided by an artist.

urbandw311er | 3 comments | 7 hours ago

I’ve been saying this about Google Maps for years, especially their vast collection of public transport loading data and real time road speeds.

People are duped into thinking they’re doing some “greater good” by completing the in-app surveys and yet the data they give back is for Google’s exclusive use and, in fact, deepens their moat.

Nexxxeh | 0 comments | 7 hours ago

It's not solely for Google's benefit. They're ("we're" tbh) contributing data that improves services that we use. It has additional selfish and altruistic benefits beyond feeding the Googly beast.

alwayslikethis | 2 comments | 4 hours ago

IIRC Google maps basically does not make money. I wonder if there can be a government deal to subsidize it on the condition that the data be open sourced.

sunshadow | 1 comment | 3 hours ago

They made 11B$ last year. It has incredible amount of ads. If you haven't noticed, then that means they did a great job. (tip: look for the custom logo pins in the map. Its printing money)

mightyham | 0 comments | 2 hours ago

While I have no way to validate this, I highly suspect that the routing algorithm is also subtly manipulated. There is a route I drive with regular frequency that contains a roughly 20 mile section of two mostly parallel roads, one for through traffic and one for local. Every single time I drive through, Google routes me to the local traffic road. I know for certain the local road is slightly slower and it's also simply incorrect. The only way it makes sense is if it's a bug, or my hunch is that Google weights the route a little higher because it goes by a bunch of businesses that pay for advertising.

ipaddr | 0 comments | 3 hours ago

Google maps would if it sold the data to Google. My guess is there is a line item for that or at least on paper for tax purposes.

HPsquared | 0 comments | 5 hours ago

As a Google maps user, I benefit from that data being in there.

aidenn0 | 0 comments | 4 hours ago

In the US at least, "facts of the world as it is" are not generally copyrightable, though any creative process in the presentation of them may be.

underlipton | 0 comments | 6 hours ago

There's an "illegal child labor" angle to it, I suspect, T&Cs be damned.

dev1ycan | 1 comment | 8 hours ago

Do you expect every company to release all their data to the public as well or it's just because you're not invested in this one?

ggm | 1 comment | 7 hours ago

I expect any company which collates information about geospatial datasets to release the substance of them, yes. Maybe there's an IPR lockup window, but at some point the cadastral facts of the world are part of the commons to me.

I would think there's actually a lot of epidemiology data which also should be winding up in the public domain getting locked up in medical IPR. I could make the same case. Cochrane reports rely on being able to do meta analysis over existing datasets. Thats value.

scottyah | 0 comments | 7 hours ago

They found a creative way to incentivize the collection of it and paid for the processing. Anybody can collect the same data, I don't see why they would have to release it...

It would be nice of them though.

darkwater | 2 comments | 9 hours ago

I can really imagine a meeting with the big brasses of Google/Niantic a few years ago that went along

- We need to be the first to have a better, new generation 3D model of the world to build the future of maps on it. How can we get that data?"

+ What about gamifying it and crowd-sourcing it to the masses?

- Sure! Let's buy some Pokemon rights!

It's scary but some people do really have some long-term vision

dgfitz | 3 comments | 9 hours ago

Pokemon Go is built on the same engine as Inverness I think its called. When it launched they even used the same POIs. I think this was ~5-7 years before PGO launched.

Edit: I said inverness and meant ingress. Apologies.

edm0nd | 1 comment | 9 hours ago

I think you are thinking of Ingress. No idea what Inverness is.

Ingress and PGO share the same portals and stuffs and its what PGO got its data from.

ClassyJacket | 1 comment | 9 hours ago

Inverness is a city in Scotland

travisjungroth | 0 comments | 7 hours ago

Also a tiny town in Marin County, CA and one of my favorite words. It’s just so nice to say. Inverness.

virodoran | 1 comment | 2 hours ago

Pokemon Go was launched on the Unity game engine in 2016. Ingress was using a different game engine at the time, and wasn't rewritten into Unity until several years later. Even the backend/server side was significantly different, with them needing to write a shim to ensure compatibility during & after the move to Unity.

dgfitz | 1 comment | 2 hours ago

Surely the game engine has little to do with logged telemetry data. No?

virodoran | 1 comment | 2 hours ago

Perhaps, perhaps not - I have my theories, but is that not what you meant when you said Pokemon Go was built on the same engine as Ingress?

