[HN Gopher] Niantic announces "Large Geospatial Model" trained o...
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Niantic announces "Large Geospatial Model" trained on Pokemon Go
player data
Author : bookstore-romeo
Score : 58 points
Date : 2024-11-19 20:02 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (nianticlabs.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nianticlabs.com)
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| 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.
| janice1999 wrote:
| 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...
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Pikachu did 9/11
| Onavo wrote:
| More like Celesteela, after all, you need jet fuel to melt
| steel beams.
| dgfitz wrote:
| Google maps has more data than PGO could ever hope to have.
| astrange wrote:
| People have a lot of strange beliefs about the CIA. Why would
| they even care about this?
| tiahura wrote:
| Upload a picture of a bad guy in an office lobby to pokegpt
| and ask it where he is.
| Jabrov wrote:
| I wonder how this can be combined with satellite data, if at all?
| ileonichwiesz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| 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 Pokemon 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.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| 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.
| relyks wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That's good information, thank you!
| darkwater wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| edm0nd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Inverness is a city in Scotland
| relyks wrote:
| They definitely had this as a long-term vision
| murdockq wrote:
| 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.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| 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.
| rbrown wrote:
| Genuinely impressed Google had the vision and resources to commit
| to a 10 year data collection project
| relyks wrote:
| 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.
| rbrown wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| fragmede wrote:
| 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!
| rbrown wrote:
| NooooooooooOooOooOo!
| relyks wrote:
| Lol
| relyks wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| jillyboel wrote:
| This is why I stopped posting useful stuff in public fora.
| It's only being used to make the rich fucks richer at this
| point.
|
| It's a shame because I do enjoy reading what others post, but
| it's not going to last.
| chottocharaii wrote:
| I don't understand this perspective. Why should I resent
| the creation of value from behaviours that I would be doing
| anyway.
| jillyboel wrote:
| 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?
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| You're mislabeling rent-seeking as value creation.
| Perhaps this is the root of your misunderstanding?
| fragmede wrote:
| You think that's bad, wait till you find out about what
| happens at work!
| Schnouki wrote:
| Yeah, they did the same in Ingress: film a portal
| (pokestop/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!
| Jabbles wrote:
| > 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.
| tiahura wrote:
| The cia has to be all over this.
| mxfh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| oliyoung wrote:
| Impressive, but this is one of those "if this is public
| knowledge, how far ahead is the _not_ public knowledge" things
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| 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
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| 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.
|
| Quite frustrating
| alpyne wrote:
| Brian Maclendon (Niantic) presented some interesting details
| about this in his recent Bellingfest presentation:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/live/0ZKl70Ka5sg?feature=shared&t=12...
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(page generated 2024-11-20 23:00 UTC)