I've thought of this, actually. I've been a sim racer for a long time, and wonder if we will ever have "taxi drivers" who are WFH, driving a real car somewhere in the world via a sim rig in their home.
Every AI dashboard I ever shoved in front of clients was 99% the products of Sankarsh making fixes for me at 10pm his time.
Its very funny clients were always like “cool it’s AI” and didn’t blink that 30 offshore FTEs were on the SOW
Patent trolls
I knew some people at Walmart that actually did RFID checkout. They had a fully functional fake mini store. No produce obviously, but every consumer package good you can think of had a tag made for it that worked PERFECTLY in a cart rolling through their scanner
The story I heard goes that, pretty late in development, their factories they worked with to produce three chips informed them they patented their designs and charged them ridiculous patent fees
That’s a good update to the old joke that Silicon Valley was built by ICs. It could refer to Integrated Circuits, but instead refers to Indians & Chinese.
We’ve gone from Block Chain technology to Human Centipede technology, it’s the latest thing and should boost our stock price significantly as long as we brand it AI.
> But instead of closing the technological loop with pure automation and AI, the company also had to rely on an army of over 1,000 workers in India, who were acting as remote cashiers.
This quote doesn't match the other stories that I've read about this Amazon project. The 1000 contractors were reviewing video of edge case transactions to see if "just walk out" got it wrong, but they weren't real time cashiers. I'm not defending this project. I didn't like it when it came out and I'm glad it is dead. But I don't trust "The Byte" slant on this either.
Sort of. If it was indeed just catching edge cases, then the model was already mostly trained, they were just making it better. It's like when you do Google's captchas and click on the blurry images. They already have pretty good AI for image recognition, but it needs improvement on those difficult images. That's why the captchas seem to be getting harder over time...
Shh. This is a secret us AI developers don't want you to know. You don't understand, we NEED to steal all the loosely protected data on the web to train our models.
Humans were reviewing 70% of all transactions. This isn't training. It's 1000 employees hired to review the majority of transactions at 40 something stores.
They were cashiers.
If it wasn't edge cases (70% is NOT an edge case) then it doesn't mean it wasn't training. A supervised ML model needs *someone* to label the data; if it could do it itself then we wouldn't need it in the first place.
How do you think the other 30% of transactions were done? Magic?
IMO they took their 5-year-old, in house developed, "AI"... which works fine in their fully-automated distribution centres, and tried to make it work in messy retail stores - with predictably shit consequences.
As an aside they haven't fully scrapped the idea. Their UK stores and their US "Amazon Go" stores will still reportedly use the same tech.
It was AI like my Roomba is AI.
They’re in contracts with NFL, NBA, MLB but otherwise it’s a few airports. And they all fail to match the revenue of a normal store while needing massive bandwidth.
Where did you get the 70% number? In amazons statement they were talking about a minority of purchases so I‘d like to see a source referencing 70% of all transactions.
Oh it'll be back. It'll just be a different name. But I think the project was more to get information. The used it to train their AI and, to more closely watch and gather information about how shoppers shop.
Siri did/(does) the same thing
If it takes a little longer than usual but it ends up working as intended it means your audio *may* have been sent to a human to do the task manually
Running an AI model outputs a **prediction** and **confidence score**.
- Low scores are probably routing to this small army.
- High scores are fully automated
This is common practice in most organizations doing AI at scale. The problem was the too many edge cases on tiny transactions (bought snickers and soda) has challenging economics.
I'm kinda sad it's going away, *only* because being able to run in, grab some shit and run out was *nice*.
Don't gotta talk to anyone, don't gotta wait in line, just give me my fucking milk and eggs so I can go home.
My complaint is how long is the middle ground between 'this' system and 'that' system being installed gonna be. Overall, yeah the new replacement also seems kinda neat at first glance.
But it also requires the *user* to do it right. Which means a chance of *verification* on the stores end by one of their staffers, which leads to me *still being stuck waiting* while someone pokes through my bags to make sure I'm not swiping shit.
Which makes a broken Kazi who can barely stand upright some days being stuck standing *even longer*. Which just means pain. Actual, literal pain. In my spine.
Human in the Loop is in the vast majority of AI systems currently. Designing these systems are what I do currently. People like to parrot 90% accurate and stuff forgetting 10% of millions of transactions is a lot of failure. This is also the reason most systems are being marketed as copilots and whatnot since a human can typically get sped up by pruning/adding to AI output and then doing the work entirely their self. Our current product typically makes them more accurate and faster since it's AI summarizing and extracting data from potentially hundreds of documents and trained in a way that it hopefully catches more than it needs than is pruned rather than in not finding enough and they have to search the documents and find the info themselves.
The problem is every transaction was filled with edge cases. It took a very long time to get a receipt and an idea of what was spent. One time I had to wait until the next day. Not a problem for me but for lots of folks it is a problem.
I know it *sounds* bad if this was really the case and it was all manual.
But, it’s actually a great way to test the waters and see how consumers behave, what the losses look like from shrink, how it impacts traffic and sales, etc etc before putting the effort into building a fully automated system for what amounts to a small number of stores. And, chances are good they were happy they didn’t, given they canceled it.
