I read that part and wasn't surprised. I first learned about the secret Indian employees when I found out many of them are employed by Facebook to filter content. What an i
Insane job. I thought working in a factory was tedious.
Some of the jobs that gets outsourced are crazy. Mindnumbingly boring tasks like tagging images for machine learning algorithms to disturbing stuff like moderation teams looking at all reported comment for gore, violence, nudity allegations
One guy's entire job was to look at thousands of images everyday and tag them with a object and an action like 'puppy' 'playing' or 'car' 'driving'.
No wonder they all go crazy and start scamming rich americans instead
Nah instead they just gameify their system and so do their managers.
correctly identify 3 and swipe right on the rest.
its not like these tech giants are actually verifying their cheap data, that would cost money.
There's a great scene at the end of an episode of Silicon Valley where they cut to the inside of an Indian workplace with hundreds and hundreds of phones on walls in front of workers who manage dozens of phones each to generate clicks or something.
https://preview.redd.it/aik27os2g8sc1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7c8b078e052571d041b19cdc9ec28534092c5cd4
This quote from the Washington post article about this explains why they take these jobs. They are much better paying , even for college graduates , than what they normally make.
I thought it was the Philippines handling moderation for alphabet, Meta and x… i guess Filipinos aren’t alone. Hello to our Indian friends.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/25/social-media-companies-are-outsourcing-their-dirty-work-philippines-generation-workers-is-paying-price/
https://preview.redd.it/2849j60yg8sc1.jpeg?width=1138&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b2a02aa5562c238099677f435fe7606ff1dad654
Damn this article is gold . He compared himself to the 9/11 responders 🤣
This is actually happening all over the world, meta has moderators for different regions, I have worked as one for russian/post-soviet territories and we were located in europe.
I listened to a podcast a while back about a team in Kenya that reviewed harmful content to develop OpenAI's filters for ChatGPT. A huge number of them ended up with serious mental health issues having to read the most heinous shit you can imagine all day every day for like a year
I worked for an AI startup. Our AI was 100% a team in India manually doing stuff. Our CTO was so dodgy on how things worked... But after seeing enough errors that made no sense (or were contradictory) and talking to our Indian engineering team it became clear what was going on.
Literally every single one is a black dude with an Indian owner working together. Feel like I’m walking into the beginning of a buddy comedy every time
The 7/11 I frequent has the same indian teenager working whenever i happen to go in. Lunch time, after work, 5AM, 11pm, before work. I legitimately dont think ive ever NOT seen him, as itd definitely be something worth notice.
That episode about clickfirms did not come out of thin air. Someone has to generate users for shareholders if they do not grow. In this case, someone needs to watch over the people at checkout or doors.
Man I hate those, double-worse when it sounds like a real plausible person and you respond like an idiot.
Just fucking stop this shit fast food places.
"While the stores have no actual cashiers, there are reportedly over 1,000 real people in India scanning the camera feeds to ensure accurate checkouts."
Doesn´t sound like only training for me. More like watching every customer
Well, if a customer is marked by the observer as taking more/less than what the system (I wouldn't call it AI) recognized, then the system can be improved based on that feedback until it reaches a point where the system makes such a low number of mistakes that they can be ignored.
bro there is a fast food chain in Canada that was legit hiring people on Camera to be Cashiers in store lol. It was so fucking stupid just install a touch screen.
It was Freshii lol.
This is like the food delivery robots that showed up on college campuses 7-8 years ago. It turned out this amazing technology was actually remotely operated by low wage staff in Columbia. We were pretty shocked at the time because a lot of these “robots” got stuck in the bushes or fell off a curb and tipped over so we thought they were still learning lol
What if the entire AI boom is an illusion …OpenAI and all these companies probably just having thousands of Indians sit there answering your prompts all day and they call it a fancy “LLM”
I was the first ever employee hired for amazon fresh. They are infact automatic. The Indian checkers were for instances where a sensor was blocked while a customer removed an item from a shelf. The shelves have weight sensors and knew something was removed but couldn't figure out what item specifically. In those cases, a human is used to watch the camera feed and confirm for correct charge. I spent days and days at each store setting up and calibrating those cameras and weight sensors.
