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

According to a Niantic blog posts, Pokemon Go players have been helping train machine learning models for a while.

Niantic has launched a "Large Geospatial Model" (LGM) that leverages millions of scans from Pokémon Go players. The LGM integrates advanced neural networks for applications like 3D mapping, augmented reality (AR), and robotics.

The game's developer, Niantic, detailed a new AI product using geolocated images from all over the world to help robotics understand and interact with physical spaces.

The technical details may fly over the head of many who read Niantic's blog post, but the easiest way to think of it is that certain player actions in Pokemon Go have been trainin

Scans of the world from Pokemon Go and Ingress are the backbone of Niantic’s AI model, which aims to navigate the world like ChatGPT spits out text.