They found a way to outsource grocery store employees. great
If we are in an era of economic wars, can we get laws to charge companies with treason?
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.
Jesus christ these headlines mislead everything.
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 goal was to train ML enough so that humans were rarely necessary, obviously.
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.
Machine learning has lots of errors until you train it.
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.
My goal is to build a fusion reactor.
I will hire Indian call center workers to add fuel to my diesel generator until the fusion is up and running.
This plan makes sense to certain people on the internet.
You could probably get lots of funding with this. I say go for it.
The goal was to train ML enough so that humans were rarely necessary, obviously.
Yes, that’s the goal.
There’s a long rich history of AI like outcomes being mimiced by just hiding the human who does the work. That’s actually the source of the name of Amazon’s own “Mechanical Turk” service.
Not being actively watched by an army of underpaid workers is effectively still on the “someday…maybe” feature list for this thing, unless Amazon (famous for making delivery workers pee in soda bottles, and allowing warehouse workers to get heat stroke) somehow provides credible proof that they’ve actually grown past that.
I, as someone with substantial professional ML experience, won’t take Amazon at their word, when they claim the ML has alleviated the need for the army of workers watching cameras. That’s bullshit marketing promise, until proven otherwise. Particularly coming from Amazon.
Moving away from the people watching to using pure AI is well within the realm of possibility.
But good AI maintainers cost more per hour to pay than the entire army of mechanical turk “trainers”. So I am skeptical of any claim that Amazon, in particular, has done the right thing here.
So it’s very fair to assume you’re being watched in one of those stores, until real credible evidence is provided that you’re not.
They were using machine learning to try and figure out what people were buying. Machine learning has lots of errors
until you train it.Machine Learning, no matter how well trained or advanced, is just doing a make-em-up.
Besides that, in this case the experiment has been going on for years and humans were still doing like 70% of the work. It was a failure, that’s why Amazon shut it down
That’s their excuse but it is convenient for them that in order to train the AI the workers need to follow the exact same steps as what an AI would be doing if it was sufficiently trained. We can’t say as outsiders to what extent the actual work is assisted by AI. Seems likely that it is largely a manual process.
I understand the spirit, but that’s how it goes. You have somebody doing the work, as you want the ML to do it, and then feed the data. It’s the same when they get oncology scans that have been diagnosed by well paid doctors, somebody who knows does and the machine tries to replicate.
What very likely happened is that the failure rate platoed much higher than they expected, and all this time the goal was to lower it. Remember, it’s cheaper to have 0 people in India than 1, specially with AWS in mind.
Moreover, even if the accuracy was incredibly high, they would still need people reviewing. You have to review random events to ensure the model keeps performing well and to evaluate the ones with low confidence or suspicious.
I’m pretty sure the first chess program was just a grand master playing remotely
Yes, that’s where amazon got the name of their service from
What ever happened to doing this with UHF RFID? Getting the cost of the individual chips down was always just a matter of scaling production.
They weren’t just tracking what you bought. They wanted to track what you looked at and for how long, to learn what packaging worked best.
“Hey Vitesh, this John guy just stole two chickens”
Hey! Guess how they remove all of the content they DON’T want to train AI’s on?
A disturbing portion of the internet’s scams are held up by schemes like this.
Big fuckin shocker
You mean to tell me big businesses are exploiting low wage countries?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The company touted the technology, which allowed customers to bypass traditional checkouts, as an achievement powered entirely by computer vision.
An Amazon spokesperson disputed that claim in a statement to Business Insider, saying that the team in India mostly helps train the model that the company used for Just Walk Out.
“Associates may also validate a small minority of shopping visits where our computer vision technology cannot determine with complete confidence an individual’s purchases,” the spokesperson said.
While customers used Just Walk Out at Amazon Fresh stores, “they also wanted the ability to easily find nearby products and deals, view their receipt as they shop, and know how much money they saved while shopping throughout the store” — all options that the company’s Dash Cart provides, the company spokesperson said of the change.
The technology allowed customers to enter a store by identifying themselves with their Amazon account.
Startups have also created their own versions of Just Walk Out and tested them at retailers including Aldi and Dollar General.
The original article contains 432 words, the summary contains 169 words. Saved 61%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Wait, how does this technology work!?
(other than being really bad at what it does… )
The type of shit you’d see on a movie
It would be fun to have a Bollywood style flashmob show up at one of these stores.
All “AI” relies on thousands and thousands of low-paid, overworked humans in the Global South staring at screens so snake-oil salesmen in SV and Redmond can claim they’re about to revolutionize the world. It’s all lies.
Actually most AI relies on high quality data acquired from all sorts of sources including academic research papers, GitHub code repositories, books and journals, newspapers, and technical manuals.
Manually parsed and corrected by near-slave labor.
Enjoy your funny ChatGPT output though, you monster.
What the actual hell is that comment? I’m sorry are you suggesting some kind of evil cabal or something?
Might want to make some more sense
All “AI”
Not even close to true.
If you unhinge your jaw a little further I’m sure you can fit that VC cock further back in your throat.
That’s got nothing to do with how wide my mouth is open.
I think you are confused about what “AI” means. You are referring to a very small subset if AI.
