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.
Extraordinary piece in FT about the operation to kill #Iran's regime's supreme leader Khamenei.
Nearly all traffic cameras in Tehran were hacked by #Israel for years. They knew when members of the #IRGCterrorists Vali Amr Protection Unit (Khamenei's bodyguards) came and left work on Pasteur Street. And interestingly the CIA--not Mossad--had a human source which assisted with the effort.
https://t.co/Giqgb6d0dT
No one knows you. No one has a story about who you are. No one is waiting for you to be the person you were yesterday. You're just a stranger in a chair by the window, watching a city that doesn't need anything from you.
It's the feeling that anything could happen. That the world is bigger than the walls you built around yourself back home. That the life you've been living is just one version of a life, and there are others, and they're not as far away as you thought.
At home, you're fixed. Known. You fit into a shape that other people recognize, and after a while, you forget you're even in a shape at all. But here, alone, somewhere new, the shape dissolves. You could be anyone. You could be more of yourself than you've ever been. No one is watching to see if you stay consistent.