And this is not the only time it happened.
Google reCAPTCHA - every time you clicked "select all traffic lights" you were training self driving car AI.
Duolingo - millions of users translating sentences were actually training Meta's translation models.
Amazon Mechanical Turk - people got paid cents to label images that now power billion dollar AI systems.
The pattern is always the same.
Gamify a task. Make it free. Collect the data.
The most expensive part of building AI is not the model.
It is the labeled real world data.
And the best way to get it is to make sure the person providing it never realizes they are working.
This is wild.
143 million people thought they were catching Pokémon. They were actually building one of the largest real-world visual datasets in AI history.
Niantic just disclosed that photos and AR scans collected through Pokémon Go have produced a dataset of over 30 billion real-world images. The company is now using that data to power visual navigation AI for delivery robots.
Players didn't just walk around with their phones. They scanned landmarks, storefronts, parks, and sidewalks from every angle, at every time of day, in lighting and weather conditions that staged photography would never capture. They documented the physical world at a scale no mapping company with a fleet of vehicles could have replicated on the same timeline or budget.
Niantic collected this systematically, data point by data point, across eight years, while users thought the only thing at stake was catching a rare Charizard.
The most valuable AI training datasets in the world aren't being assembled in data centers. They're being built by people who have no idea they're building them.
The ultimate life hack is the ability to quickly reset and recover. From a bad interaction. From a bad day. From a missed workout. From a poor decision. You can start over whenever you want. You can't always control what happened, but you can control how long you carry it.
I’m increasingly convinced that the willingness to change your mind is the ultimate sign of intelligence. The most impressive people I know change their minds often in response to new information. It’s like a software update. The goal isn't to be right. It's to find the truth.
I know shit sucks right now. But don’t fuckin give up dude. You got people who need you to not give up. Even if you feel like you don’t have anyone in your corner. You can only prove them all wrong about you, if you don’t fuckin give in.
You got this.
Whoever you are.
Tom Brady revealed that his current dog Junie is a clone of his late dog Lua, who died in December 2023, per @baileykrich 🤯
The dogs were cloned by Colossal Biosciences, a biotech company that Brady is an investor in, using blood collected prior to Lua's death
Bryan Battle drops an all time post fight speech. I think this applies to everyone whether you’re a combat sports fan or not. I debated posting this but i announced recently that I was going to be a dad. The love of my life and I had our first ultrasound yesterday and there was no heartbeat. I am beyond devastated but trying to remain strong and Bryan’s words just hit in a way I don’t know… maybe other people should hear as well. Maybe a fight post isn’t the best place to do this but I found his words profound. “God will never give you more than you can bear.” ❤️🙏