The World Is Becoming a Digital Twin: Bilawal Sidhu on AI, OSINT & Spatial Computing

Man, it's funny because like it started off as like a silly weekend project, right? You know, one of the things I had a chance to work on at Google was like photogrammetry and the 3D tiles API.

And I was just like vibe coding and I was like, oh, I want to like put something on the globe to bring it to life.

As we just discussed, like, you know, a static rendition of the planet's really cool, but how do you make it dynamic? So I went down the rabbit hole of, uh, of OSINT or open source intelligence.

just to understand what are the kinds of layers that you can overlay on top of a globe that have sort of mostly global coverage.

And, oh, then I discovered there's this thing called ADS-B.

Oh, it's like every plane is like squawking its position.

And there's like 35,000 volunteers that have like a cheap like receiver that basically aggregates these unencrypted signals that are flying over their heads.

Sorry, is the same technology or similar technology as we can see in the flight radar app or?

Exactly the same technology.

So basically there's like either is like the vessel tracking apps and the flight tracking apps.

All the flight stuff is called ADS-B and then all the vessel stuff is called AIS.

And roughly you can think of it as the same thing where, you know, all these you kind of have a social contract if you're using shared airspace or infrastructure in the real world.

Just like a car, you should be able to see the traffic that's coming at you.

You know, these vehicles basically like release their position.

And yeah, you just need like, you know, tens of thousands of volunteers to build a digital twin of all the planes on the planet.

And so all the flight radar apps work in a similar fashion.

They've got, you know, communities of contributors and, you know, other, you know, essentially receivers that they install over the world to collect this type of data.

Same thing with vessel data as well.

And then satellite positions, NORAD officially releases basically the TLEs, as they're called, of all these satellites.

And you can propagate and figure out the path of where those things are.

And so, yeah, I mean, I can pull up the visual here for the audience just so they have a thing to look at.

So that's kind of what you see over here is all of this data overlaid.

Now, where this got interesting and I think started feeling kind of insane is like, you know, when you have all these planes, right? These planes also share their GPS confidence.

So if you aggregate like GPS confidence on these H3 cells, you can see where is GPS jamming happening.

And so, you know, kind of what started as like a fun little weekend project, which was basically this thing over here, just to see like, ah, like what layers are available, turn into something, you know, more profound when the Iran conflict started.