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.
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Of course it probably doesn’t matter if you also use a credit card to make the purchase - every single purchase is fed into your personal consumer profile.
In some cases you trade the purchase history information for the 2% cash back or whatever.
You can also use a service like privacy.com to get credit card numbers for online services for a modicum of privacy.
Yup. I just purchased something from Home Depot and opted for the emailed receipt (needed for a rebate), and they didn’t ask for my email because they could look it up from my credit card (must have used the same card to order something online). In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they get the card owner’s name as well, so it might not matter which card you use.