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This is self-reported: remember the 1000 Indians that were watching people shop at the Amazon Go stores? Amazon told us it was all "sensors" because it fit the

This is self-reported: remember the 1000 Indians that were watching people shop at the Amazon Go stores? Amazon told us it was all "sensors" because it fit their company narrative to do so. I am not saying that Amazon doesn't have 750k robots and hasn't laid off 100k people... but they usually have some seasonality, plus, the quoted number is from 2021, the height of at-home shopping. "The world's second-largest private employer employs 1.5 million people. While that's a lot, it's a decrease of over 100,000 employees from the 1.6 million workers it had in 2021" I think a bit of skepticism is in order, is all.

jedberg 3y ago
The 1000 Indians story was completely incorrect though. They has 1000 people in India tagging the videos after the fact for improvements to the machine learning algorithms. They weren't watching in real time.
- smnrchrds 3y ago
  I have a question: was the customer billed based on whatever the machine learning algorithm determined, or based on what humans decided after the fact? In other words, was the humans' job to just provide training data for future versions of the machine learning algorithm, or to manually fix the algorithm's errors and prevent over-billing?
  - entangledqubit 3y ago
    IIRC, they could correct your bill after the fact. I used to joke with others that shoplifted items should be retroactively free - as long as you self report after the fact. (Extra useful training data...)
  - antiterra 3y ago
    From my experience you just weren’t actually billed until they were done, it could be many hours after you left the store.
- paxys 3y ago
  There are reports that 70% of the sales had to be manually reviewed by the team in India (https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actually-1-000-people-in-india-2024-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actual...), so no, they weren't just training algorithms.
  - jedberg 3y ago
    That article in particular was the one that was debunked. It was based on a false rumor.
    - paxys 3y ago
      Debunked where? The only response is from Amazon (in the same article), who are disputing the number but still admitting that the team did intervene when needed.
      - Dylan16807 3y ago
        And they did not give their own number, so even the dispute is very weak.
      - jedberg 3y ago
        https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/17/24133029/amazon-just-walk-out-cashierless-ai-india https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/17/24133029/amazon-just-walk...
      - jnaina 3y ago
        The 1000 Indians working to track all activities remotely was/is a false story. See link below: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7186447512973574144/ https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7186447...
    - Culonavirus 3y ago
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      - 3y ago
- waltbosz 3y ago
  Having not read the original story, this makes more sense. "1000 Indians that were watching people shop at the Amazon Go stores" ... Conjured up picture in my head of an Indian man inside an Amazon Go store sitting behind a registerless counter. What his purpose would be, I don't know.
  - WWLink 3y ago
    Funny story. The amazon go stores do have a register at the counter now. But as far as I can tell, they rotate positions. There's never really anyone standing at that counter. If you walk up to the counter someone will come from the sandwich counter or restocking the shelves or whatever.
- aimazon 3y ago
  For what it’s worth, I purchased from one of these Amazon stores every day for over a year. After leaving the store, it would typically take 2+ hours before my purchases were registered in the Amazon app. I agree that there probably was a large degree of automation but based on how the store worked, there didn’t need to be an army of “real time” reviewers for humans to be involved in each individual purchase… it’s totally plausible based on what I experienced that Amazon did have an army of people involved in the standard purchase path.
  - mFixman 3y ago
    Same here. My theory is that purchase tracking is done automatically via AI, while humans are on the loop to check the feed of people taking each item and verifying that the amounts are correct before charging. It makes sense. Even if your entire AI system is 99.9% accurate, you want a human to detect and remove that one-in-a-thousand mistake.
  - jkhanlar 3y ago
    I think it was from a video I watched a day or two ago, describing how with those uber and lyft and other order delivery services that consumers apparently are placing those orders wtih the services, picking up the items themselves and walking out, and then when the actual delivery person arrives, order is gone, reported as missing, the consumer also reports similarly, even though they picked up the orders themselves, that this is apparently happening more widespread commonly that still is vulnerable with business infrastructures to not prevent the exploit from taking place, I am curious how this may affect industry standards with regards to this concept because I never witnessed it but I wouldn't be surprised if it is not even that widely realized about the issue yet thereby enabling more theft and loss and damages and whatnot.