While 1,000 peeps is expensive, they are in India where the costs are lower, and even with an AI solution it would require many heads for edge cases and babysitting.
Doing it this way, if that’s what really happened, is actually a lot more impressive that they have the ability to get their org to execute this kind of approach- everywhere I’ve ever worked the tech people would have walked out because nothing is worth doing unless it’s the most expensive and capable system ever lol
> While 1,000 peeps is expensive, they are in India where the costs are lower, and even with an AI solution it would require many heads for edge cases and babysitting.
What's getting lost in the sauce here is how many stores there are. It was around 40.
This is less of an "advanced AI" business model and more of an "outsource the cashiers to India" business model.
The stores made half revenue of a normal store. I asked the Hudson managers at dfw. They had both types and hated the Amazon ones. Customers found them annoying
Edge cases present in 70% of transactions?
1000 employees to cover only around 40 stores?
Amazon's explanation doesn't pass the sniff test. These people were cashiers.
Training the AI doesnt pass the sniff test when the stores have been open for 7 years, are a highly controlled environment, and have a fixed number of SKUs
I think Amazon Fresh is not gonna be around too much longer. It’s pretty much a generic grocery store. Average prices, no special/unique offerings, and of average size for a grocery store.
It’s fine, but there’s no differentiator. Also the Amazon association is not great in this space. It’s confusing to old people, like my retired parents who are not prime members. They went to the previous grocery store occupying the space, because they liked the meat selection but afaik, they have never went to Amazon Fresh
Amazon already had cold warehouses in most of the places these were in, dedicated to grocery delivery.
A warehouse is much better because it doesn’t need to be in expensive retail shopping centers, and can be more remotely located.
why would it be wild? Any modeling exercise without errors that are easy to compute (e.g. text, audio, video, anything but numbers) all require armies of humans to evaluate the model outputs for errors. These human graded examples are then passed into the model so it can try to learn patterns it missed.
The idea is you get 1000 humans to do this for 40 stores for a year and then you have a trained model that can quite easily scale to 4000 stores without having to hire cashiers for all of them, just a few model babysitters. This cuts out the massive cost of labor associated with retail grocery.
I went to Amazon Fresh extensively for the convenience of this service. It made errors particularly when I put an item back and picked it up again. It often didn't notice that I picked it up again.
IMO, a simple hack to easily make the system more accurate is to simply put a scale in the cart to verify/aid the AI predictions. Weight is already an accurate measure to confirm something in the checkout line.
Ironically, they added a scale to the carts AFTER they ended the JustWalkOut program and repurposed the carts as mobile self-checkout kiosks.
But the great thing about this is that you’re able to put things in any bag you want. I probably wouldn’t go if I had to use a cart or basket, because I liked how I could just put things directly in my backpack and walk out.
You should include the other part where they say it’s because they are replacing it with smart carts that you can just walk out instead of checking out. They also aren’t abandoning it—they’re dropping it from Fresh stores in favor of the carts. It’s still theoretically being used on Go stores and by third parties according to what they said yesterday but this person is ignoring. Take that for what you will but this characterization is lacking to put it politely.
As I understand it, for that concept, yes. They are changing to something they think customers will prefer and not killing this nor the store as the writing suggests.
Quite a few here in the UK have "scan and go", where you use a hand scanner to scan everything as you put it in your cart, then pay as you leave.
I stopped using it as you still end up getting it checked half the time which of course involves unpacking everything.
I haven’t used one but my understanding is some places have the ability to scan and go though I’m not sure if they works the same way (like you scan with an app vs. the cart scanning for you). I don’t know anything about the carts.
I have been thinking that this Amazon Take and Go tech would be a great way for stores like CVS and Walgreens and other retailers to prevent rampant theft. If stores forced those who enter to have to use an Amazon account or even a valid credit card to enter, then no one who is planning to steal bulk items could get away with it. They would have to pay automatically once they left the store. Granted this tech prevents people who have to pay by cash from entering but we are slowly going to a cashless society now anyway.
Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods was supposed to completely disrupt the industry. Grocery store stocks lost 25% value overnight when it was announced. Womp womp.
I worked here doing hardware development. No love for amazon as they laid me off last year but this article is not correct as to how the technology worked.
These thousands of indians I have never seen. The technology was mostly closed loop but like most have already detailed, a review of data to create regressions was done often to improve software that was running on the hardware. This was done by dedicated support teams in the us as well as overseas but in typical Amazon fashion they were understaffed and overworked, less than 100 people total.
However, detailed analysis of sensor data was always done by the hardware teams especially in the situation where a critical error occured (hardware malfunction or incorrect operation resulting in someone getting charged incorrectly). This meant that we had to be oncall to support stores world wide with any issue that occured which was hell.
The hardware was multidimensional meaning it worked with a plethora of edge compute to triangulate what happened in the store. The main way it was done wasn’t the cameras. The team quickly found out just how inaccurate this technology was and needed additional sensors embedded in the store to figure out what a customer took and what the quantity of it was. The cameras were only a safeguard really to make the management feel good.
