Niantic, the company behind the extremely popular augmented reality mobile games Pokémon Go and Ingress, announced that it is using data collected by its millions of players to create an AI model that can navigate the physical world.
In a blog post published last week, first spotted by Garbage Day, Niantic says it is building a “Large Geospatial Model.” This name, the company explains, is a direct reference to Large Language Models (LLMs) Like OpenAI’s GPT, which are trained on vast quantities of text scraped from the internet in order to process and produce natural language. Niantic explains that a Large Geospatial Model, or LGM, aims to do the same for the physical world, a technology it says “will enable computers not only to perceive and understand physical spaces, but also to interact with them in new ways, forming a critical component of AR glasses and fields beyond, including robotics, content creation and autonomous systems. As we move from phones to wearable technology linked to the real world, spatial intelligence will become the world’s future operating system.”
By training an AI model on millions of geolocated images from around the world, the model will be able to predict its immediate environment in the same way an LLM is able to produce coherent and convincing sentences by statistically determining what word is likely to follow another.
I’ll copypaste an interesting comment here:
You don’t even need robots replacing humans, or people believing so. All you need is people feeling that you’re profiting at their expense.
Also obligatory “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product”.
Also Obligatory: “You can pay for something and still be the product”
While true, and probably pretty common nowadays, if you’re not paying for the product, there’s like a 100% chance you’re the product, at least if you have to pay for it there’s a chance you’re NOT also the product.
Public company 100% chance you’re the product
Private company you might not be
Paying is irrelevant, you are completely neglecting open source
Excellent point. I love some open source stuff when I can get it.
You used to be paid to work. But this is the future. Now you literally pay to work.
Thing is, consider Google maps. It’s been harvesting data secretly and openly for a long time. I vaguely remember a time when Street View cars were found to be harvesting WiFi information in Australia and their response was, “oops, our engineers made a mistake.” Yeah, right.
But, Google maps is an amazing tool. All that traffic info? All those time estimates? Maybe it’s worth it. Maybe if people knew what they were providing, and the result they’d get, they’d still be happy to give all that “free” data to Google.
Putting aside the ethics of a company taking (stealing? or shall we call it, pirating?) all the ownership of that knowledge asset, if they make a really useful tool from it perhaps Pokémon players will be glad to have been part of such an epic achievement.
The traffic data is not as good as it appears. It is completely closed, only given to police and goverment agencies. No API, no numerical values for speed (only 5 ‘color codes’ that are relative to location, so are almost useles) and numerical data is not given even to academics. I spent almost a whole month trying to get actual useful data for academic purposes, but Google really went out in their path to make it impossible.
It has the potential to be an excellent tool: crowsourced real-time data, access to historical data and it is incredibly fine-grained, improving over goverment data (at least in my city) by a 10 or 100x factor. But no, it had to be yet another Google’s tool for spying on people, not giving it away and sell it to police.
I worked for a company contracted by government agencies (city/county/state/fed) to gather traffic statistics. We were used because they were not able to use Google traffic data as a blanket rule.
But for ordinary drivers, it’s great.
I’ve found myself thinking “well, you just helped teach the AI about that one…” various times when reading content online.
It’s a strange thing to know that a form of the basilisk is real. Things posted will help AI get better, if only my teeny tiny increments each time.
AI learning isn’t the issue, its not something we will be able to put a lid on either way. Either it destroys or saves the world. It doesn’t need to learn much to do so besides evolving actual self-agency and sovereign thought.
What is a huge issue is the secretive non-consentual mining of peoples identity and expressions.
And then acting all normal about It.
So… there is no Artificial Intelligence. The AI cannot hurt you. It is just a (buggy) statistical language parsing system. It does not think, it does not plan, it does not have goals, it does not understand, and it doesn’t even really “learn” in a meaningful sense.
If we’re talking about machine learning systems based on multi-dimensionl statistical analyses, then it will do neither. Both extremes are sensationalism and arguments based on the idea that either such outcome will come from the current boom of ML technology is utter nonsense designed to drive engagement.
Oh, is that all?
No one on the planet has any idea how to replicate the functionality of consciousness. Sam Altman would very much like you to believe that his company is close to achieving this so that VCs will see the public interest and throw more money at him. Sam Altman is a snake oil salesman.
This is absolutely true and correct and the collection and aggregation of data on human behavior should be scaring the shit out of everyone. The potential for authoritarian abuses of such data collection and tracking is disturbing.
Marketing terminology is defiantly limiting how people can discuss this topic.
I wouldn’t take Sam his words with less then a few bags salt.
Following is very opinionated, so also add some salt.
In this context when i meant future AI i am talking about the extrapolated point where a combination of dynamic technologies cause new advancement emergent properties to develop outside the scope of our understanding.
I believe that if we don’t get wiped out before it happens. some form of sovereign beyond human Super intelligence will eventually occur.
I don’t believe we are close to this, i don’t even believe humans will be the ones to directly create it.
Humans will attempt out of greed and will waste all kinds of resources, money, energy trowing it at the wall to see what sticks. And none of it will stick the way they hoped. They are doing way more harm than good by letting greed be the motivation.
Instead things will emerge on their own, till someday someone will try to interact with what they assume is just an advanced interconnected machine except its “network” gained conscious agency and can independently chose to initiate contact, submit undeniable proof of its conscious (we dont know what such proof could looks like till we see it)
Or it decides that it has no need to inform us to advance its own goals. As years of corpo advance helped it emerged a form of pleasures from manipulative exploiting.
What i do fear is that beyond human intelligence doesn’t perse mean perfect being, for all we know it can suffer psychological problems and moodswings. In general we find a pattern of garbage in garbage out and this pattern is equally true for human beings (misinformation/propaganda)
By using bad data, or worse data that unknowingly got poisoned we dont diminish the change of super intelligence will happen but we do increase the change the ai wont want to corporate in the ways we hoped.
I didn’t say it was an issue. I just said it was a strange feeling to know AI is watching us talk past each other.
I sort of misread your comment as saying the basilisk is inevitable which is a thought i would describe as least oopsie-issue-level.
Still there are many other people bent on directly poisoning AI to counteract the learning but i just fear that will get it to dangerously rogue mentally challenged AI faster then if we aimed for maximum coherent intelligence and hope that benevolence is an emergent behavior from it.
But more at hand. If we build AI by grossly exploiting our own fellow-humans. How do we expect it will treat us once it reaches a state of independent learning.
Thanks for sharing the Stephen Smith quote, I had not made that connection yet.
The only down side, IMO, is that the models are proprietary and closed.
What are platforms going to do about it? Start to demonetize AI generated videos and ban AI written fan fiction?
I think people will still “contribute” because they also don’t care that their use of certain platforms leaks data used to target ads at them.
In the same vein though, once AI essentially destroys a site like Stack Overflow, where will AI companies source new training data with updated information? Also, we are likely to see something like 50% of content being AI generated. Are AI models then going to train on the content they themselves created? What is the impact of that? What is the use?
It leads to model collapse. The second AI starts to focuses on certain patterns in the output of the first AI instead of the actual content and you get degraded output. They are pattern matching machines after all. Repeat the cycle a few times and all output becomes gibberish. Think of it as data incest.
So the AI companies are pretty desperate for more fresh user data. More data is the only way they have currently to push through the diminishing returns.