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.

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.