Niantic’s AI spinout is training a new world model using 30 billion images of urban landmarks crowdsourced from players.
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“Five hundred million people installed that app in 60 days,” says Brian McClendon, CTO at Niantic Spatial, an AI company that Niantic spun out in May last year. According to the video-game firm Scopely, which bought Pokémon Go from Niantic at the same time, the game still drew more than 100 million players in 2024, eight years after it launched.
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Now Niantic Spatial is using that vast and unparalleled trove of crowdsourced data—images of urban landmarks tagged with super-accurate location markers taken from the phones of hundreds of millions of Pokémon Go players around the world—to build a kind of world model, a buzzy new technology that grounds the smarts of LLMs in real-world environments.
The company’s latest product is a model that it says can pinpoint your location on a map to within a few centimeters, based on a handful of snapshots of the buildings or other landmarks in view. The firm wants to use it to help robots navigate with greater precision in places where GPS is unreliable. . .
The company’s latest product is a model that it says can pinpoint your location on a map to within a few centimeters, based on a handful of snapshots of the buildings or other landmarks in view.
Well that’s not necessarily terrifying at all lol
Every day, the world gets a little bit worse. Can we eat the tech bros yet?
Oh cool. So now they will offer a service for customers (e.g. Palantir, US Govt, whatever ABC agency) to accurately pinpoint locations of people based off of images. Luckily our phones don’t have backdoors into them and surely won’t have a way for Face Unlock images to be seen, and functional real-time updates on any given person’s location? And with how much these phones are used for communication, surely they won’t also have evidence of perceived dissent, all in a nice little rectangle package.
I understand that Apple and, I guess sorta, Google aren’t necessarily willing to allow this, and it might not be legal, or any number of other hurdles, but it’s just one step easier for actors who want to and have the means to do so. Good lord this place sucks.
See a clanker, smash a clanker ! Destroy any delivery bot you see.
