Niantic using Pokémon GO data to train A.I. to navigate the real world

If you’ve been a Pokémon GO player, or a player of any mobile game from Niantic, your interactions with their apps is being used to further what A.I. can do.

Via their official blog, Niantic has revealed that they’re working on a “Large Geospatial Model,” which much like Large Language Models like OpenAI’s GPT, has been trained on gigs upon gigs of data. That data is coming from Pokémon GO players and their real-world travels.

Niantic says this data will be used to “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.”

Again, just like existing AI programs, this LGM will allow a computer to predict what’s coming next in a physical environment. In turn this should allow AI users to more easily navigate the physical world. As far as just where and how this will be implemented, that remains to be seen.