Peridot, Niantic’s original augmented reality pet game, will start using generative AI designed to make the game’s cute technicolor aliens behave more like your cat.

Here’s how it works. Starting with today’s update, Niantic’s algorithm will analyze real-world objects captured in game with your phone’s camera and then convert those objects into words to be parsed by a large language model (LLM) — in this case, a customized version of Meta’s Llama 2 program.

Additionally, each pet, called Dots, will have their personality profile — which is similar to the different natures of pokémon — also fed to the LLM. Peridot will then ask the LLM how a dot with its specific personality type would interact with the objects around it. Its answers...

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