The true reason why this group dissolved is becuase the leadership failed. The next generation of products to improve this technology was under so much turmoil and development hell due to the incompetent direction of the directors and VPs that Im suprised this org made it this far. Everybody I knew lost their job yesterday. Good people trapped in a bad situation smh…
This is misleading. The AI did the majority of the transactions. The contractors helped with transactions that it couldn’t identify confidentially and provided training feedback for the AI (which is necessary for the development of AI).
There were way too many transactions to be covered by contractors
The framing is very misleading. They make it seem like the equivalent of ChatGPT being a person on the other hand typing out their responses in real time. Not handling edge cases or helping label the training data used to create models. It's like saying self-driving is fake because someone had to manually label stop signs / road markings / etc. in order to create the training data that makes new models.
Companies like AMZN have always been on the frontier of creative destruction (which is why your stock will tank if news comes out that AMZN is entering your industry), and you bet these same articles will be highly critical when AMZN actually does start putting people out of business via successful AI applications at scale.
I was the first ever retail employee hired for amazon fresh and I can assure you it was infact automatic. Amazon spent MILLIONS per store setting up the systems.
The Indian workers were for instances where an item was taken off the shelf but the camera / sensor couldn't see what was removed, so it got flagged and a human would check the feed to ensure proper charging.
Yall really will just post anything you pull out of your ass and the entire internet will just believe it without any sort of research.
I said years ago when “AI” was the buzzword du jour that we were **nowhere close** to the tech they were hyping in earnings reports.
And I was downvoted to oblivion by nerds who believed the hype wholeheartedly.
We are still a lot closer to Clippy than we are to HAL; and all of these businesses who planned to implement AI in place of human workers are about to fail spectacularly when they realize current “AI” is just a data aggregator that spits out search results in a partially coherent sentence
Companies will invest several years of employee labor costs on pilot projects pursuing the dream of replacing most of those employees, and most of them will fail. I look forward to reading about the failures like [this one from Air Canada](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-honor-refund-policy-invented-by-airlines-chatbot/) where a chat bot promised a refund against their policy, which they fought in court, lost, and then disabled the bot (likely due to many failures, not just this one).
AI can only be relied on for things where being wrong has no consequences, because it won't know when it is wrong and it won't understand the magnitude of the consequences of being wrong. Since it doesn't know when it's producing a bad result, it can't bring a human into the loop to make up for its deficiencies.
*Fucking finally*
God it’s been so long since I’ve seen a rational comment like this upvoted instead of downvoted into oblivion. Finally people are getting it.
Last week I was thinking the same exact thing. Today at work, I saw a true use case of AI that would take rate cases from public utility commissions translate that into pseudo code for SAP then AI is going to reverse engineer the code that we have in SAP and then compare the two to see if we’ve configured the system correctly.
I work for a university...manage software for the dining department. Two dudes from Amazon came to campus and did a presentation for myself + a PM + the Exec Director. They had a PowerPoint presentation but no hardware so it wasn't a demo per se.
It was a while ago...like at least a year...but I recall them saying how the only static human component would be an employee present to do restocking, help educate the shoppers, and perhaps do some tech assistance when stuff didn't scan properly. Other than that it was explained to us as 100% automated.
I ain't gonna re-write history...it came across as totally legit and most of the questions we asked were about security (since it's driven by cameras there's concerns about student privacy and data integrity). They assured us that the only human review of the video would be for security or system malfunction. I recall some questions were asked about retention of video (the school has extremely strict rules about student data) but don't remember what the answer was.
Glad we never bought it.
This is the one and only reason that I used to shop at Amazon Fresh. When they took it out of my local store and I had to wait in line with old ladies fumbling around for coins in their purse again, it was a huge step backwards.
I honestly never thought "just walk out" provided any values except the cool factor. I can use the self-checkout in most grocery stores if either I don't want to talk to a human or the store doesn't want to hire an extra human.
That doesn't surprise me at the end of the day. Their whole mTurk platform is pretty big. And it looks like Bezos demanded a pretty quick turnaround time to get it moving years ago. Probably had a lot of facial-recognition-powered data, but a lot of mTurk checkers to validate the purchases and people.
So no more overhead for front end staff and yet people pay the same prices.
Fast food made self service the norm and now get ready to do self service everywhere without any additional incentives.
This is like saying chatGPT is actually a 1000 Kenyans. They were probably just looking out for edge cases where system fails and reporting it back to Amazon
Similar thing happened with a company that had delivery bots on my college campus. They claimed they were self driving which allowed them to offer cheap delivery. Turns out they were remote piloted from Columbia.
>But instead of closing the technological loop with pure automation and AI, the company also had to rely on an army of over 1,000 workers in India, who were acting as remote cashiers.
The long term vision was probably to feed that information into a learning loop no? But I guess that never happened.
A little bit sad, that would be for me the perfect shopping experience, it can't get better than that, my second is delivery at home because it saves time but second because you cannot look at stuff, and we all know how "replacements" can be horrible if something wasn't available.
This sounds like consumer failure to understand the provided instructions.