    - cyanydeez 3y ago
      Wonder if you could some how arbitrage your own food delivery...
    - Clent 3y ago
      How many times can one's order be 'stolen' like this before a pattern emerges and the account is banned? This is also fraud and because it requires using the internet, it's going to lead to felony charges.
godsfshrmn 3y ago
Very true. Could be counting 50k IR sensors that count how many items pass on a belt. (Plus maybe a PIR motion sensor in the bathroom )
actuallyalys 3y ago
> the height of at-home shopping I wondered that, too, but I did see that Amazon revenue has continued to grow since 2021. Of course, it’s possible AWS and other divisions are compensating for a decline in physical goods sold. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to find revenue numbers for specific divisions.
- hattmall 3y ago
  That's from inflation. Look at CVS revenue growth and that's with a declining customer volume. Fewer customers buying fewer items, but fairly massive revenue growth.
  - Animats 3y ago
    Because of massive price increases due to a monopoly.
    - notyourwork 3y ago
      Can you share more on this? What monopoly?
      - Animats 3y ago
        CVS/Walgreens
jairuhme 3y ago
> remember the 1000 Indians that were watching people shop at the Amazon Go stores? > Amazon told us it was all "sensors" because it fit their company narrative to do so. I think you, like many others, fell into the trap of just looking at the headline. The 1k people were labeling training data, not watching you shop like a puppet master..
- Kerbonut 3y ago
  Per the articles I read, they did more than label training data. They also did other things to facilitate the checkout process. They didn't get into what those things were however. > "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.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    "may also" still doesn't suggest that the remote observers were doing all the work and the computer vision systems didn't work and it was all a farce though. spot checking that the system works isn't the same thing as doing the job of the whole system
    - paxys 3y ago
      No one is suggesting that. The question is how automated was the system? According to the article 70% of all transactions were manually checked out because the algorithm didn't have enough confidence in its prediction. Amazon has disputed the number, but not the fact that the manual intervention was happening.
  - ehsankia 3y ago
    The whole discussion around that headline has always been so confusing. It's honestly unclear. What I'd like to know is, what % of actual costumer checkouts required a human being vs what % was 100% automated. Some of the headlines and negative discussions make it sound like 100% of the checkouts required human approval. If that is true, then that's clearly terrible. If on the other hand it was anywhere below 5-10%, then I think that's a fair target for training the model in more difficult edge cases. Something like Waymo also has humans constantly monitoring and helping, but I don't see much discussion about that being "controlled by humans".
bonestamp2 3y ago
They've also laid off a lot of office workers, who were not replaced with robots... so we can't correlate the robot number and all of the changes in head count.
varenc 3y ago
Agreed. These numbers are being cherry-picked. From Amazon quarterly filings[0][1], here's their employees count: - Q3 2019: 750,000 employees - Q4 2019: 798,000 employees - Q1 2020: 840,400 employees - Q2 2020: 876,800 employees - Q3 2020: 1,125,300 employees - Q4 2020: 1,298,000 employees - Q1 2021: 1,271,000 employees - Q2 2021: 1,335,000 employees - Q3 2021: 1,468,000 employees - Q4 2021: 1,608,000 employees - Q1 2022: 1,622,000 employees - Q2 2022: 1,523,000 employees - Q3 2022: 1,544,000 employees - Q4 2022: 1,541,000 employees - Q1 2023: 1,465,000 employees - Q2 2023: 1,461,000 employees - Q3 2023: 1,500,000 employees - Q4 2023: 1,525,000 employees The 1.6M count was a clear seasonal/stay-at-home blip. [0] https://ir.aboutamazon.com/quarterly-results/default.aspx https://ir.aboutamazon.com/quarterly-results/default.aspx [1] https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2023/q4/AMZN-Q4-2023-Earnings-Release.pdf https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2023/q4/...
- shrubble 3y ago
  Thank you for taking the time to break this out.
- LUmBULtERA 3y ago
  Wow, that shows a surge of about 800k employees from Q4 2019 to Q4 2021, just two years! Wild.
- j-cheong 3y ago
  Hard to say how much is seasonality vs laying people off due to increases in robots based on historical numbers. Thanks for breaking this out.
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jedberg 3y ago

