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> Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The
by madeofpalk 3y ago
> Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.
Wow - I did not know this. This makes it all a whole lot less impressive and interesting that it was just people off shore watching you.
- alsodumb 3y agoIt's just a tech-illiterate journalist who can't seem to understand the difference between "annotators watching and labeling videos to validate the model" vs "people watching the videos live to remotely decide the cost of every user's purchase". Or maybe they do know the difference, but wanted to bait audience.
- kadoban 3y agoOr it's a tech-literate journalist who knows that usually it's the latter and they have vague plans to transition to the former later.
- anthony__j 3y agoalways mturk all the way down
- Timshel 3y ago> 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022. Or not ...
- ec109685 3y agoI thought so too, but the article says this: > 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 3y agoIf you required a high accuracy like 99.9% to charge a customer, you could have a system that was mostly automatic but still needed human review when the model isn’t confident enough. It’s hard to know exactly what this means without a lot more details, which Amazon is unlikely to provide.
- imperfect_light 3y agoWonder if that 30% include the cases where someone walks in, strolls around, and walks out without buying something? Which I see people do all the time, interested in the concept.
- imperfect_light 3y agoIf it was just a matter of building up a large enough training set and corresponding model do you really think Amazon would be abandoning a technology they spent so much time, money and resources on, in a somewhat embarassing manner?
- xp84 3y agoApparently this news came out in May 2023. I also was bamboozled into thinking that sophisticated computer vision algos -- that worked -- were doing this. I'm now picturing the remote workers constantly switching between cameras, studying: Did he put down the can of kidney beans or the can of corn there? Wait, the man picked up the bananas, but then he handed them to the woman in the white shirt. Let's charge them to her account. Wait, she handed them back at 14:42 in aisle 16. Going to switch them back to the man. All day long, day in day out, for years. I am the last to criticize 'low wage jobs' paternalistically, because I know they may be much better than what the workers might otherwise be doing: perhaps just toiling in the fields for 16 hours a day (or worse: something like 'melting down discarded PCBs to recover trace metals'). But still, I do not think I would want to do this job nor that it was worth it. I get that they were supposedly trying to train an algorithm to do it. I'm glad that they aren't keeping at it any longer though now that it's proven so unworkable.
- idontwantthis 3y agoIf you did some kind of shell game with 5 different people all passing around their items, then you don’t get charged correctly is it theft? Did anyone ever try that?
- baumy 3y agoI worked for Amazon in Seattle when Amazon Go first launched. As you'd expect, lots of SDE teams made games out of trying to fool the thing in various ways. A few attempts were successful early on (passing items back and forth, one person moving something to the wrong shelf and another person picking it up, people dressing in identical outfits, etc), but the success rate in fooling the system was very very low. No method of trying to trick it that I ever heard of worked consistently, and it definitely seemed to get harder to fool the longer the store was open. At the time I thought that whatever algos were being run on the camera feeds were getting better. Knowing that it was basically all manual, I'm not sure what the explanation is for the store seemingly getting harder to fool over time. Possibly just placebo, or people lost interest in trying so hard to fool it.
- breadwinner 3y agoI wonder if the same "tech" could be used for "self-driving" cars.
- FourOnTheFloor 3y ago"Unidentified item in driving area. Calling police."
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoI'm pretty sure this idea has been kicked around, and is generally seen as not-super-useful because it requires a perfectly reliable low-latency connection.
- MrFoof 3y agoThis is like learning that there actually 1000 tiny elves inside of your television drawing the pictures. This a real-life, genuine Flintstones-esque cartoon gag.
- KptMarchewa 3y agoPratchett comes to mind.
- justinjlynn 3y agoPratchett really got technology, imo. Sometimes it really is high energy magic, but most of the time it's just labourers you can't see being exploited. I especially enjoyed the line "money dangled is far more effective than money given" or something like that... it's true.
- arcticbull 3y agoSounds like fake-it-till-you-make-it stuff right? This is exactly how I would bootstrap a startup that wanted to do this. Kind of impressed with their scrappiness to be honest.
- anonacct37 3y agoWhat I think is funny is that circa 2008 I had a manager who used to work at Amazon who told me that "a surprising amount of Amazon artificial intelligence is artificial artificial intelligence, low paid workers". I heard this was behind mechanical turk. Sounds like the playbook remained the same.
- randycupertino 3y ago> Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped. Reminds me of the "delivery robots" that weren't really automated after all, they were remotely navigated by cheaper workers on playstation controllers in Brazil and the Philippines driving them on the streets through cameras. https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/they-are-cute-pink-robots-who-bring-you-local-food-but-their-drivers-may-well/article_bd7d8b2d-c54d-5d40-a40e-f83b80ea88fb.html https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/they-are-cute-pink-robots-w...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ametrau 3y agoThat is absolutely dystopian and completely awful. Everything Amazon does / releases you should assume it’s evil in some way.
- lupire 3y agoWhen Amazon Fresh first launched, it was just SWEs running to the grocery store when someone placed an order.
- Ancalagon 3y agoAgreed and I laughed out loud at that part. It’s honestly embarrassing.