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

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.

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,

Pokemon Go” developer Niantic announced its new AI model on Nov. 12, created using data players have sent over the years. The large geospatial model (LGM), built using the San Francisco-based studio’s visual positioning system (VPS),

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

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.

Making us genuinely nostalgic for those days when all that Pokémon Go users were doing was finding corpses and committing crimes, today it turns out that they’ve also been training robots how to, like,