I do think it wasn't until after Pokemon Go launched and they saw the success of it, that they shifted focus to be more of a platform for these types of experiences (see Niantic Lightship). Additionally, I think Unity offered them the opportunity to integrate with ARCore and collect much more detailed data than they would've ever been able to do on the old Ingress engine. In fact, I expect a significant chunk of ARCore functionality was added specifically thanks to Niantic and Unity (in fact, you see Unity mentioned all over the Google Developer docs for it).

dgfitz | 0 comments | 55 minutes ago

I did say engine, you’re correct.

I imagine the logs aren’t tied to the engine, which I suppose is the point I should have made without researching which engine the games used as opposed to which company made both games.

relyks | 0 comments | 9 hours ago

They definitely had this as a long-term vision

alpyne | 0 comments | 9 hours ago

Brian Maclendon (Niantic) presented some interesting details about this in his recent Bellingfest presentation:

https://www.youtube.com/live/0ZKl70Ka5sg?feature=shared&t=12...

john_minsk | 0 comments | 2 hours ago

Very cool.

However, I can't fully agree that generating 3d scene "on the fly" is the future of maps and many other use cases for AR.

The thing with geospatial, buildings, roads, signs, etc. objects is that they are very static, not many changes are being made to them and many changes are not relevant to the majority of use cases. For example: today your house is white and in 3 years it has stains and yellowish color due to time, but everything else is the same.

Given that storage is cheap and getting cheaper, bandwidth of 5G and local networks is getting too fast for most current use cases, while computer graphics compute is still bound by our GPU performance, I say that it would be much more useful to identify the location and the building that you are looking at and pull the accurate model from the cloud (further optimisations might be needed like to pull only the data user has access to or needs access to given the task he is doing). Most importantly users will need to have access to a small subset of 3D space on daily basis, so you can have a local cache on end devices for best performance and rendering. Or stream rendered result from the cloud like nVidia GDN is doing.

Most precise models will come from CAD files for newly built buildings, retrospectively going back to CAD files of buildings build in last 20-30 years(I would bet most of them have some soft of computer model made before) and finally going back even further - making AI look at the old 2D construction plans of the building and reconstructing it in 3D.

Once the building is reconstructed (or a concrete pole like shown in the article) you can pull its 3D model from the cloud and place it in front of the user - this will cover 95% of use cases for AR. For 5% of the tasks you might want real time recognition of the current state of surfaces for some tasks or changes in geometry (like tracking the changes in the road quality compared with the previous scans or with reference model), but these cases can be tackled separately and having precise 3D model will only help, but won't be needed to be reconstructed from scratch.

This is a good 1st step to make a 3D map, however there should be an option to go to the real location and make edits to 3D plan by the expert so that the model can be precise and not "kind of" precise.

janice1999 | 5 comments | 9 hours ago

I'm sure the CIA already has access. [1] People were raising privacy concerns years ago. [2]

[1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/953621/the-cia-nsa-and-...

[2] https://kotaku.com/the-creators-of-pokemon-go-mapped-the-wor...

BirAdam | 0 comments | 5 hours ago

Hanke’s actually got awards from CIA for his work at In-Q-Tel investing in Keyhole/Niantic, so yeah, safe to assume that the agency invested specifically to have players collect data. Considering many Pokémon were on or near military bases around the world… not hard to assume what CIA’s real goal was.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/pokemon-go-trespassers-militar...

dgfitz | 1 comment | 9 hours ago

Google maps has more data than PGO could ever hope to have.

esafak | 1 comment | 3 hours ago

But you only use Maps when you need directions.

dgfitz | 0 comments | 2 hours ago

I don’t think this is sarcasm.

