Niantic announces “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data
nianticlabs.com312 points by bookstore-romeo a day ago
312 points by bookstore-romeo a day ago
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.
This is pretty cool, but I feel as a pokehunter (Pokemon Go player), I have been tricked into working to contribute training data so that they can profit off my labor. How? They consistently incentivize you to scan pokestops (physical locations) through "research tasks" and give you some useful items as rewards. The effort is usually much more significant than what you get in return, so I have stopped doing it. It's not very convenient to take a video around the object or location in question. If they release the model and weights, though, I will feel I contributed to the greater good.
> I feel … I have been tricked
Everything “free” coming from a company means they’ve found a way to monetise you in some way. The big long ToS we all casually accept without reading says so too.
Other random examples which appear free but aren’t: using a search engine, using the browser that comes with your phone, instagram, YouTube… etc.
It’s not always about data collection, sometimes it’s platform lock-in, or something else but there is always a side of it that makes sense for their profit margin.
only a sith speaks in absolute. plenty of especially free AI products out there
> I have been tricked into working to contribute training data so that they can profit off my labor
You were playing a game without paying for it. How did you imagine they were making money without pimping your data?
Niantic made 700 million dollars last year, mostly selling virtual game items.
Why would anyone think niantic would protect user-data from profit?
Sarcastically, no one should.
Unsarcastically, a lot of people believe user data belongs to users, and that they should have a say in how it's used. Here, I think the point is that Niantic decided they could use the data this way and weren't transparent about it until it was already done. I'm sure I would be in the minority, but I would never have played - or never have done certain things like the research tasks - had I known I was training an AI model.
I'm sure the Po:Go EULA that no one reads has blanket grants saying "you agree that we can do whatever we want," so I can't complain too hard, but still disappointed I spent any time in that game.
> Unsarcastically, a lot of people believe user data belongs to users, and that they should have a say in how it's used
I can understand that people believe this, but why do they do? Nothing in our society operates in a way that might imply this.
> Nothing in our society operates in a way that might imply this.
I beg your pardon?
Consider just about any physical belonging — say, a book. When I buy a book, it belongs to me. When I read a book in my home, I expect it to be a private experience (nobody data-mining my eyeball movements, for example).
This applies to all sorts of things. Even electronic things — if I put some files on a USB stick I expect them to be "mine" and used as I please, not uploaded to the cloud behind my back, or similar.
And if we're just limiting ourselves to what we do in public (eg: collecting pokemon or whatever), it's still normal, I think, to interact relatively anonymously with the world. You don't expect people to remember you after meeting them once, for example.
In summary, I'd say that "things in our society" very much include people (and their tendency to forget or not care about you), and physical non-smart objects. Smart phones and devices that do track your every move and do remember everything are the exception, not the rule.
Before smart phones or the rise of the internet your information was mined by credit agencies for use by banks, employers and other forms of credit lending.
Credit cards and Banks sold your data to third parties for marketing purposes.
Payroll companies like ADP also shared your data with the credit agencies.
This is not a new phenomenon and has been the currency of a number of industries for a while.
The only thing that has changed is the types of data collected. Personally, I think these older forms of data collection are quite a bit more insidious than some of the data mining done by a game like Niantic for some ml model.
I have a lot more control over and less insidious consequences from these types of data collection. I can avoid the game or service if I like. There isn't much I can do to prevent a credit agency from collecting my data.
> Consider just about any physical belonging — say, a book. When I buy a book, it belongs to me. When I read a book in my home, I expect it to be a private experience (nobody data-mining my eyeball movements, for example).
Perhaps this is just my own brain's degradation, but how far removed from society do you need to be to expect your purchases to not be sold to the highest bidder? This practice is certainly older than I am.
Forgive me if I cannot conceive of a consumer who has completely tuned out the last forty years of discourse about consumer protection. Hell, the credit bureaus themselves contradict the concept of consumer privacy.
> Perhaps this is just my own brain's degradation, but how far removed from society do you need to be to expect your purchases to not be sold to the highest bidder? This practice is certainly older than I am.
It depends quite a bit on how you make your purchases.
If your purchases are on a credit card, with a loyalty ("tracking") card or App(TM) involved in the purchase? They're absolutely being sold to... well, probably not the highest bidder, but "all bidders with a valid payment account on file."
If you make a habit of paying cash for things and not using Apps or loyalty cards, and don't have your pocket beacon blaring loudly away on a range of radio frequencies when you shop, I expect a lot less data sales. It's a bit of a transition if you're used to credit cards, but once you're used to it, it's not bad at all, and involves a lot less data collection. I don't mind if the local barista or bartender knows me and my preferences, but I do mind if their POS system is uploading that data continuously.
Perhaps my main objection is that you said "Nothing in our society X" rather than "many things in our society Y."
I was just providing some counter-examples to show that there's more than nothing at play, here.
Certainly there are oodles of examples of our data being sold behind our backs, even well before 40 years ago. But there are also oodles of examples of the opposite.
> This applies to all sorts of things. Even electronic things — if I put some files on a USB stick I expect them to be "mine" and used as I please, not uploaded to the cloud behind my back, or similar.
Every app you open on Mac sends a "ping" to Apples servers.
https://acecilia.medium.com/apple-is-sending-a-request-to-th....
You find it strange that people want something different than the wild west status quo (which is not the status quo everywhere, btw) that they may not even fully understand or be informed enough to understand how it works or what the consequences are? like you actually expect even a savvy user of this game to be like ‘oh, of course they would be using my labor to profit for this technology i dont understand, duh?’ what a strange statement and world view.
Wanting something to be a certain way is very different from believing that it is. And yes, I would expect any moderately informed and technically savvy user to assume that the company is doing anything they possibly can to profit off of user data.
But you don't expect people to also try to profit off whatever said company is doing?