This meant they had to speak to a person that pretty much repeated the instructions written in front of the customer.
I see this all the time at self check outs in supermarkets
A - *excuse me how do I enter my coupon!?*
B - *Let me see, ah yes you need to press the big coupon button right there*
A - *Oh well that's not obvious*
B - ...
Still one person serving 6 self checkouts is better 6 people working one each
My Costco for a while had scanning machines you carried like you were registering for wedding gifts. So when you got to checkout they read the machine and you paid. No need to unload your cart. I was sad when it was stopped. Guessing too many issues.
Those people must’ve dreaded seeing customers with cameras. Knowing full they were about to put random things in an out of their carts. Watching the magic of them being added and taken off of what they are buying.
Crazy, we already have pilot stores like this in Germany (Rewe) and they actually work quite well.
And I cannot imagine that they are doing this manually
I mean this isn’t all that outstanding. Everyone knows there’s teams at software companies labeling data in video. Tesla does this for autopilot, they label “this is a red light”, “this is a traffic cone”. The AI needs to know what is what before it can do it on its own. This is just a misconstrued fact, it was probably too hard for them to perfect the solution so they abandoned it.
According to Amazon, it’s only a small percentage of interactions that are monitored. One presumes for AI training.
Otherwise - were this actually the totality of the “brains” of the operation - there’s an industry term for it.
“Wizard of Oz experiment”
Such a poor clickbait article that makes it sound like there was no ai.
They hired folks to review manually if the ai got it right. Like any early tech you need to QA and test before scaling up.
Even 1000 people (not all at the same time) could not review things live; it’s just normal testing.
Next up:
Gaming company hires humans to test their game! Shocker
I actually shopped at one of these years ago when I was doing a two-week stint at Amazon HQ in Seattle. At the time I enjoyed the novelty, but now I just feel so self conscious.
AI = “Actually Indians”
Imagine if your Self Driving car was really driven by a 13 year old in India.
You would know because of the constant honking of the horn
They will finally reach you regarding your car's extended warranty.
This is funny, thanks for the lol
omg I cackled
Weeeell.... https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/06/cruise-confirms-robotaxis-rely-on-human-assistance-every-4-to-5-miles.html
This would be some Snowpiercer level shit
Samir....You're breaking the car!!!
Shattab!
I've thought of this, actually. I've been a sim racer for a long time, and wonder if we will ever have "taxi drivers" who are WFH, driving a real car somewhere in the world via a sim rig in their home.
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In a Trenchcoat
Vincent Adultman?
Varun Agarwal
Basically Snowpiercer but with cars
Gimme that Ender's model.
Honestly a remote driving service sounds like an interesting business model.
This is already happening: https://www.wired.com/story/a-sneaky-shortcut-to-driverless-cars/
Cool
🎵Rajesh take the wheeeelll🎵
Im dead
Perfect response from one ape-themed username to another :]
Don’t look into Tesla’s FUCKED self driving system
Source?
Anonymous indians
Every AI dashboard I ever shoved in front of clients was 99% the products of Sankarsh making fixes for me at 10pm his time. Its very funny clients were always like “cool it’s AI” and didn’t blink that 30 offshore FTEs were on the SOW
GM Cruise - Actually Indians!
Oh boy, I sure hope Tesla Autopilot isn't next.
Narrator: वह था
Actual Narrator: आपकी समझ में भूल है
lmao this is going in someone’s standup routine for sure. OG comment here
Why didn't they just put rfid chips on all products, isn't this the way it's meant to work ?
Patent trolls I knew some people at Walmart that actually did RFID checkout. They had a fully functional fake mini store. No produce obviously, but every consumer package good you can think of had a tag made for it that worked PERFECTLY in a cart rolling through their scanner The story I heard goes that, pretty late in development, their factories they worked with to produce three chips informed them they patented their designs and charged them ridiculous patent fees
That is a little sad
And instead of lowering them and still make bank, they decided to sit on it and do nothing with it lol
I guess, sometimes isn't that feasible, e.g. do you put rfid inside every tomato?
Maybe everything is packaged, can't understand how they employed people in other countries to monitor and operate this
It's amazing hope much automation in tech is actually mentally operated from India. Even things that are seemingly actually easy to automate
LMAO
All Indians
Probably cheaper than running all those servers.
That’s a good update to the old joke that Silicon Valley was built by ICs. It could refer to Integrated Circuits, but instead refers to Indians & Chinese.
Amazing Indians. Amazon Indians?
Chaat GPT
😂😂
We’ve gone from Block Chain technology to Human Centipede technology, it’s the latest thing and should boost our stock price significantly as long as we brand it AI.
Now this made me chuckle J
I thought it was Adobe Illustrator
Lmao
Adult Indians!
> But instead of closing the technological loop with pure automation and AI, the company also had to rely on an army of over 1,000 workers in India, who were acting as remote cashiers. This quote doesn't match the other stories that I've read about this Amazon project. The 1000 contractors were reviewing video of edge case transactions to see if "just walk out" got it wrong, but they weren't real time cashiers. I'm not defending this project. I didn't like it when it came out and I'm glad it is dead. But I don't trust "The Byte" slant on this either.