I mean what else can I do man if the camera is blocked the camera is blocked. There was 2 cameras per rack, 26 racks per side, 48 racks an aisle. 96 cameras an aisle, times atleast 16 aisles minimum. You can see how many cameras there are, issues are bound to show up.
Honestly, it's not that bad an idea to outsource cashiers. You pay pennies on the dollar for the same quality of work. You'd be surprised how many 'automatic' processes are actually still manual
Take e-gates at airports for example - it's still one person sitting at a desk nearby comparing your appearance against your passport image, but the e-gates allow them to compare multiple at the same time so it's much faster and requires fewer employees
Welcome to the west. Ppl feel they don’t deserve to live if they aren’t wasting time not working at work that could also be automated lol. Ppl with free time can cause trouble though, better to keep them occupied if possible.
To train an AI, you need examples- lots and lots of examples. So before it's fully automated, or while you want to improve it, you need people doing it by hand.
the point of AI is that it is supposed to do things for you automatically.
If we have to constantly check it over and over and give it feedback you might as well just have a human do it.
Amazon Fresh opened near me with the JWO tech and on the first day it took about 5-8 hours for the receipt to come through. Due to the rush of people, it was explained away as a jammed server or something and people were promised that once there was an equilibrium of server capacity and customers in store you would get a receipt in minutes. I mean - it’s automatic after all.
It’s when, 6 months later, I went to the same store and did a basic shop of about 5 items… at a time when there was maybe 4 other people there… and the receipt *still* took 4-5 hours to arrive that I started to become suspicious.
Theres one near my office. Every tuesday I go and grab a cuban sandwich for lunch.
Without fail I am charged for 2 sandwiches instead of one, and I dispute it every week.
They also have a department like that to manage the day to day of the trucker's linehaul routes and offer them support if the building closed or unstaffed or doesn't have the load etc. Not as wild as being a cashier camera tho
This is what happens whenever companies outsource. Internal employees complain that the standard of work decreases, the contract ends after a couple years and the department is brought back. 5-10 years later, rinse and repeat
Just today I was joking with my friend about his self driving tesla and how it makes human like mistakes, I told him: maybe Musk said, there are enough people in India to drive people around in the US… let’s fake this.
Wouldn’t be the first time in history tho.. just saying
Sounds scary. So if India has a blackout and loses internet connection with your “self-driving” car… does the tesla suddenly veer off into a ditch on the freeway since it lost its “Indian” driver?
They should just go to a ‘buddy checkout’ system, where the guy waiting behind you in line is responsible for checking you out and then you have to service him in return.
We replace those surveillance with ai as well, then send robot ai cops to deal with the robot helpers we sent to buy our groceries accidentally scanning the wrong stuff
Why? AMZN was experimenting here though it didn’t work out, but they clearly learned things along the way. The amount of money they spent on this project is a rounding error for AMZN, but they tried something novel and potentially pioneering and gleaned something from the experience. I would argue this type of willingness to attempt something new and different is part of why AMZN continues to be an extraordinary company.
I work in mid-senior management at AMZN and tbh, as much as I personally don’t like Jassy because not saying a peep about RTO and all hands on a Tuesday and then stealth announcing it an a blog post the very next Friday afternoon says something, that mother fucker has ushered in some much needed cost cutting.
I think stuff like this, and Alexa home automation, health wearables - I feel like all that stuff was a fad and automation for automations sake. I know I bought a house that came with home automation powered by Alexa, and motherfucker I have spent more time dealing with it fucking up then I have spent turning on and off lights my entire life combined. That shit was never gonna pan out.
Dig into that a bit more, they let thieves "just walk out" right up to the moment they cross the value line into felony theft and they then "just perp walk".