The 1000 Indians story was completely incorrect though. They has 1000 people in India tagging the videos after the fact for improvements to the machine learning algorithms. They weren't watching in real time.

smnrchrds 3y ago
I have a question: was the customer billed based on whatever the machine learning algorithm determined, or based on what humans decided after the fact? In other words, was the humans' job to just provide training data for future versions of the machine learning algorithm, or to manually fix the algorithm's errors and prevent over-billing?
- entangledqubit 3y ago
  IIRC, they could correct your bill after the fact. I used to joke with others that shoplifted items should be retroactively free - as long as you self report after the fact. (Extra useful training data...)
- antiterra 3y ago
  From my experience you just weren’t actually billed until they were done, it could be many hours after you left the store.
paxys 3y ago
There are reports that 70% of the sales had to be manually reviewed by the team in India (https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actually-1-000-people-in-india-2024-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actual...), so no, they weren't just training algorithms.
- jedberg 3y ago
  That article in particular was the one that was debunked. It was based on a false rumor.
  - paxys 3y ago
    Debunked where? The only response is from Amazon (in the same article), who are disputing the number but still admitting that the team did intervene when needed.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      And they did not give their own number, so even the dispute is very weak.
    - jedberg 3y ago
      https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/17/24133029/amazon-just-walk-out-cashierless-ai-india https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/17/24133029/amazon-just-walk...
    - jnaina 3y ago
      The 1000 Indians working to track all activities remotely was/is a false story. See link below: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7186447512973574144/ https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7186447...
  - Culonavirus 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - 3y ago
waltbosz 3y ago
Having not read the original story, this makes more sense. "1000 Indians that were watching people shop at the Amazon Go stores" ... Conjured up picture in my head of an Indian man inside an Amazon Go store sitting behind a registerless counter. What his purpose would be, I don't know.
- WWLink 3y ago
  Funny story. The amazon go stores do have a register at the counter now. But as far as I can tell, they rotate positions. There's never really anyone standing at that counter. If you walk up to the counter someone will come from the sandwich counter or restocking the shelves or whatever.
aimazon 3y ago
For what it’s worth, I purchased from one of these Amazon stores every day for over a year. After leaving the store, it would typically take 2+ hours before my purchases were registered in the Amazon app. I agree that there probably was a large degree of automation but based on how the store worked, there didn’t need to be an army of “real time” reviewers for humans to be involved in each individual purchase… it’s totally plausible based on what I experienced that Amazon did have an army of people involved in the standard purchase path.
- mFixman 3y ago
  Same here. My theory is that purchase tracking is done automatically via AI, while humans are on the loop to check the feed of people taking each item and verifying that the amounts are correct before charging. It makes sense. Even if your entire AI system is 99.9% accurate, you want a human to detect and remove that one-in-a-thousand mistake.
- jkhanlar 3y ago
  I think it was from a video I watched a day or two ago, describing how with those uber and lyft and other order delivery services that consumers apparently are placing those orders wtih the services, picking up the items themselves and walking out, and then when the actual delivery person arrives, order is gone, reported as missing, the consumer also reports similarly, even though they picked up the orders themselves, that this is apparently happening more widespread commonly that still is vulnerable with business infrastructures to not prevent the exploit from taking place, I am curious how this may affect industry standards with regards to this concept because I never witnessed it but I wouldn't be surprised if it is not even that widely realized about the issue yet thereby enabling more theft and loss and damages and whatnot.
  - cyanydeez 3y ago
    Wonder if you could some how arbitrage your own food delivery...
  - Clent 3y ago
    How many times can one's order be 'stolen' like this before a pattern emerges and the account is banned? This is also fraud and because it requires using the internet, it's going to lead to felony charges.

