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

nianticlabs.com

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Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#331

Post by georgeplusplus »

RivieraKid wrote: post #321
reissbaker wrote: post #255

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"). The…

After skimming the article I don't understand what the Large Geospatial Model is supposed to be, what it can be used for.

According to their website :

Neural mapping. Taking 5 minutes to build a scene in space.

Relocalization estimating camera pose from a single image.

https://nianticlabs.com/news/largegeospatialmodel?hl=en

It looks pretty cool. I imagine it could be a game changer in wearable devices that want to use position like AR.

Intelligence gathering is also another one. Being able to tell where someone is based on a Picture is a huge one. Not just limited to outdoors but presumably indoors as well. Crazy stuff

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#332

Post by georgeplusplus »

zorked wrote: post #322
RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think there is something amoral here. Niantic explicitly sends players to take videos of places for rewards. It’s not like it’s done in a sneaky way. Being somehow surprised they actually plan to do things with the data they have you gather is a bit weird.

No, it isn't. Stop normalizing this behavior. There was no consent. You expect that you are playing a game, not working for them for free.

You were too lazy to read the rules of the game

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#333

Post by KaiserPro »

RivieraKid wrote: post #321
reissbaker wrote: post #255

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"). The…

After skimming the article I don't understand what the Large Geospatial Model is supposed to be, what it can be used for.

They have a "VPS" which extracts keypoints from an image and matches them against a 3d pointcloud. Using trigonometry you can work out the 3d position of the camera by matching the keypoints from the image to the keypoints in the point cloud.

What is different is that they are proposing to make a large ML model to do all of the matching, rather than having a database and some matching algorithm.

Will it work? probably, will it scale? I'm not that hopeful, but then I was wrong about LLMs.

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#335

Post by KaiserPro »

darkwater wrote: post #8

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

> How can we get that data

Its far cheaper to pay people on bikes to go round places, than it is to do what niantic did. Mind you, they make money hand over fist, so the mapping is a side quest for them.

Apart from they need it to make AR work properly.

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#336

Post by KaiserPro »

smcin wrote: post #297
janice1999 wrote: post #3

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...

I was wondering about the privacy implications: given a photo, the LGM could decode it to not just positioning, but also time-of-day and season (and maybe even year, or specific unique dates e.g. concerts, group activities). Colors, amount of daylight(/nightlight), weather/precipitation/heat haze, flowers and foliage, traffic patterns, how people are dressed, other human features (e.g. signage and/or decorations for…

> Colors, amount of daylight(/nightlight), weather/precipitation/heat haze, flowers and foliage, traffic patterns, how people are dressed, other human features (e.g. signage and/or decorations for Easter/Halloween/Christmas/other events/etc.)

I mean, in theory it could. But in practice it'll just output lat, lon and a quaternion. Its going to be hard enough to get the model to behave well enough to localize reliably, let alone do all the other things.

The dataset, yes, that'll contain all those things. but the model won't.

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#337

Post by zelphirkalt »

This looks like another use of data not following the original purpose of the collected data. Clearly it should be illegal to use any such data without asking every single user whose data they want to use for consent. And by that I do not mean some extortion scheme.

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#338

Post by jillyboel »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #59
jillyboel wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the goal is to replace you with a machine and to widen the poverty gap. Also because I do not consent to it. Are you also fine with taking pictures of pretty women on the street (hey, they'd be walking there anyway) and posting them online and farming ad revenue? Or training a model on their likeness for porn?

Women on the street didn’t agree to a terms of service and didn’t choose to put content online. The better metaphor is a woman posting her photos online and then those photos were used by a painter who then sold an abstract painting of her.

As if these ai bros give a fuck? No terms of services mentioned AI but they scraped everything and built their fortunes from it.

Also are you sure that the TOS of the major websites specify "we allow anyone that runs a scraper to use your data however they wish"

Because I can guarantee you they don't. And yet, that's what the AI bros have done / are still doing.

Sure, these despicable companies realize they hold value and are now also selling our data, but that's only one side of this disgusting coin.

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#339

Post by Matticus_Rex »

icehawk wrote: post #265
Matticus_Rex wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Can you name any other agreement where it's considered reasonable to renegotiate the terms afterwards because you found out what the other party got was more profitable for them than you'd been aware of, through no misrepresentation on their part?

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#340

Post by jillyboel »

nh23423fefe wrote: post #50
jillyboel wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the goal is to replace you with a machine and to widen the poverty gap. Also because I do not consent to it. Are you also fine with taking pictures of pretty women on the street (hey, they'd be walking there anyway) and posting them online and farming ad revenue? Or training a model on their likeness for porn?

I don't like bad arguments like this.

I don't like bad comments like this.
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