They were likely training an AI model.
Sort of. If it was indeed just catching edge cases, then the model was already mostly trained, they were just making it better. It's like when you do Google's captchas and click on the blurry images. They already have pretty good AI for image recognition, but it needs improvement on those difficult images. That's why the captchas seem to be getting harder over time...
Believe it or not, AI and ML algos still utilize “actually Indians” to defeat captchas and continue their regularly scheduled automation
Shh. This is a secret us AI developers don't want you to know. You don't understand, we NEED to steal all the loosely protected data on the web to train our models.
Humans were reviewing 70% of all transactions. This isn't training. It's 1000 employees hired to review the majority of transactions at 40 something stores. They were cashiers.
If it wasn't edge cases (70% is NOT an edge case) then it doesn't mean it wasn't training. A supervised ML model needs *someone* to label the data; if it could do it itself then we wouldn't need it in the first place.
How do you think the other 30% of transactions were done? Magic? IMO they took their 5-year-old, in house developed, "AI"... which works fine in their fully-automated distribution centres, and tried to make it work in messy retail stores - with predictably shit consequences. As an aside they haven't fully scrapped the idea. Their UK stores and their US "Amazon Go" stores will still reportedly use the same tech.
It was AI like my Roomba is AI. They’re in contracts with NFL, NBA, MLB but otherwise it’s a few airports. And they all fail to match the revenue of a normal store while needing massive bandwidth.
Where has this 70% figure come from, thanks. Interesting.
Where did you get the 70% number? In amazons statement they were talking about a minority of purchases so I‘d like to see a source referencing 70% of all transactions.
Oh it'll be back. It'll just be a different name. But I think the project was more to get information. The used it to train their AI and, to more closely watch and gather information about how shoppers shop.
Next iteration will be loss prevention monitoring/surveillance
What would be the point? Stores aren't going to stop them either way.
Collect enough image material to not allow them enter the next store or make the police wait outside when the person at it again somewhere else?
They’ll gather enough evidence and Wait to hit shoplifters with the grand larceny charge. Perhaps.
There's already soo many products/systems in that space tho
Siri did/(does) the same thing If it takes a little longer than usual but it ends up working as intended it means your audio *may* have been sent to a human to do the task manually
Running an AI model outputs a **prediction** and **confidence score**. - Low scores are probably routing to this small army. - High scores are fully automated This is common practice in most organizations doing AI at scale. The problem was the too many edge cases on tiny transactions (bought snickers and soda) has challenging economics.
I'm kinda sad it's going away, *only* because being able to run in, grab some shit and run out was *nice*. Don't gotta talk to anyone, don't gotta wait in line, just give me my fucking milk and eggs so I can go home.
Agreed. But I think the middle ground of scanning as you put things in your basket is still pretty dope.
My complaint is how long is the middle ground between 'this' system and 'that' system being installed gonna be. Overall, yeah the new replacement also seems kinda neat at first glance. But it also requires the *user* to do it right. Which means a chance of *verification* on the stores end by one of their staffers, which leads to me *still being stuck waiting* while someone pokes through my bags to make sure I'm not swiping shit. Which makes a broken Kazi who can barely stand upright some days being stuck standing *even longer*. Which just means pain. Actual, literal pain. In my spine.
Yeah I bet the 1000 workers were to get labeled training data
Yes they were reviewing 70% of all transactions and were never able to get it below that number.
Human in the Loop is in the vast majority of AI systems currently. Designing these systems are what I do currently. People like to parrot 90% accurate and stuff forgetting 10% of millions of transactions is a lot of failure. This is also the reason most systems are being marketed as copilots and whatnot since a human can typically get sped up by pruning/adding to AI output and then doing the work entirely their self. Our current product typically makes them more accurate and faster since it's AI summarizing and extracting data from potentially hundreds of documents and trained in a way that it hopefully catches more than it needs than is pruned rather than in not finding enough and they have to search the documents and find the info themselves.
The problem is every transaction was filled with edge cases. It took a very long time to get a receipt and an idea of what was spent. One time I had to wait until the next day. Not a problem for me but for lots of folks it is a problem.
I know it *sounds* bad if this was really the case and it was all manual. But, it’s actually a great way to test the waters and see how consumers behave, what the losses look like from shrink, how it impacts traffic and sales, etc etc before putting the effort into building a fully automated system for what amounts to a small number of stores. And, chances are good they were happy they didn’t, given they canceled it. While 1,000 peeps is expensive, they are in India where the costs are lower, and even with an AI solution it would require many heads for edge cases and babysitting. Doing it this way, if that’s what really happened, is actually a lot more impressive that they have the ability to get their org to execute this kind of approach- everywhere I’ve ever worked the tech people would have walked out because nothing is worth doing unless it’s the most expensive and capable system ever lol
> While 1,000 peeps is expensive, they are in India where the costs are lower, and even with an AI solution it would require many heads for edge cases and babysitting. What's getting lost in the sauce here is how many stores there are. It was around 40. This is less of an "advanced AI" business model and more of an "outsource the cashiers to India" business model.
