Pokémon Go is running a $ 4 billion spinoff. Those game maps can be AI Gold.

Pokémon Go players have spent years with their smartphones to upload location data from their smartphones with images and videos of their environment. Using this raw data, the goal of NIANTIC, which develops Pokémon Go and other games, is to create the earth’s first ground-level geophysic model, a model that can see with the physical world around us, can argue and interact.

On the target, San-Fansco-based Niantic announced a deal of approximately $ 4 billion this week, which would shut down most of the gaming studios and return the rest of the company to its roots in mappinging.

“Man gives spatial intelligence information. We do not need to walk in one direction and we do not need to see the other direction and be able to go back, even for the places that we have never gone before, “NIANTIC Senior VP Engineering of Niatic Spatial Platform, Bryan McCanedon told Bairon in a December interview.” This is a very big challenge for computers. ,

As of November, Niantic had 10 million scanned locations worldwide, concentrated in North America, Europe and Japan.

NIANTIC expects to create a large geophysic model that can be a foundation for a range of services in many places that require detailed ground level mapping.

In Wednesday LinkedIn Post, NIANTIC CEO John Henkey said, “Today’s LLM represents the first step towards a future, where different types of experts cooperate to understand and understand complex problems, and many of those problems will require deep and accurate knowledge of the physical world.”

McClanden and Henkes led the teams that created Google Maps, Google Earth, Street View and other Google location-based services.

They are expert mapmekar – who exiting Google in 2010 to take his mapping expertise to get his mapping expertise for gaming.

For $ 3.5 billion in Ninetic Go,, including mobile gaming studio scopaly Pokémon Go, NIANTIC will leave $ 350 million for $ 350 million, which will have a total of $ 3.85 billion, if the deal is approved by regulators.

The new company, NIANTIC spatial, will be capitalized with $ 200 million from its predecessor, as well as an investment of $ 50 million from Skopli.

The NIANTIC spatial will require every money for this project, and it may not still be enough: the volume and model of the data collected is put in the model, even more than the largest language model. Even in its early form, if the NIANTIC placed all its scanned places together, it would be about 100 times the size of the largest language model. For now, the company will limit itself to the small portion of the full data set. The NIANTIC will have high and rising computing requirements, and this may require technological successes that reduce AI computing costs to be dramatically successful.

And the model will never end. “We are building one of the big challenges with a 3-D map,” McClaendon told Baron, it is never complete because the world is dynamic and often changes. “

Lan -Deen is a barometer where NIANTIC has come in 15 years since the establishment of NIANTIC. Subsequently, mobile gaming looked like a big opportunity. it was. Today, that opportunity is going on in AI.