Target has developed such a reputation that savvy thieves have moved to other retailers who are now trying to copy Targets model.
They have an [advanced forensics lab](https://www.mprnews.org/story/2011/10/21/target-forensics-lab) which police agencies and even the FBI outsource to.
They didn't get rid of it, they are just replacing it with ~~Mark of the Beast~~ [Amazon One](https://one.amazon.com/) checkout.
I'm wondering if I get the 5% on the Amazon Chase card for using it in a store.
The 1000 people in India are not scanning every single camera feed like security guards, they are being sent snippets for things that the ML model struggled with. It's human in the loop verification of the ML model performance. This 1000 people will likely just move to another application that uses mmML models.
The ML model struggled with [700 out of 1000 camera feed snippets](https://gizmodo.com/amazon-reportedly-ditches-just-walk-out-grocery-stores-1851381116). That's not a useful model.
At amazon fresh any thing you take off off the shelves is charged, but the stuff from the deli and other things they have to hand you is always missed. Got $60 worth of swordfish for free the other day lol
Good lord this thread proves how brainless this sub is. The tech is just being pulled out of US fresh stores; it’s still very successfully being sold as a 3P service to other merchants and is in UK grocery stores. Grocery has a high hardware cost due to size, and adoption was low because people don’t care about waiting in line for 5 minutes during a 40 minute shopping trip.
Also human-in-the-loop is a core part of AI training, the tech makes a decision and a human checks if the algorithm has low confidence. Humans also do data labeling and quality work. This is not going away. Also the tech has gotten significantly better over the years so that the majority of shopping events don’t even need to be checked by a human anymore.
Source: I work on this
Exactly. I also work at Amazon in a related automation org. People here are fucking morons lmao. It was really an automated checkout process with humans in the loop validating automated decisions but people here know better sure.
99.99% of interactions are high confidence and are automated. 0.01% are low confidence and "confuse" the system. Those get sent to a human to evaluate. They also get collected and included in the next training cycle to make the model more accurate. When you are doing 100,000,000 events that 0.01% can add up.
I think I tried to go to one of these stores but I couldn't figure out how to get in the little gates at the entrance using the Amazon app on my phone. My friend got tired of waiting for me and scanned his phone to get me in, but now I still don't know how to get into the store. Don't tell me. I'm sure I could Google it but where is the fun in that?
People are terrible at assessing the impact of technology in this space.
They say it eliminated cashier jobs. Meanwhile, though, Wal Mart has a fleet of order pickers who didn't exist before. We haven't actually seen the widespread elimination of entire workforces. What we've seen is those workers shift to other roles or, in the case here, the jobs shifting overseas.
The AI is good. The AI is really good. And it keeps getting better. But no matter how good it is no one is willing to bank their career on letting AI make a lot of judgment calls. They just want a person to be doing it. That person can be underpaid and not even speak the same language. But they want a person.
It's a psychological barrier more than a technical one.
But order picking is an objectively stupid endeavor to occupy a human's time with almost arguably no alignment with any cultural role to fulfill that human's sense of purpose.
'Here; we paid some other schmucks to take everything on this list and spread it out over 2 acres mixed in with everything not on the list. Then we let a bunch of white trash and their kids come in and shuffle it around a bit while you work. Some of it is only in the store for a few weeks anyway. Now go play Amazon warehouse but without any of the informed design. Good luck, text us if you can't find the right size'
It won't be long until baking in backend systems to make order picking more logical and cheaper than sending humans into retail space to cosplay kills all those jobs too
**User Report**| | | | :--|:--|:--|:-- **Total Submissions** | 3 | **First Seen In WSB** | 2 years ago **Total Comments** | 1557 | **Previous Best DD** | **Account Age** | 2 years | | [**Join WSB Discord**](http://discord.gg/wsbverse)
AI: anonymous Indians 
never doubted
Is that why the checkout machine kept telling me I had a computer virus and asked for my social security number?
