Niantic announces “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

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 Pokémon 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.

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.

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.

That's good information, thank you!

It's OK to adjust the title to have more relevant facts or to fix a poorly worded one. Editorializing is more like 'Amazing: Niantic makes world-changing AI breakthrough'.

I feel like I'm going mad, if you actually read the article it's a theoretical thing they'd like to lead in, yet literally every comment assumes it launched. The title being "announces model" rather than the actual title certainly doesn't help.

The original title was not poorly worded though. The new one was editorialized to get a certain reaction out of readers — I promise you the responses on this thread would look different with the original title.

The Harry Potter game had much better AR integration

> the rest of the world gets a cool new technology

The rest of the world gets an opportunity to purchase access to said new technology, you mean! It's not like they're releasing how they generated the models. It's much more difficult to get excited about paid-access to technology than it is about access to tech itself.

Many articles only make it to the front page because the submitted title was editorialized. The rules may say one thing, but the incentives are to a subtle balance between editorialization and avoiding flagging due to extreme editorialization with mods only stepping in to correct the title once it's gotten loads of upvotes and comments already.

Google branded AR glasses. Not any AR glasses.

The original title fails to explain who is building the model and where the data is coming from. It also implies a discussion of the task of training models, whereas the actual page is an announcement of an intent to train a model.