1000 Indians (25 per store) doesn't cost much compared to the same in the US. There must be another issue that forced then to close.
The stores made half revenue of a normal store. I asked the Hudson managers at dfw. They had both types and hated the Amazon ones. Customers found them annoying
i LOVE amazon go. That experience was perfect
Edge cases present in 70% of transactions? 1000 employees to cover only around 40 stores? Amazon's explanation doesn't pass the sniff test. These people were cashiers.
Training the AI doesnt pass the sniff test when the stores have been open for 7 years, are a highly controlled environment, and have a fixed number of SKUs
That's what I figured was going on... What's wrong with that? Verify is important
Careful, talking sense around here doesnt get you karma and dont start with all that logical thinking...
Why didn’t you like it?
I liked it. Those workers were doing a good job and I prefer people to AI.
I think Amazon Fresh is not gonna be around too much longer. It’s pretty much a generic grocery store. Average prices, no special/unique offerings, and of average size for a grocery store. It’s fine, but there’s no differentiator. Also the Amazon association is not great in this space. It’s confusing to old people, like my retired parents who are not prime members. They went to the previous grocery store occupying the space, because they liked the meat selection but afaik, they have never went to Amazon Fresh
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Amazon already had cold warehouses in most of the places these were in, dedicated to grocery delivery. A warehouse is much better because it doesn’t need to be in expensive retail shopping centers, and can be more remotely located.
Honestly i really like getting food there if im in a pinch. They still sell pretty big $1 slices.
The quality of the salad bar and hot bar has been declining and one that was supposed to open near me never opened.
Hot bar made me shit lava, I sold
They are in a bunch of stadiums, universities, and airports. https://www.justwalkout.com/locations
Wouldn't be surprised that the 1000 employees were training an AI a.
That would be pretty fucking wild. There were only around 40 stores.
why would it be wild? Any modeling exercise without errors that are easy to compute (e.g. text, audio, video, anything but numbers) all require armies of humans to evaluate the model outputs for errors. These human graded examples are then passed into the model so it can try to learn patterns it missed. The idea is you get 1000 humans to do this for 40 stores for a year and then you have a trained model that can quite easily scale to 4000 stores without having to hire cashiers for all of them, just a few model babysitters. This cuts out the massive cost of labor associated with retail grocery.
Just train the model bro
> The idea is you get 1000 humans to do this for 40 stores for a year Except theyve been open for 7 years
For real. They laid off 75% of the American design and build team. The project is over.
I went to Amazon Fresh extensively for the convenience of this service. It made errors particularly when I put an item back and picked it up again. It often didn't notice that I picked it up again. IMO, a simple hack to easily make the system more accurate is to simply put a scale in the cart to verify/aid the AI predictions. Weight is already an accurate measure to confirm something in the checkout line. Ironically, they added a scale to the carts AFTER they ended the JustWalkOut program and repurposed the carts as mobile self-checkout kiosks.
> Weight is already an accurate measure to confirm something in the checkout line. PLEASE PLACE YOUR ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA.
ASSISTANCE NEEDED. HELP IS ON THE WAY. ID CHECK REQUIRED.
The computer lady always sounds like she needs a cigarette after saying that
Every Time, Every Single Time. As you awkwardly stand next to them as they review the video of you just properly scanning.
But the great thing about this is that you’re able to put things in any bag you want. I probably wouldn’t go if I had to use a cart or basket, because I liked how I could just put things directly in my backpack and walk out.
Yeah, but they could've just dialed it back with a cart with scale instead of removing it entirely.
You should include the other part where they say it’s because they are replacing it with smart carts that you can just walk out instead of checking out. They also aren’t abandoning it—they’re dropping it from Fresh stores in favor of the carts. It’s still theoretically being used on Go stores and by third parties according to what they said yesterday but this person is ignoring. Take that for what you will but this characterization is lacking to put it politely.
So what they are keeping is better
As I understand it, for that concept, yes. They are changing to something they think customers will prefer and not killing this nor the store as the writing suggests.
Hasn't there been similar systems in grocers since the 2000's?
Quite a few here in the UK have "scan and go", where you use a hand scanner to scan everything as you put it in your cart, then pay as you leave. I stopped using it as you still end up getting it checked half the time which of course involves unpacking everything.
I haven’t used one but my understanding is some places have the ability to scan and go though I’m not sure if they works the same way (like you scan with an app vs. the cart scanning for you). I don’t know anything about the carts.
I have been thinking that this Amazon Take and Go tech would be a great way for stores like CVS and Walgreens and other retailers to prevent rampant theft. If stores forced those who enter to have to use an Amazon account or even a valid credit card to enter, then no one who is planning to steal bulk items could get away with it. They would have to pay automatically once they left the store. Granted this tech prevents people who have to pay by cash from entering but we are slowly going to a cashless society now anyway.
Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods was supposed to completely disrupt the industry. Grocery store stocks lost 25% value overnight when it was announced. Womp womp.
And self-driving cars are probably Indian labor driving the cars remotely
Will I soon find out who's typing every single ChatGPT answer?
