alt Hacker News> the rest of the world gets a cool new technology
The rest of the world gets an opportunity to purchase access to said new technology, you mean! It's not like they're releasing how they generated the models. It's much more difficult to get excited about paid-access to technology than it is about access to tech itself.
True, true, but they can still purchase it. I mentioned that it's a win-win-win situation, which includes Niantic profiting too (not a bad thing, it's a good incentive), which entails selling access to it.
Though as a copyright reformist, I do believe that such models should be released as public domain after 14 years. Though the cloud thing does make these sort of obligations harder to enforce...