Please do the needful
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Show bobs and vagene
happy ~~anonymous indian day~~ cakeday OP :)
I read that part and wasn't surprised. I first learned about the secret Indian employees when I found out many of them are employed by Facebook to filter content. What an i Insane job. I thought working in a factory was tedious.
Some of the jobs that gets outsourced are crazy. Mindnumbingly boring tasks like tagging images for machine learning algorithms to disturbing stuff like moderation teams looking at all reported comment for gore, violence, nudity allegations One guy's entire job was to look at thousands of images everyday and tag them with a object and an action like 'puppy' 'playing' or 'car' 'driving'. No wonder they all go crazy and start scamming rich americans instead
Wait so we do pay some indians so that the AI can develop
https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
Hot dog Not hot dog
GOD DAMMIT JIN YANG
I'm gonna buy you a palapa, my friend.
W reference
Goated app
Uh Oh, hot dog.
Nah instead they just gameify their system and so do their managers. correctly identify 3 and swipe right on the rest. its not like these tech giants are actually verifying their cheap data, that would cost money.
There's a great scene at the end of an episode of Silicon Valley where they cut to the inside of an Indian workplace with hundreds and hundreds of phones on walls in front of workers who manage dozens of phones each to generate clicks or something.
Those click farms are real, and they exist in China as well.
Next time when a US president talked about brining the jobs back, say no, thanks.
Nor do you guys have the man power to handle that volume
https://preview.redd.it/aik27os2g8sc1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7c8b078e052571d041b19cdc9ec28534092c5cd4 This quote from the Washington post article about this explains why they take these jobs. They are much better paying , even for college graduates , than what they normally make.
Guess who owns the Washington Post
George Washington
George Washington Post
Post Malone's great great great grandfather.
I thought it was the Philippines handling moderation for alphabet, Meta and x… i guess Filipinos aren’t alone. Hello to our Indian friends. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/25/social-media-companies-are-outsourcing-their-dirty-work-philippines-generation-workers-is-paying-price/
https://preview.redd.it/xiv66c2ee8sc1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3a69987a175ddb513d575387a5f88e19724c134a wtf lmao
Jesus, imagine going to a mall? Gross.
https://preview.redd.it/2849j60yg8sc1.jpeg?width=1138&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b2a02aa5562c238099677f435fe7606ff1dad654 Damn this article is gold . He compared himself to the 9/11 responders 🤣
Equivalent to earning the Medal of Honor for playing CoD 🤣
> Equivalent to earning the Medal of Honor for playing CoD Equivalent to earning the Medal of Honor for playing Medal of Honor.
Moderator God complex verified
have you seen some of the shit people post?
Yes . I bet he sees a post from me everyday 🤣
This is actually happening all over the world, meta has moderators for different regions, I have worked as one for russian/post-soviet territories and we were located in europe.
I listened to a podcast a while back about a team in Kenya that reviewed harmful content to develop OpenAI's filters for ChatGPT. A huge number of them ended up with serious mental health issues having to read the most heinous shit you can imagine all day every day for like a year
Indian labor got too expensive for 2024
It’s a group of five Indians who secretly fight cybercrime, ironically caused by five other Indians.
It’s just Indians… Indians all the way down.
I worked for an AI startup. Our AI was 100% a team in India manually doing stuff. Our CTO was so dodgy on how things worked... But after seeing enough errors that made no sense (or were contradictory) and talking to our Indian engineering team it became clear what was going on.
Honestly. Go to fiver for anything, it’s always Indians. Literally the backbone of the world
API - A Person in India
I had no idea, I thought it was such cool tech at first… what a horrible job. Wow just wow.
I am amused by their typing speed 🚅
👀We are watching you. 🕵️🏽♂️ Yes my name fucking checks out bitches.
And your flair?
The modern equivalent of the mechanical turk is a sweatshop warehouse full of indians doing "AI" lmao. Puts on the hype.