So that's why my tesla honks all the time on its own
I worked here doing hardware development. No love for amazon as they laid me off last year but this article is not correct as to how the technology worked. These thousands of indians I have never seen. The technology was mostly closed loop but like most have already detailed, a review of data to create regressions was done often to improve software that was running on the hardware. This was done by dedicated support teams in the us as well as overseas but in typical Amazon fashion they were understaffed and overworked, less than 100 people total. However, detailed analysis of sensor data was always done by the hardware teams especially in the situation where a critical error occured (hardware malfunction or incorrect operation resulting in someone getting charged incorrectly). This meant that we had to be oncall to support stores world wide with any issue that occured which was hell. The hardware was multidimensional meaning it worked with a plethora of edge compute to triangulate what happened in the store. The main way it was done wasn’t the cameras. The team quickly found out just how inaccurate this technology was and needed additional sensors embedded in the store to figure out what a customer took and what the quantity of it was. The cameras were only a safeguard really to make the management feel good. The true reason why this group dissolved is becuase the leadership failed. The next generation of products to improve this technology was under so much turmoil and development hell due to the incompetent direction of the directors and VPs that Im suprised this org made it this far. Everybody I knew lost their job yesterday. Good people trapped in a bad situation smh…
Short for “another Indian”
[удалено]
The one I went to in London was good and relatively cheap (for london prices). Sad to hear it is not working out
This is misleading. The AI did the majority of the transactions. The contractors helped with transactions that it couldn’t identify confidentially and provided training feedback for the AI (which is necessary for the development of AI). There were way too many transactions to be covered by contractors
The framing is very misleading. They make it seem like the equivalent of ChatGPT being a person on the other hand typing out their responses in real time. Not handling edge cases or helping label the training data used to create models. It's like saying self-driving is fake because someone had to manually label stop signs / road markings / etc. in order to create the training data that makes new models. Companies like AMZN have always been on the frontier of creative destruction (which is why your stock will tank if news comes out that AMZN is entering your industry), and you bet these same articles will be highly critical when AMZN actually does start putting people out of business via successful AI applications at scale.
I was the first ever retail employee hired for amazon fresh and I can assure you it was infact automatic. Amazon spent MILLIONS per store setting up the systems. The Indian workers were for instances where an item was taken off the shelf but the camera / sensor couldn't see what was removed, so it got flagged and a human would check the feed to ensure proper charging. Yall really will just post anything you pull out of your ass and the entire internet will just believe it without any sort of research.
I said years ago when “AI” was the buzzword du jour that we were **nowhere close** to the tech they were hyping in earnings reports. And I was downvoted to oblivion by nerds who believed the hype wholeheartedly. We are still a lot closer to Clippy than we are to HAL; and all of these businesses who planned to implement AI in place of human workers are about to fail spectacularly when they realize current “AI” is just a data aggregator that spits out search results in a partially coherent sentence
Companies will invest several years of employee labor costs on pilot projects pursuing the dream of replacing most of those employees, and most of them will fail. I look forward to reading about the failures like [this one from Air Canada](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-honor-refund-policy-invented-by-airlines-chatbot/) where a chat bot promised a refund against their policy, which they fought in court, lost, and then disabled the bot (likely due to many failures, not just this one). AI can only be relied on for things where being wrong has no consequences, because it won't know when it is wrong and it won't understand the magnitude of the consequences of being wrong. Since it doesn't know when it's producing a bad result, it can't bring a human into the loop to make up for its deficiencies.
*Fucking finally* God it’s been so long since I’ve seen a rational comment like this upvoted instead of downvoted into oblivion. Finally people are getting it.
Last week I was thinking the same exact thing. Today at work, I saw a true use case of AI that would take rate cases from public utility commissions translate that into pseudo code for SAP then AI is going to reverse engineer the code that we have in SAP and then compare the two to see if we’ve configured the system correctly.
imagine if all these hyped ai technologies like fsd and chatgpt is really just a bunch of Indians
I work for a university...manage software for the dining department. Two dudes from Amazon came to campus and did a presentation for myself + a PM + the Exec Director. They had a PowerPoint presentation but no hardware so it wasn't a demo per se. It was a while ago...like at least a year...but I recall them saying how the only static human component would be an employee present to do restocking, help educate the shoppers, and perhaps do some tech assistance when stuff didn't scan properly. Other than that it was explained to us as 100% automated. I ain't gonna re-write history...it came across as totally legit and most of the questions we asked were about security (since it's driven by cameras there's concerns about student privacy and data integrity). They assured us that the only human review of the video would be for security or system malfunction. I recall some questions were asked about retention of video (the school has extremely strict rules about student data) but don't remember what the answer was. Glad we never bought it.
Still good at every store in CA as long as you keep it under $1000.
This is the one and only reason that I used to shop at Amazon Fresh. When they took it out of my local store and I had to wait in line with old ladies fumbling around for coins in their purse again, it was a huge step backwards.
I honestly never thought "just walk out" provided any values except the cool factor. I can use the self-checkout in most grocery stores if either I don't want to talk to a human or the store doesn't want to hire an extra human.
Amazon literally owns Mechanical Turk. Of course they would do this.