Until pretty recently, phone telemetry data was a free-for-all, and if you’re, say, in legal trouble, a map of the location of your phone over the past… however long you’ve had your phone is immediately available.

astrange | 1 comment | 9 hours ago

People have a lot of strange beliefs about the CIA. Why would they even care about this?

tiahura | 1 comment | 9 hours ago

Upload a picture of a bad guy in an office lobby to pokegpt and ask it where he is.

vasco | 1 comment | 8 hours ago

You can do that for free by sending the picture to a geoguessr streamer on twitch.

astrange | 0 comments | 7 hours ago

Or Google Lens. Regardless this isn't the CIA, it's the NGIA.

krick | 3 comments | 5 hours ago

I still don't get what LGM is. From what I understood, it isn't actually about any "geospatial" data at all, is it? It is rather about improving some vision models to predict how the backside of a building looks, right? And training data isn't of people walking, but from images they've produced while catching pokemons or something?

P.S.: Also, if that's indeed what they mean, I wonder why having google street view data isn't enough for that.

virodoran | 0 comments | 2 hours ago

> And training data isn't of people walking, but from images they've produced while catching pokemons or something?

Training data is people taking dedicated video of locations. Only ARCore supported devices can submit data as well. So I assume along with the video they're also collecting a good chunk of other data such as depth maps, accelerometer, gyrometer, magnetometer data, GPS, and more.

drusepth | 0 comments | 5 hours ago

> It is rather about improving some vision models to predict how the backside of a building looks, right?

This, yes, based on how the backsides of similar buildings have looked in other learned areas.

But the other missing piece of what it is seems to be relativity and scale: I do 3D model generation at our game studio right now and the biggest want/need current models can't do is scale (and, specifically, relative scale) -- we can generate 3d models for entities in our game but we still need a person in the loop to scale them to a correct size relative to other models: trees are bigger than humans, and buildings are bigger still. Current generative 3d models just create a scale-less model for output; it looks like a "geospatial" model incorporates some form of relative scale, and would (could?) incorporate that into generated models (or, more likely, maps of models rather than individual models themselves).

jayd16 | 0 comments | 4 hours ago

The ultimate goal is to use the phone camera to get very accurate mapping and position. They're able to merge images from multiple sources which means they're able to localize an image against their database, at least relatively.

oliyoung | 1 comment | 9 hours ago

Impressive, but this is one of those "if this is public knowledge, how far ahead is the _not_ public knowledge" things

UltraSane | 0 comments | 8 hours ago

I really want to know what the NSA and NRO and Pentagon are doing training deep neural networks on hyperspectral imaging and synthetic aperture radar data. Imagine having something like Google Earth but with semantic segmentation of features combined with what material they are made from. All stored on petabytes of NVMe flash.

Jabbles | 0 comments | 9 hours ago

> For example, it takes us relatively little effort to back-track our way through the winding streets of a European old town. We identify all the right junctions although we had only seen them once and from the opposing direction.

That is true for some people, but I'm fairly sure that the majority of people would not agree that it comes naturally to them.

mxfh | 1 comment | 9 hours ago

Somehow I always thought something like that would have been the ultimate use case for Microsoft Photosynth (developed from Photo Tourism research project), ideally with a time dimension, like browsing photos in a geo spatio-temporal context.

I expect that was also some reason behind their flickr bid back then.

https://medium.com/@dddexperiments/why-i-preserved-photosynt...

https://phototour.cs.washington.edu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynth

at least any patents regarding this will also expire about 2026.

josh_cutler | 0 comments | 9 hours ago

I worked on this and yes it was 100% related to the interest in Flickr. At the time Google Street had just become a thing and there was interest in effectively crowdsourcing the photography via Flickr and some of the technology behind Photosynth.

ogurechny | 0 comments | 16 minutes ago

Lunduke is happy: “I told you so!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVmZy95vMUc

urbandw311er | 4 comments | 7 hours ago

> Today we have 10 million scanned locations around the world, and over 1 million of those are activated and available for use with our VPS service. We receive about 1 million fresh scans each week

Wait, they get a million a week but they only have a total of 10 million, ie 10 days worth? Is this a typo or am I missing something?

r00fus | 0 comments | 7 hours ago

A location probably requires like a million scans to be visualized properly. Think of a park near your house - there are probably thousands of ways to view each feature within.

aeturnum | 0 comments | 7 hours ago

Scans are not always of new locations. They have ~10m established nodes and they get ~1m node scans per week that might be new and might be old.

gtr32x | 0 comments | 7 hours ago

Pretty sure there can be multiple "scans" per location is what they are saying

themingus | 0 comments | 6 hours ago

It’s possible they meant 1 million frames from scans.

themingus | 0 comments | 8 hours ago

Interestingly, Pokemon GO only prompts players to scan a subset of the Points of Interest on the game map. Players can manually choose to scan any POI, but with no incentive for those scans I'm sure it almost never happens.

