This is unsettling for anyone who played Pokémon GO, since their walking and camera scans secretly built a detailed 3D map of the world that one company now owns.

• Niantic used 30 billion player photos from Pokémon GO to train a "Large Geospatial Model" — an AI map of the real world.
• Players were essentially unpaid labor, mapping parks, malls, and private spaces that Google Street View cars can never reach.
• Niantic skipped an estimated $15 billion mapping cost and instead booked over $6 billion in profit.
• Founder John Hanke's mapping company was once CIA-funded, then became Google Earth — mapping was the goal all along.
• The system can pinpoint an active user's location down to the centimeter, useful for ad targeting or tracking people.

Outlook: Niantic aims to become the monopoly platform for augmented reality, charging other companies rent to build on the world its players mapped for free.