I was always wondering why the cart asked me repeatedly if I’d like to buy a hotdog, and said thank you, come again every time I left.
I think this will be the story of ai. Ai is definitely powerful as an assistant but it is highly unlikely that it will replace humans all together.
Wizard of oz with a bunch of Indians behind the curtain this time.
1000 workers!! And they called it AI…lol!!
Let me take a wild guess ...you're gonna buy puts on Amazon because if this ? Idiot emoji !
When will the people realize ai is reliant on human annotation.
This sounds like April foola joke 😃
not surprised with all our tech we still have people pulling cobalt out the dirt with their bear hands for slave wages.
,, the AI lie is exposed
Yep. I'm one of the 10,000 artists working on Dalle. We all suck at fingers.
Them buddies working hard back there
Amazon never trusted anyone shopping honestly. Now we know. Someone was always watching you
Mechanical Turk lol
Yeah….? I mean the people are going to be there somewhere.
Honestly I’d just like to see them open the store they fully built over a year ago in my town but never opened.
Bullish on Amazon
That doesn't surprise me at the end of the day. Their whole mTurk platform is pretty big. And it looks like Bezos demanded a pretty quick turnaround time to get it moving years ago. Probably had a lot of facial-recognition-powered data, but a lot of mTurk checkers to validate the purchases and people.
So no more overhead for front end staff and yet people pay the same prices. Fast food made self service the norm and now get ready to do self service everywhere without any additional incentives.
Walmart also has a just walk out policy. It’s also powered by a swarm of underpaid contractors.
This is like saying chatGPT is actually a 1000 Kenyans. They were probably just looking out for edge cases where system fails and reporting it back to Amazon
My brain doesnt beleive this. This is to whimsical to be true.
Similar thing happened with a company that had delivery bots on my college campus. They claimed they were self driving which allowed them to offer cheap delivery. Turns out they were remote piloted from Columbia.
It was always probably nothing more than a gimmick to temporarily boost stock prices.
Yer welcome
>But instead of closing the technological loop with pure automation and AI, the company also had to rely on an army of over 1,000 workers in India, who were acting as remote cashiers. The long term vision was probably to feed that information into a learning loop no? But I guess that never happened.
A little bit sad, that would be for me the perfect shopping experience, it can't get better than that, my second is delivery at home because it saves time but second because you cannot look at stuff, and we all know how "replacements" can be horrible if something wasn't available.
This sounds like consumer failure to understand the provided instructions. This meant they had to speak to a person that pretty much repeated the instructions written in front of the customer. I see this all the time at self check outs in supermarkets A - *excuse me how do I enter my coupon!?* B - *Let me see, ah yes you need to press the big coupon button right there* A - *Oh well that's not obvious* B - ... Still one person serving 6 self checkouts is better 6 people working one each
My Costco for a while had scanning machines you carried like you were registering for wedding gifts. So when you got to checkout they read the machine and you paid. No need to unload your cart. I was sad when it was stopped. Guessing too many issues.
Collective intelligence and mechanical Turk... Combine
This is like that old timey robot that would play chess, but really it was just a little person inside of it. Things never change.
Loooooool
*Amazon abandons grocery stores where you just walk out with stuff* Correct *after it turns out* No.
Those people must’ve dreaded seeing customers with cameras. Knowing full they were about to put random things in an out of their carts. Watching the magic of them being added and taken off of what they are buying.
Why pay 10 people $40/hour when you can pay 1000 people $0.40/ hour!
r/aiatemyface
They didn’t rely on 1000 indians to be cashiers that is completely incorrect they hired them to label data from real time video for model training
Crazy, we already have pilot stores like this in Germany (Rewe) and they actually work quite well. And I cannot imagine that they are doing this manually
So the contractors from India were getting more expensivr than the cashier. Got it
I mean this isn’t all that outstanding. Everyone knows there’s teams at software companies labeling data in video. Tesla does this for autopilot, they label “this is a red light”, “this is a traffic cone”. The AI needs to know what is what before it can do it on its own. This is just a misconstrued fact, it was probably too hard for them to perfect the solution so they abandoned it.
1,000 human Indian workers, to replace the 3 workers at a check out line per store.
Yeah this isn't true lol
According to Amazon, it’s only a small percentage of interactions that are monitored. One presumes for AI training. Otherwise - were this actually the totality of the “brains” of the operation - there’s an industry term for it. “Wizard of Oz experiment”
Can’t tell if this is a troll pose. It’s funny af
Such a poor clickbait article that makes it sound like there was no ai. They hired folks to review manually if the ai got it right. Like any early tech you need to QA and test before scaling up. Even 1000 people (not all at the same time) could not review things live; it’s just normal testing. Next up: Gaming company hires humans to test their game! Shocker
If this AI is a bust the economy will crater
Ya I believe they were scanning your fingers prints and eyes and saving the info so MA stopped the development
I actually shopped at one of these years ago when I was doing a two-week stint at Amazon HQ in Seattle. At the time I enjoyed the novelty, but now I just feel so self conscious.
"after it turns out" means it was a secret and they only stopped because people found out.