> Today we have 10 million scanned locations around the world, and over 1 million of those are activated and available for use with our VPS service.

This 1 in 10 figure is about accurate, both from experience as a player and from perusing the mentioned Visual Positioning System service. Most POI never get enough scan data to 'activate'. The data from POI that are able to activate can be accessed with a free account on Niantic Lightship [1], and has been available for a while.

I'll be curious to see how Niantic plans to fill in the gaps, and gather scan data for the 9 out of 10 POI that aren't designated for scan rewards.

1: https://lightship.dev

DrBenCarson | 1 comment | 9 hours ago

I’ve published research in this general arena and the sheer amount of data they need to get good is massive. They have a moat the size of an ocean until most people have cameras and depth sensors on their face

It’s funny, we actually started by having people play games as well but we expressly told them it was to collect data. Brilliant to use an AR game that people actually play for fun

UltraSane | 0 comments | 8 hours ago

Yes it must be almost an exabyte of data.

yalogin | 0 comments | 4 hours ago

Even before LLMs, I knew they are going to launch a fine grained mapping service with all that camera and POI data. Now this one is actually much better obviously. Very few companies actually have this kind of data. Remains to be seen how they make money out of this

murdockq | 1 comment | 9 hours ago

I'm guessing this can be the new bot that could play competitively at GeoGuesser. It would be interesting if Google trained a similar model and released it using all the Street Map data, I sure hope they do.

Has anyone done something similar with the geolocated WIFI MAC addresses, to have small model for predicting location from those.

themk | 0 comments | 7 hours ago

I believe I read somewhere that geoguesser AI based on street view data was mostly classifying based on the camera/vehicle set up. As in, a smudge on the lens in this corner means its from Paris.

This crowdsourced approach probably eliminates that issue.

Jabrov | 1 comment | 9 hours ago

I wonder how this can be combined with satellite data, if at all?

ileonichwiesz | 1 comment | 9 hours ago

I don’t see why not. Photos are often combined with satellite data for photogrammetry purposes, even on large scale - see the recent Microsoft Flight Simulator (in a couple days, when it actually works)

mxfh | 0 comments | 9 hours ago

It's usually aerial data, especially oblique aerial. Bing Maps is still pretty unique in offering them undistorted and not draped over some always degraded mesh.

rbrown | 0 comments | 9 hours ago

Genuinely impressed Google had the vision and resources to commit to a 10 year data collection project

farhanhubble | 0 comments | 5 hours ago

It may not be Geospatial data at all and I'm not sure how much the users consented but the data collection strategy was well crafted. I remember recommending building a game to collect handwriting data from testers (about a thousand), to the research lab I worked for long time back.

navaed01 | 2 comments | 6 hours ago

Conversation about ‘players are the product’ of Pokémon go aside… What are some practical applications of an LGM?

Seems like navigation is ‘solved’? There’s already a lot of technology supporting permanence of virtual objects based on spatial mapping? Better AI generated animations?

I am sure there are a ton of innovations it could unlock…

wongarsu | 0 comments | 5 hours ago

"It could help with search and rescue" jokes aside [1] this seems really useful for robotics. Their demo video is estimating a camera position from a single image, after learning the scene from a couple images. Stick the camera on a robot, and you are now estimating where the robot is based on what the robot has seen before.

They are a bit vague on what else the model does, but it sounds like they extrapolate what the rest of the environment could look like, the same way you can make a good guess what the back side of that rock would look like. That gives autonomous robots a baseline they can use to plan actions (like how to drive/fly/crawl to the other side) that can be updated as new view points become available.

