Amazon is phasing out its checkout-less grocery stores with “Just Walk Out” technology, first reported by The Information Tuesday. The company’s senior vice president of grocery stores says they’re moving away from Just Walk Out, which relied on cameras and sensors to track what people were leaving the store with.
Lmao.
idk…
if Amazon wasn’t the source of this number, where is it coming from?
Amazon was using people to train the model, so at the starts it would be 100%, but eventually the goal would be to get near zero, maybe the average was 70% but when the ended it was near 40%?
If the numbers don’t match your narrative, just make them up! That’s the Gizmodo way.
Or Amazon, if you don’t like your employees having labor rights, just sue to have the NLRB declared unconstitutional with such awesome groups as Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Probably the ‘1000 people in india’ reviewing that footage.
The rest of the articles linked in the above one are pay walled and I don’t care enough to dig further.
Goes to show the true state of the art for AI right now
Meanwhile, my college machine learning model made to recognize three types of flower by sepal length: 92% success rate.
Narrower scope. Trying to recognize every possible thing in a grocery store is harder
I’m not an expert but uh, I don’t think this had anything to do with AI. It was just a scanner in a basket.
Scanners in baskets/carts is what they are replacing this with.
The ‘Just Walk Out’ system was as the name implies; grab product and leave. No scanners, no checkout, no cashiers; just cameras watching you shop, and a heavy implication that that video is primarily watched by AI to determine your purchases. AFAIK the only scanners were to read a qr code on entry to associate you with your amazon account; the rest is hands off. Or at least that’s what it’s supposed to be. Seems there’s a lot more labour under the hood than the advertising said. Shocker.
Sounds like it was primarily watched by people in India.
Yes, because when you run systems like that, you use the AI, and you have the people as a fallback for when the AI fails.
It was primarily watched by people in India because the AI was failing the vast majority of the time.
So yeah, the state of the art AI is… Failing at its job 70% of the time. Instead of the hoped goal of 5%.
Can’t they just…add sensors to the items and add them to your Amazon account cart anytime you add pick one, dunno, using some proximity stuff from the phone itself, then charge for the items once the phone leaves the store?
Sure they can, it just isn’t as simple as “just” ;) How do you, for example, determine who picked which item if two people are standing next to each other? Or if something is put back?
Sure, a proof of concept will always work. Building it for the real world is a completely and utterly different beast.
Putting a sensor on every item in a grocery store might be prohibitively expensive
Reality rarely meets expectations.
Having Bozos set those expectations doesn’t help.
I never got to see it personally. But the demo videos definitely implied some OCR was being used as well.
It did have AI, the cameras adjusted based on location, proximity, lighting, etc. They tracked you through the store and gavenyou a unique ID were trained to manage you being blocked from view by other shoppers.
This feels so creepy to, being watched spending your money by slaves on the other side of the globe, and Amazon pretending it to be automated !
Is it surprising for a company running a service called Mechanical Turk?
Slaves?
1000 employees is also insane for ~20 locations. 60-80 cashiers would do a better job and not require slave wages to make the store viable.
Incredible. Their “AI” is just a bunch of people watching cameras in India.
AI stands for Actually India
I sat in front of one of these ideas at an airport. People are just dumb. They couldn’t figure out how to get into the store. They didn’t understand how to pay by just leaving.
Never blame people for an issue with a system. If you have to blame the people then just admit your system is shit. It’s called idiot proofing and when theirs a bigger idiot proof it some more.
I’ve said the same elsewhere, and the idiots here downvote to oblivion.
It’s so weird. This is a basic rule of building anything that engages with the public. How can anyone assume that everyone will simply “get” how an interface works?
This is sort of implicitly true. You can’t get people’s money if they can’t figure out how to use your product/service.
At the same time… People are pretty dumb.
People are rather dumb, but that’s why you design a system that even an idiot can use.
I’d be far more surprised if it went smoothly.