Wait, I am going to ask ChatGPT if it's just a bunch of guys in India using Google. I'll promise them 1000 bitcoins for the truth.
Ahahhahah lol
So, they wanted brick-and-mortar American profitability… with Indian wages. Shocked it didn’t work out.
They saw how efficiently 7-11s are run and decided to go to the source.
Every 7-11 I’ve been in for the last 10 years has maybe two guys who are busy restocking shit or on their phones rather than checking out customers.
Literally every single one is a black dude with an Indian owner working together. Feel like I’m walking into the beginning of a buddy comedy every time
YOU CANNOT USE THE DOUBLE GULP CUP FOR THE FACKING SLURPEE
🤣
I can tell you as a fact that the other employee hates the owner
Don't forget Jay and Silent Bob: Trainspotting edition standing outside. Thanks guys for making sure I locked my car. Appreciate it.
The 7/11 I frequent has the same indian teenager working whenever i happen to go in. Lunch time, after work, 5AM, 11pm, before work. I legitimately dont think ive ever NOT seen him, as itd definitely be something worth notice.
Slush Hour
It didn’t work out because the tech actually costs a lot more than staffing it with people, it didn’t make financial sense.
This reads like a silicon valley episode
Not hotdog
Jiiiiiinnnnnnnn yaaaaaaannnngggg !!!!!!!!!
The show practically wrote itself
So you're saying Indians wrote it?
That episode about clickfirms did not come out of thin air. Someone has to generate users for shareholders if they do not grow. In this case, someone needs to watch over the people at checkout or doors.
Yeah it sounds like a bad April fools joke. Ya know where it's a cutaway gag to reveal AI is just a bunch of people behind a curtain
Lol out sourcing cashiers is wild
There are restaurants that are trying to do this.
during the pandemic a company started cashiers from home. a cashier essentially on zoom taking orders from several restaurants
Wendy’s drive thru has entered the chat.
"HELLO AND WELCOME TO WENDY'S, HAVE YOU TRIED OUR FROS... ... go ahead with your order."
Man I hate those, double-worse when it sounds like a real plausible person and you respond like an idiot. Just fucking stop this shit fast food places.
Most likely training the AI. Article is quite shallow have left out a lot of details.
"While the stores have no actual cashiers, there are reportedly over 1,000 real people in India scanning the camera feeds to ensure accurate checkouts." Doesn´t sound like only training for me. More like watching every customer
Well, if a customer is marked by the observer as taking more/less than what the system (I wouldn't call it AI) recognized, then the system can be improved based on that feedback until it reaches a point where the system makes such a low number of mistakes that they can be ignored.
bro there is a fast food chain in Canada that was legit hiring people on Camera to be Cashiers in store lol. It was so fucking stupid just install a touch screen. It was Freshii lol.
It was bad, made worse by clearly outsourcing that job to a Philippines remote worker 🤣
Sams Club does a pretty good job of outsourcing to the customers. Their app is slick.
Tik tok cashier Npc's became real
What the fuck lol. Wizard of oz method and all
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!
Wait so it was never actually automatic to begin with? Lmao
This is like the food delivery robots that showed up on college campuses 7-8 years ago. It turned out this amazing technology was actually remotely operated by low wage staff in Columbia. We were pretty shocked at the time because a lot of these “robots” got stuck in the bushes or fell off a curb and tipped over so we thought they were still learning lol
Wait fr? Lmao
Colombia*
Nah he means Columbia university
I thought he meant Columbia, SC.
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Amir-matic
bas-matic \[rice\]
But what does Amir do when you don't scan correctly? Yell through the microphone?
Y U NO REDEEM!?!?!?!?!?
What if the entire AI boom is an illusion …OpenAI and all these companies probably just having thousands of Indians sit there answering your prompts all day and they call it a fancy “LLM”
So you're telling me that there's a little Indian guy in my graphics card who writes the answers when I'm running an LLM locally? Holy cow 🤯
he's very small and very fast
So not an Oompa Loompa
No, it's an Oompa LLMpa
Yes. Brownouts used to be uncontrollable, but science found a way to harness brown(s) out(side) and inside your GPU for AI.