1: https://www.xkcd.com/2128/

CaptainFever | 0 comments | 5 hours ago

I hope this tech could help make AR glasses more useful in public, day-to-day life, like a video game HUD.

piyh | 1 comment | 8 hours ago

Applications that I thought of as I read this:

Real-Time mapping of the environment for VR experiences with built-in semantic understanding.

Winning at geoguesser, automated doxing of anybody posting a picture of themselves.

Robotic positioning and navigation

Asset generation for video games. Think about generating an alternate New York City that's more influenced by Nepal.

I'm getting echoes of neural radiance fields as well.

Procedural generation of an alternative planet is the kind of stuff that the No Man's sky devs could only dream of.

adamredwoods | 0 comments | 29 minutes ago

AI guided missiles.

__MatrixMan__ | 0 comments | 10 hours ago

I wonder if there's a sweet spot for geospatial model size.

A model trained on all data for 1m in every direction would probably be too sparse to be useful, but perhaps involving data from a different continent is costly overkill? I expect most users are only going to care about their immediate surroundings. Seems like an opportunity for optimization.

firejake308 | 0 comments | 5 hours ago

Is this related to NeRF (neural radiance fields)?

arnaudsm | 2 comments | 6 hours ago

So that's why Pokemon was notoriously impactful on battery life. They were recording and uploading our videos the whole time?

andybak | 0 comments | 6 hours ago

I don't think so. I wanted to voice this quickly without a detailed rebuttal as yours is the top comment and I don't think it's correct. Hopefully someone will do my homework for me (or alternatively tell me I'm wrong!).

CaptainFever | 0 comments | 6 hours ago

No, that is unlikely to be the case.

jonplackett | 0 comments | 8 hours ago

This seems like it’d be quite handy to have in an autonomous vehicle of any kind

garagemc2 | 2 comments | 7 hours ago

Don't quite understand the application of this?

CaptainFever | 0 comments | 6 hours ago

Google Maps uses this tech for AR navigation: https://www.pocket-lint.com/what-is-google-maps-ar-navigatio...

reilly3000 | 0 comments | 9 hours ago

I’m intrigued by the generative possibilities of such a model even more than how it could be used with irl locations. Imagine a game or simulation that creates a realistic looking American suburbia on the fly. It honestly can’t be that difficult, it practically predicts itself.

whatevermang | 1 comment | 7 hours ago

People complaining here that you are somehow owed something for contributing to the data set, or that because you use google maps or reCAPTCHA you are owed access to their training data. I mean, I'd like that data too. But you did get something in return already. A game that you enjoy (or your wouldn't play it), free and efficient navigation (better than your TomTom ever worked), sites not overwhelmed by bots or spammers. Yeah google gets more out of it than you probably do, but it's incorrect to say that you are getting 'nothing' in return.

maxerickson | 1 comment | 7 hours ago

I'm not sure quite what the ownership is, but Niantic isn't a subsidiary of Alphabet or Google.

drusepth | 0 comments | 4 hours ago

The company was formed as Niantic Labs in 2010 as an internal startup within Google, founded by the then-head of Google's Geo Division (Google Maps, Google Earth, and Google Street View).

It became an independent entity in October 2015 when Google restructured under Alphabet Inc. During the spinout, Niantic announced that Google, Nintendo, and The Pokémon Company would invest up to $30 million in Series-A funding. Not sure what the current ownership is (they've raised a few more times since then), but they're seemingly still very closely tied with Google.

fragmede | 0 comments | 4 hours ago

Waymo is supposedly geofenced because they need detailed maps of an area. And this is supposedly a blocker for them deploying everywhere. But then Google goes and does something like this, and I'm not sure, if it's even really true that Waymo needs really detailed maps, that it's an insurmountable problem.

AndrewKemendo | 2 comments | 9 hours ago

This is literally what I built my first company around starting in 2012, when Niantic was still working on Ingress

I describe it here during 500 Startups demo day: https://youtu.be/3oYHxdL93zE?si=cvLob-NHNEIJqYrI&t=6411

I further described it on the Planet of the Apps episode 1

Here's my patent from 2018: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10977818B2/en

So. I'm not really sure what to do here given that this was exactly and specifically what we were building and frankly had a lot of success in actually building.