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

(nianticlabs.com)
383 points bookstore-romeo | 5 comments | 19 Nov 24 20:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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relyks ◴[20 Nov 24 22:26 UTC] No.42198768[source]▶
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.
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fragmede ◴[20 Nov 24 22:31 UTC] No.42198820[source]▶
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!
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1. relyks ◴[20 Nov 24 22:35 UTC] No.42198850[source]▶
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
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2. CaptainFever ◴[20 Nov 24 22:48 UTC] No.42198941[source]▶
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?

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3. spencerflem ◴[20 Nov 24 23:23 UTC] No.42199197[source]▶
I think that's part of it- but another part is a lot of people do not like what Gen AI is doing and are offended that what was a fun game is now part of that project.

Like when captchas were for making old books readable it felt a lot more friendly than now where its all driverless car nonsense

4. ◴[21 Nov 24 01:17 UTC] No.42200019[source]▶
5. eru ◴[21 Nov 24 03:36 UTC] No.42200855[source]▶
Technically, it's not an externality, because the company that benefits is clearly part of the transaction.

Nitpicking aside, I agree with you.