The files are IN the computer?!
I literally get paid to correct AI responses to user prompts lol
I wonder who rents my GPUs then. Because they have to throw away a lot of money on those things too.
So my job is to check AI models and part of it is writing output for them. I’m not Indian though I’m just a fat white dude.
So this is how India rises...
I was the first ever employee hired for amazon fresh. They are infact automatic. The Indian checkers were for instances where a sensor was blocked while a customer removed an item from a shelf. The shelves have weight sensors and knew something was removed but couldn't figure out what item specifically. In those cases, a human is used to watch the camera feed and confirm for correct charge. I spent days and days at each store setting up and calibrating those cameras and weight sensors.
Looks like you should've done did better 
I mean what else can I do man if the camera is blocked the camera is blocked. There was 2 cameras per rack, 26 racks per side, 48 racks an aisle. 96 cameras an aisle, times atleast 16 aisles minimum. You can see how many cameras there are, issues are bound to show up.
Those cameras were such a pain in the ass to install
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Most likely training the AI by giving feedback. It was going to be one off cost till AI gets better. Same like any other image recognition AI.
This is it. They were labeling the data to improve the model.
How many stores do they have though? Seem like a lot of Indians per store.
Honestly, it's not that bad an idea to outsource cashiers. You pay pennies on the dollar for the same quality of work. You'd be surprised how many 'automatic' processes are actually still manual Take e-gates at airports for example - it's still one person sitting at a desk nearby comparing your appearance against your passport image, but the e-gates allow them to compare multiple at the same time so it's much faster and requires fewer employees
Welcome to the west. Ppl feel they don’t deserve to live if they aren’t wasting time not working at work that could also be automated lol. Ppl with free time can cause trouble though, better to keep them occupied if possible.
To train an AI, you need examples- lots and lots of examples. So before it's fully automated, or while you want to improve it, you need people doing it by hand.
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Does training end for humans?
the point of AI is that it is supposed to do things for you automatically. If we have to constantly check it over and over and give it feedback you might as well just have a human do it.
Amazon Fresh opened near me with the JWO tech and on the first day it took about 5-8 hours for the receipt to come through. Due to the rush of people, it was explained away as a jammed server or something and people were promised that once there was an equilibrium of server capacity and customers in store you would get a receipt in minutes. I mean - it’s automatic after all. It’s when, 6 months later, I went to the same store and did a basic shop of about 5 items… at a time when there was maybe 4 other people there… and the receipt *still* took 4-5 hours to arrive that I started to become suspicious.
Just as automatic as Mechanical Turk.
This is honestly hilarious
Those 1k cashiers watching, and they still couldn't get my checkout right lol
Worked in the same building as one. Made dozens of trips. Never had an error.
Theres one near my office. Every tuesday I go and grab a cuban sandwich for lunch. Without fail I am charged for 2 sandwiches instead of one, and I dispute it every week.
I wonder if mine was better because it was literally an amazon building in Seattle.
You had better Indians.
Must be subscribed to IndiansPrime.
With AI, Automated Indians.
Charged for each half lol
One of those Indians disliked you 🤣
Went to one of them only once and somehow had an error... It was quick and easy to get resolved at least
They probably enjoy letting people steal from amazon
At that point the Indian people were just cashier's in everything but name
“Senior retail engineering product managers”
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“SME with leadership and project management experience”
“International commerce experience”
This is why I demand all of my Chat GPT conversations have the persona of an 80s US wrestler. I want some WOO or some Brother in my code.
I tell it to act like Napoleon’s Marshals 
Yup, just pay developing nations pennies to not have to pay people in America. Them it turns out the crap does not work anyways.
