{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Spatial Stack with Matt Forrest","title":"Beyond the Blue Dot: AI & LLM Navigation with Zephr's Sean Gorman and Pramukta Rao","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":2570,"description":"What does it actually take for an AI to navigate you through the real world, without a screen and without a camera running the whole time?In this episode of the Spatial Stack, Matt Forrest sits down with Sean Gorman and Pramukta Rao, the co-founders of Zephr, to unpack how they ground large language models in location. Sean and Pramukta spent twenty years building startups together, from GeoIQ to Snap's visual positioning work, and at Zephr they walked away from the camera and went back to the sensors already in your phone.They get into why the blue dot on a map breaks down the moment you stop looking at a screen, why language models are bad at spatial reasoning like left, right, and across the street, and how they fix it by doing the geometry first and handing the model clean language. Instead of training ever-bigger foundation models, they push a small model and well-structured data down to the edge so the conversation stays fast.In this episode, we cover:- Why they left visual positioning and AR cameras behind after Snap- Cooperative positioning: getting survey-grade accuracy out of commodity phones- GNSS and the urban canyon problem (3 meters to 50 meters and back)- Beyond the blue dot: building a first-person, egocentric experience- Why LLMs struggle with geometry, and what context engineering solves- Small models at the edge vs giant foundation models- Overture Maps, GERS IDs, and conflating POIs with imagery to \"agree on reality\"- The grounding service: MCP, REST, and Opus or Gemma on device- Conversations about place as a new geospatial primitiveWhether you build with spatial data, work on AI navigation, or just want to see where location and LLMs are heading, this conversation is your field guide.Connect with Zephr:Website: https://zephr.xyzSean Gorman (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-gorman-93a79Pramukta Rao (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/pramukta/Zephr (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/company/zephr-xyz00:00:00 – Intro and...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/eQgCuZrC7zp58BwqV7sl3SCjjIPfOYXp-k4ce29LXQY/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS80ZjU3/N2JlMDJiYTFjOWY5/OWQ5NWQxYmZjMjMw/Yzg1ZC5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}