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Amazon's Just Walk Out technology relies on hundreds of workers in India watching you shop
(www.businessinsider.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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Jesus christ these headlines mislead everything.
They were using machine learning to try and figure out what people were buying. Machine learning has lots of errors until you train it. The "hundreds of workers" were training it by telling it what each thing was. E.g. it was creating training data for it to learn from.
The goal was to train ML enough so that humans were rarely necessary, obviously.
One article included how often employees needed to look at the cameras. That was the case in something like 80% of the times people went in to shop.
The headline is pretty accurate. That might have been the goal, but they didn't come close. And now they are closing down those stores.
Seems that they utterly failed in the goal.
These stores were open for a pretty long time. It's not a given that it's just a matter of training.
The people who hate AI always seem to have no fucking idea how it actually works and it's frustrating.
People were required to teach the AI how to do it's job. A 'new employee' is going to make frequent mistakes during training. Yes - it took a long time to train a program to identify a person, match them to their ID, identify a product, match it to the UPC, then make absolutely 110% sure that item remained on the person when they left with no mistakes. For it to be flawless even when you shove it into your backpack.
Should the people training it have been paid more for their temporary position? Sure. Should Amazon have been transparent about how they were teaching the AI? Sure. They still did not rely on Indian workers for their stores, they relied on people to teach the AI, like doing a captcha, that the store relied on. Any human being would have done the trick, India just allows its people to be exploited the most apparently. Headlines are meant to make you click, not give you accurate information.
Experiments in technology don't always work. This was a bold plan that they gave years to which would have been a really cool thing to have. Just grabbing your shit and leaving? That's like EZPass for retail. There was definitely money there, they just couldn't get to it in time.