godsfshrmn 3y ago

Very true. Could be counting 50k IR sensors that count how many items pass on a belt. (Plus maybe a PIR motion sensor in the bathroom )

actuallyalys 3y ago

> the height of at-home shopping I wondered that, too, but I did see that Amazon revenue has continued to grow since 2021. Of course, it’s possible AWS and other divisions are compensating for a decline in physical goods sold. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to find revenue numbers for specific divisions.

hattmall 3y ago
That's from inflation. Look at CVS revenue growth and that's with a declining customer volume. Fewer customers buying fewer items, but fairly massive revenue growth.
- Animats 3y ago
  Because of massive price increases due to a monopoly.
  - notyourwork 3y ago
    Can you share more on this? What monopoly?
    - Animats 3y ago
      CVS/Walgreens

jairuhme 3y ago

> remember the 1000 Indians that were watching people shop at the Amazon Go stores? > Amazon told us it was all "sensors" because it fit their company narrative to do so. I think you, like many others, fell into the trap of just looking at the headline. The 1k people were labeling training data, not watching you shop like a puppet master..

Kerbonut 3y ago
Per the articles I read, they did more than label training data. They also did other things to facilitate the checkout process. They didn't get into what those things were however. > "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.
- fragmede 3y ago
  "may also" still doesn't suggest that the remote observers were doing all the work and the computer vision systems didn't work and it was all a farce though. spot checking that the system works isn't the same thing as doing the job of the whole system
  - paxys 3y ago
    No one is suggesting that. The question is how automated was the system? According to the article 70% of all transactions were manually checked out because the algorithm didn't have enough confidence in its prediction. Amazon has disputed the number, but not the fact that the manual intervention was happening.
- ehsankia 3y ago
  The whole discussion around that headline has always been so confusing. It's honestly unclear. What I'd like to know is, what % of actual costumer checkouts required a human being vs what % was 100% automated. Some of the headlines and negative discussions make it sound like 100% of the checkouts required human approval. If that is true, then that's clearly terrible. If on the other hand it was anywhere below 5-10%, then I think that's a fair target for training the model in more difficult edge cases. Something like Waymo also has humans constantly monitoring and helping, but I don't see much discussion about that being "controlled by humans".

bonestamp2 3y ago

They've also laid off a lot of office workers, who were not replaced with robots... so we can't correlate the robot number and all of the changes in head count.

varenc 3y ago

Agreed. These numbers are being cherry-picked. From Amazon quarterly filings[0][1], here's their employees count: - Q3 2019: 750,000 employees - Q4 2019: 798,000 employees - Q1 2020: 840,400 employees - Q2 2020: 876,800 employees - Q3 2020: 1,125,300 employees - Q4 2020: 1,298,000 employees - Q1 2021: 1,271,000 employees - Q2 2021: 1,335,000 employees - Q3 2021: 1,468,000 employees - Q4 2021: 1,608,000 employees - Q1 2022: 1,622,000 employees - Q2 2022: 1,523,000 employees - Q3 2022: 1,544,000 employees - Q4 2022: 1,541,000 employees - Q1 2023: 1,465,000 employees - Q2 2023: 1,461,000 employees - Q3 2023: 1,500,000 employees - Q4 2023: 1,525,000 employees The 1.6M count was a clear seasonal/stay-at-home blip. [0] https://ir.aboutamazon.com/quarterly-results/default.aspx https://ir.aboutamazon.com/quarterly-results/default.aspx [1] https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2023/q4/AMZN-Q4-2023-Earnings-Release.pdf https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2023/q4/...

shrubble 3y ago
Thank you for taking the time to break this out.
LUmBULtERA 3y ago
Wow, that shows a surge of about 800k employees from Q4 2019 to Q4 2021, just two years! Wild.
j-cheong 3y ago
Hard to say how much is seasonality vs laying people off due to increases in robots based on historical numbers. Thanks for breaking this out.

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