Niantic's geospatial model is using geolocation data from scans players submit of real-world locations while playing the company's mobile games.

Niantic, the developer behind Pokémon Go, has revealed that users have been contributing to the creation of an AI model. This Large Geospatial Model, as it is being referred to, is designed to traverse the physical world.

The blog post explains that “Over the past five years, Niantic has focused on building our Visual Positioning System (VPS), which uses a single image from a phone to determine its position and orientation using a 3D map built from people scanning interesting locations in our games and Scaniverse,

Niantic is making geospatial AI models to help computers navigate real spaces, and it’s using your Pokémon Go data to help

Niantic, the team behind Pokemon Go, is working on a new type of AI model that's training on data from its apps.

Data captured from Pokémon Go and other games are being used to create large AI models that can predict what buildings and other objects look like.

Pokemon Go developer Niantic reveals its long-term use of player data in the creation of a new large geospatial AI model.

Chances are you or someone you know has downloaded and played Niantic's Pokémon Go at some point because the game has been downloaded over 1 billion times

You probably didn't know it, but if you played or are still playing Pokémon Go (there are more than half a million active players ), you were helping train an AI-powered geospatial model that aims to map the world.

Pokémon Go developer Niantic is hard at work building and training an AI to essentially be able to auto-complete real-world locations with only a limited amount of information. And it's using data collected by Pokémon Go players to do it.