Gotta Catch 'Em All: How Pokémon Go covertly captured your data for years to train a massive AI model

Leo, 9, looks at his phone during the Pokemon Go Festival on July 4, 2019 at the Westfalenpark in Dortmund, western Germany.

Players of "Pokémon Go" — an augmented reality (AR) mobile game that took the world by storm upon its release in 2016 — have been unknowingly training an artificial intelligence (AI) model to map the planet at street level.

Niantic, the company behind the popular game, has revealed that it will use data scraped from its AR apps to construct a "large geospatial model" (LGM) that would enable robots and other devices to better navigate the physical world — even if they only have limited information.