Remember Pokemon Go? It’s back in the headlines, but this time for a very different reason – using your data.

For those who need a refresher: Pokemon Go was released in 2016 and became an instant hit. It is a virtual reality (VR)-based smartphone game that uses a phone camera to scan the surrounding environment, allowing players to catch virtual Pokémon hidden in the real world. The game combines GPS tracking with real-time gameplay.

Niantic, the company behind Pokemon Go, posted in a blog earlier this week, revealing that they are building a “large geospatial model (LGM)” and the past eight Pokemon Go users. Using data collected over the years.

The game gathered a serious following at the time of its release, and it is now clear that millions of users have played it.

LGM is an AI model based on Large Language Models (LLMs), the same underlying architecture used by the popular chatbot ChatGPT. Just as ChatGPT processes large amounts of textual data, LGM aims to process actual scans of real-world locations fed by users around the world to design “spatial intelligence” such as We’ve never seen it before.

“Today we have 10 million scanned locations worldwide, and more than 1 million of them are active and available for use with our VPS service,” Niantic said via blog. “We receive about 1 million fresh scans every week, each containing hundreds of discrete images.”

The company is betting on LGM to provide key technical capabilities for augmented reality (AR) glasses, robotics, content creation, and autonomous systems. According to the company, it will be a tool that allows computers to not only perceive and understand their surroundings, but also interact with them in new ways.

The creator of Pokemon Go is entering an already fiercely competitive AI product market. But Niantic has a significant advantage over autonomous vehicle GPS systems in the likes of Google Street View and Tesla models — the unique nature of its data is that the scans are made by pedestrians, not cars. Mapping of After all, cars can’t reach all the tight nooks and crannies of the world, but you can try to catch that elusive Pikachu Pokemon.

The potential application of this AI system is not yet clearly known. Such a model can be used to teach a robot to deliver food to your doorstep, but it can also end up in the hands of some bad actors. Considerations aside, one thing’s for sure—no one in 2016 could have imagined their fun little Pokemon game to be a data collector for a massive AI model that would take over the entire Earth. wants