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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

#351

Post by try_the_bass »

Larrikin wrote: post #268
try_the_bass wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

If some small number maliciously comply like this, it will make the model better, not worse.

This is also wildly antisocial behavior, and if everyone behaved like this, the world would be a really shit place. I know many people have a genuine "fuck you, I got mine" attitude, but if everyone had it, the world would be infinitely worse off.

If you don't like the terms of the game, don't play it? Why does dislike of the terms merit what essentially amounts to cheating (under the spirit of the rules, if not the letter)? This attitude makes even less sense than the one I was originally critiquing

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

#352

Post by 9dev »

RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #350
isodev wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people don’t read or understand the EULA, then it violates the spirit of the legislation (not to mention it’s plain shady). Consent must be voluntary (opt-in) and informed.

If you don’t read what you sign, it’s not uninformed consent. It’s you being an idiot.

You can spin this both ways. So if I include a 12,000 page EULA with my product, you're the idiot if page 8,172 includes a footnote that allows me to sell your data, but uses terms defined a few thousand pages earlier, so you actually have to read all of it?

You can play these shenanigans with businesses, but I for one am happy such behaviour is illegal here when selling to consumers.

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

#353

Post by RandomThoughts3 »

9dev wrote: post #352
RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t read what you sign, it’s not uninformed consent. It’s you being an idiot.

You can spin this both ways. So if I include a 12,000 page EULA with my product, you're the idiot if page 8,172 includes a footnote that allows me to sell your data, but uses terms defined a few thousand pages earlier, so you actually have to read all of it? You can play these shenanigans with businesses, but I for one am happy such behaviour is illegal here when selling to consumers.

Don’t use product with EULA you refuse to read. Then people will stop including them. Especially when it’s a game.

Anyway I’m all for outlawing the inclusion of predatory clauses in EULA but this is not one of this case.

People just want to have their cake and eat it to.

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

#354

Post by smcin »

KaiserPro wrote: post #336
smcin wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

You don't know for sure the model won't contain non-location data, like I noted the additional blurb vaguely said: "And, as noted, beyond gaming LGMs will have widespread applications, including spatial planning and design, logistics, audience engagement, and remote collaboration."

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

#355

Post by noduerme »

hackernewds wrote: post #271
noduerme wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 safeguardi…

please don't feed the trolls

Look, I will now defend my lack of a sense of humor. That post was 5 minutes old and I was the first person to respond to it. If the poster had I will say that the bit about showing users only the barcode but capturing photos outside that was pretty clever; it's the kind of detail that belongs in a Neal Stephenson novel. But that's exactly the kind of thing that a million startups would do right now. Yea in retrospect it's kinda stupid that someone would admit this and also be proud to get a better set of photos of refrigerators and supermarket aisles.

So, is this a grade-A 2024 version of Andy Kaufman comedy that requires just one dolt in the audience to take it seriously? Hah. I guess if so it wouldn't be funny unless someone like me took the bait. I see the humor. But if you analyze why it was funny, the primary reason would be the fact that it was so possible to take it seriously. Especially with 134 or so upvotes, the user writing had exactly the amount of cachet as someone who had interned at a sleazy startup for 2 months and was proud of something really stupid.

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

#356

Post by KaiserPro »

smcin wrote: post #354
KaiserPro wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

You don't know for sure the model won't contain non-location data, like I noted the additional blurb vaguely said: "And, as noted, beyond gaming LGMs will have widespread applications, including spatial planning and design, logistics, audience engagement, and remote collaboration."

> will have widespread applications

There are a lots of "coulds" "ifs" and "shoulds". But how do you tokenise all those extra bits? For it to function as a decent location system, it has to be "invariant" to weather/light conditions. Otherwise you'll just fall back to GPS.

At it's heart, its a photo -> camera pose (location) converter. The bigger issue is how do you stop it hallucinating the wrong location when it has high uncertainty. That's before you get into scaling issues so that a model can cope with bigger than room scale pointclouds.

the first "public" VPS was released a while ago, yet six years later we still don't see widespread adoption of visual based location, even though its much much more accurate in an urban environment.

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

#358

Post by whamlastxmas »

jillyboel wrote: post #338
whamlastxmas wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 valu…

Every major website including Reddit and Imgur have TOS language saying they can do basically anything they want with content you add to their platforms, including AI training

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

#359

Post by jillyboel »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #358
jillyboel wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 valu…

Every major website including Reddit and Imgur have TOS language saying they can do basically anything they want with content you add to their platforms, including AI training

Sure, what does that have to do with third parties scraping shit and training their models on it? Which is exactly how these ai bros started their empire? These terms of services were updated after the genie was out of the bottle. Claiming otherwise is revisionist.

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

#360

Post by butterNaN »

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…

This is the way it is, most likely, because investors are the actual target audience here
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