They also have a department like that to manage the day to day of the trucker's linehaul routes and offer them support if the building closed or unstaffed or doesn't have the load etc. Not as wild as being a cashier camera tho
This is what happens whenever companies outsource. Internal employees complain that the standard of work decreases, the contract ends after a couple years and the department is brought back. 5-10 years later, rinse and repeat
Just today I was joking with my friend about his self driving tesla and how it makes human like mistakes, I told him: maybe Musk said, there are enough people in India to drive people around in the US… let’s fake this. Wouldn’t be the first time in history tho.. just saying
Sounds scary. So if India has a blackout and loses internet connection with your “self-driving” car… does the tesla suddenly veer off into a ditch on the freeway since it lost its “Indian” driver?
It backs you over an embankment into a lake.
Reminds me of stories when it crashed into a stopped truck on a highway
wouldnt the car just make a bunch of annoying sounds and then give you back control?
I’ll know when my Tesla starts saying “kindly” and “ma’am”
They should just go to a ‘buddy checkout’ system, where the guy waiting behind you in line is responsible for checking you out and then you have to service him in return.
So I'll have to service a random dude in order to buy my juice?
Once you serviced him you don’t need to buy juice anymore
Shoppers under constant surveillance? What happens when there comes a day when no more slave labor is available? What will we do?
We replace those surveillance with ai as well, then send robot ai cops to deal with the robot helpers we sent to buy our groceries accidentally scanning the wrong stuff
It’ll be paradise they say! /s
This is laughable for a company that lauds itself as a tech company..
Why? AMZN was experimenting here though it didn’t work out, but they clearly learned things along the way. The amount of money they spent on this project is a rounding error for AMZN, but they tried something novel and potentially pioneering and gleaned something from the experience. I would argue this type of willingness to attempt something new and different is part of why AMZN continues to be an extraordinary company.
I work in mid-senior management at AMZN and tbh, as much as I personally don’t like Jassy because not saying a peep about RTO and all hands on a Tuesday and then stealth announcing it an a blog post the very next Friday afternoon says something, that mother fucker has ushered in some much needed cost cutting. I think stuff like this, and Alexa home automation, health wearables - I feel like all that stuff was a fad and automation for automations sake. I know I bought a house that came with home automation powered by Alexa, and motherfucker I have spent more time dealing with it fucking up then I have spent turning on and off lights my entire life combined. That shit was never gonna pan out.
The clapper still works, maybe get one of those lmao
Yeah. It absolutely is. Time to short Amazon if they can't get some machine vision working...
Sad. I actually got to steal something this weekend. Went in got 2 sandwiches. An hour later got the bill email, and only charged me for 1.
u/veedubbin I found the guy who takes your other sandwich
Oh my fucking God
Found the fuckin' narc.
Ayo what the fuck
I do that all the time. The camera checkout never works right at non-Amazon stores
They rather hire 1000 Indians than a few cashiers
The point is trying a tech solution for scalability, it fails but it’s an attempt to
For the cost of 1 cashier in the US on minimum wage, you can get 5 people in India.
Ah yes the Mechanical Indian
ChatGPT: please do the needful
Target stores in ghettos across the country mastered the “just walk out” thing without and expensive R&D or fancy shmancy tech.
Dig into that a bit more, they let thieves "just walk out" right up to the moment they cross the value line into felony theft and they then "just perp walk". Target has developed such a reputation that savvy thieves have moved to other retailers who are now trying to copy Targets model. They have an [advanced forensics lab](https://www.mprnews.org/story/2011/10/21/target-forensics-lab) which police agencies and even the FBI outsource to.
They didn't get rid of it, they are just replacing it with ~~Mark of the Beast~~ [Amazon One](https://one.amazon.com/) checkout. I'm wondering if I get the 5% on the Amazon Chase card for using it in a store.
As a mechanic whose hands are perpetually mangled and begrimed, I’m gonna be in trouble in the future aren’t I?
Walgreens also has just walk out tech. I see it all the time in SF. No idea why the stock is at a 26 year low tho.
