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

I'm confused by both this blog post, and the reception on HN. They... didn't actually train the model. This is an announcement of a plan! They don't actually know if it'll even work. They announced that they "trained over 50 million neural networks," but not that they've trained this neural network: the other networks appear to just have been things they were doing anyway (i.e. the "Virtual Positioning Systems"). They tout huge parameter counts ("over 150 trillion"), but that appears to be the sum of the parameters of the 50 million models they've previously trained, which implies each model had an average of... 3MM parameters. Not exactly groundbreaking scale. You could train one a single consumer GPU.

This is a vision document, presumably intended to position Niantic as an AI company (and thus worthy of being showered with funding), instead of a mobile gaming company, mainly on the merit of the data they've collected rather than their prowess at training large models.

“Concepts of a plan” is often enough to make people think you know what you’re doing. Think most people, here included, got the impression that they had succeeded already.

Maybe its because the current HN title says "trained" in the past tense?