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

(nianticlabs.com)
383 points bookstore-romeo | 3 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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phendrenad2 ◴[21 Nov 24 00:32 UTC] No.42199738[source]▶
Were you really tricked? Hard to believe that someone on Hacker News saw Pokemon Go and didn't immediately think of the data collection possibilities.
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1. JohnMakin ◴[21 Nov 24 02:50 UTC] No.42200604[source]▶
It may surprise you to learn pokemon go is nearly a 10 year old game based on 40 year old beloved IP that when it was released did not exist in the same data hellscape we do today, and even if it did, the attraction of the IP would overrule people thinking about this kind of thing. These kinds of comments are extraordinarily disingenuous sounding, particularly when anyone can spend 3 seconds and figure out their primary market is literal children.
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2. eru ◴[21 Nov 24 03:32 UTC] No.42200842[source]▶
> [...] when it was released did not exist in the same data hellscape we do today [...]

That was fairly obvious at the time. And people used more or less exactly the same language to describe the world back then, too.

> These kinds of comments are extraordinarily disingenuous sounding, particularly when anyone can spend 3 seconds and figure out their primary market is literal children.

Poke Mongo was popular with people of all age groups, and (most) children have parents or other guardians to help them with these decisions.

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3. viknesh ◴[21 Nov 24 05:21 UTC] No.42201383[source]▶
I believe Google explicitly stated that they used data collected from Ingress (arguably a predecessor to Pokemon Go) at the time. It's the reason Niantic was founded. It's hard to take these complaints seriously.