Niantic Spatial is building a Large Geospatial Model to power physical AI for industrial sectors. CEO argues AI must understand the real world to transform energy, logistics, and manufacturing. Niantic Spatial, the geospatial AI Company spun out of the gaming giant behind Pokémon GO, is positioning its Large Geospatial Model (LGM) as the missing piece for bringing artificial intelligence to the industrial edge. CEO Brian McClendon argues that while billions are being invested in language models and world simulators, the 80% of global economic activity tied to the physical world logistics, construction, energy, and manufacturing remains underserved by today's AI. "The next phase of AI will be defined by not just reasoning and language, but by a grounded understanding of the physical world," McClendon wrote in a recent company blog post. Unlike World Foundation Models that generate synthetic or "plausible" environments, Niantic's LGM is built on real-world, georeferenced data, enabling centimeter-level localization and semantic understanding of physical spaces. This allows machines to answer fundamental questions: Where am I? How am I oriented? What am I looking at?  T...