At Niantic, we are pioneering the concept of a Large Geospatial Model that will use large-scale machine learning to understand a scene and connect it

Building a Large Geospatial Model to Achieve Spatial Intelligence – Niantic Labs

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2024-11-19 20:30:09

At Niantic, we are pioneering the concept of a Large Geospatial Model that will use large-scale machine learning to understand a scene and connect it to millions of other scenes globally.

When you look at a familiar type of structure – whether it’s a church, a statue, or a town square – it’s fairly easy to imagine what it might look like from other angles, even if you haven’t seen it from all sides. As humans, we have “spatial understanding” that means we can fill in these details based on countless similar scenes we’ve encountered before. But for machines, this task is extraordinarily difficult. Even the most advanced AI models today struggle to visualize and infer missing parts of a scene, or to imagine a place from a new angle. This is about to change: Spatial intelligence is the next frontier of AI models.

As part of Niantic’s Visual Positioning System (VPS), we have trained more than 50 million neural networks, with more than 150 trillion parameters, enabling operation in over a million locations. In our vision for a Large Geospatial Model (LGM), each of these local networks would contribute to a global large model, implementing a shared understanding of geographic locations, and comprehending places yet to be fully scanned.