Niantic, the company behind Pokémon Go, has been scraping users’ scans of the world to build a model that will help robots navigate physical space. Some experts are worried about the potential applications.
Players of "Pokémon Go" — an augmented reality (AR) mobile game that took the world by storm upon its release in 2016 — have been unknowingly training an artificial intelligence (AI) model to map the planet at street level.
Niantic, the company behind the popular game, has revealed that it will use data scraped from its AR apps to construct a "large geospatial model" (LGM) that would enable robots and other devices to better navigate the physical world — even if they only have limited information.
The announcement, made Nov. 12 in a blog post on Niantic’s website, reveals that the company has drawn data from more than 10 million scanned locations worldwide, with users adding around 1 million more new scans each week.
This data has already been used to train 50 million local neural networks (collections of machine learning algorithms structured like the human brain) to operate in more than a million locations worldwide, the company said.