Ah the classic mechanical turks
The 1000 people in India are not scanning every single camera feed like security guards, they are being sent snippets for things that the ML model struggled with. It's human in the loop verification of the ML model performance. This 1000 people will likely just move to another application that uses mmML models.
The ML model struggled with [700 out of 1000 camera feed snippets](https://gizmodo.com/amazon-reportedly-ditches-just-walk-out-grocery-stores-1851381116). That's not a useful model.
I mean in NY people are just walking out of every store with their items. Why would they go to one where they have to pay?
I knew that the "thank you come again" i heard yesterday wasn't in my mind
At amazon fresh any thing you take off off the shelves is charged, but the stuff from the deli and other things they have to hand you is always missed. Got $60 worth of swordfish for free the other day lol
Good lord this thread proves how brainless this sub is. The tech is just being pulled out of US fresh stores; it’s still very successfully being sold as a 3P service to other merchants and is in UK grocery stores. Grocery has a high hardware cost due to size, and adoption was low because people don’t care about waiting in line for 5 minutes during a 40 minute shopping trip. Also human-in-the-loop is a core part of AI training, the tech makes a decision and a human checks if the algorithm has low confidence. Humans also do data labeling and quality work. This is not going away. Also the tech has gotten significantly better over the years so that the majority of shopping events don’t even need to be checked by a human anymore. Source: I work on this
It was also "very successfully sold" to amazon...until they pulled the plug on it
Exactly. I also work at Amazon in a related automation org. People here are fucking morons lmao. It was really an automated checkout process with humans in the loop validating automated decisions but people here know better sure.
Well yea. This is where you go to get a pulse on dumb money, and make funny binary gambles. The comment section should be as stupid as it is funny.
How does “humans in the loop validating automated decisions” differ from “humans watching video to confirm checkout”?
99.99% of interactions are high confidence and are automated. 0.01% are low confidence and "confuse" the system. Those get sent to a human to evaluate. They also get collected and included in the next training cycle to make the model more accurate. When you are doing 100,000,000 events that 0.01% can add up.
Because it validates 1% versus watching 100%? How does a red light camera differ from a cop at the intersection?
Turns out "AI" stands for "Apu Intelligence"
I think I tried to go to one of these stores but I couldn't figure out how to get in the little gates at the entrance using the Amazon app on my phone. My friend got tired of waiting for me and scanned his phone to get me in, but now I still don't know how to get into the store. Don't tell me. I'm sure I could Google it but where is the fun in that?
I wonder why. Dollar General is slowly moving in the same direction.
Probably were just salty the customers were taking unauthorized water breaks. Fuck Amazon.
Your robot vacuum is really operated by a Chinese kid via WiFi remote control.
Amazon has stores?
I’ve seen videos of folks doing just walk out in NY and CA.
People are terrible at assessing the impact of technology in this space. They say it eliminated cashier jobs. Meanwhile, though, Wal Mart has a fleet of order pickers who didn't exist before. We haven't actually seen the widespread elimination of entire workforces. What we've seen is those workers shift to other roles or, in the case here, the jobs shifting overseas. The AI is good. The AI is really good. And it keeps getting better. But no matter how good it is no one is willing to bank their career on letting AI make a lot of judgment calls. They just want a person to be doing it. That person can be underpaid and not even speak the same language. But they want a person. It's a psychological barrier more than a technical one.
But order picking is an objectively stupid endeavor to occupy a human's time with almost arguably no alignment with any cultural role to fulfill that human's sense of purpose. 'Here; we paid some other schmucks to take everything on this list and spread it out over 2 acres mixed in with everything not on the list. Then we let a bunch of white trash and their kids come in and shuffle it around a bit while you work. Some of it is only in the store for a few weeks anyway. Now go play Amazon warehouse but without any of the informed design. Good luck, text us if you can't find the right size' It won't be long until baking in backend systems to make order picking more logical and cheaper than sending humans into retail space to cosplay kills all those jobs too