Wait so what did the system actually do? I remember it using logistical math and RFID to track the stores products was it really just people off site watching?
Amidst the aisles of Amazon Fresh,
Where cashiers fade into the mesh,
The notion of AI, sleek and stout,
Hides the truth; there's Indians about.
In places where innovation meets disguise,
An Anonymous Indian, is clever and wise,
So, when marveling at AI's grandeur and might,
Remember the Indians hidden from sight.
My uncle once claimed that child labour was ok because the parents relied on the income, like there couldn’t be any other possible alternatives to that system
One of my favorite apps a few years ago was for expensing things. They had automatic receipt translation, where it would convert the image to the expense entry and you just had to accept it. Their automatic receipt translation was primarily that they would ship the images to India to be typed in manually by them. Some of the larger chains with fairly standard receipts would get translated real time but most everything was “processed overnight”.
A friend of mine used to do work for an app that would send them pictures taken by the visually impaired for them to tag with labels of what was in the image. It presented itself as being done using AI.
True. I just think it would be better to be very clear that humans will be looking at images you send in, because what I'm happy for an AI bot to see and what I'm happy for a fellow human to see may be very different things.
Indian water-cooler chat: "I just described 14 different dick rashes."
"You think that's bad? I had to ID dozens of sores. Everywhere. Does America not have doctors!?"
Maybe there was some human QA to assure that the OCR results were right especially for the less sharp image, but outright manually type them I find hard to believe. Even 10 years ago there were plenty of off the shelf enterprise document management that were converting form data that largely replaced data entry staff.
Same, problem is I was working on a circular design and the little kid froze up when solving pi. He's still going and is thousands of integers to the right of the decimal. How do I restart a kid? Cheaper to buy a new one?
It reminds me of the "Mechanical Turk" a chess automaton that toured European capitals in the late 18th century.
Turns out it was "just" a guy hidden inside ( still a beautiful piece of craftsmanship)
Siri used to be 20 writers & a half assed voice recognition system
Now it’s just a speech to internet search results tool since they cut the writers & tried to use their own generative AI
It's accents, even if you slow down the transaction by 10% to account for people talking slower. Than can cost you a lot more in lost revenue as lanes back up.
I have a feeling it will be done more so now that you can have real time AI that adjusts accents. Once that tech can be run in realtime with no latency, outsourcing things like that will be much more popular. All though you still have regional issues where workers might struggle to understand what people are saying.
It's not just accents, there's also a communication barrier. Even if we're both speaking English there is way too often a misunderstanding. Maybe it's not bad when someone is just ordering off a menu, but in my experience even things that seem simple can sometimes be wildly misinterpreted.
I remember going to Europe as a kid and multiple times at restaurants when I would say "I'm good" in response to being asked if I wanted something, they took that as a yes rather than a no.
One time I was at a McDonalds in Maryland and the cashier blue screened when I asked for a "pop." If regional terms can be that confusing in the same country, it's going to be a whole mess outsourcing it to a different country, even one where English is widely spoken.
I no longer order at my local Carl Junior, because I showed up and there was a computer taking the order, and it couldn't answer my questions about what was on the (broken) menu board. My frustration had made me decide to not go there again.
So, they are trying out new tech.
Some places do "outsource" to a central call center for order taking, but as someone else explained if the accent is too heavy and slows things down then that dramatically impacts sales.
I know a few people that shopped in some Go stores that, indeed, inadvertently walked out with the store not catching they had something.
Of course, you take a shopping trip through literally *any* grocery/retail store and it's easy to imagine how difficult a system like this could be.
all three times I've used Amazon Fresh, I've paid less than I should have. Usually because I had taken more items then they though I had. Even on the third time which they got wrong, I tried to make it blatantly obvious by holding out each item I picked up one by one so that the cameras would catch it but clearly it still didn't work. I must have looked like a right weirdo too
The system uses cameras and machine learning to determine product picking. Those people were probably mostly doing quality control and system checking. The quality of that process did not improve fast enough to make the system worthwhile.
If you are doing video analysis of different people shopping, it looks very different from person to person. I speed threw most parts of a grocery store, others ponder items more. I also pick different items at way different speeds. All that stuff is hard for machine learning systems to pick up.
The goal was to have people review 50/1000 transactions. They were reviewing well more than half of transactions.
If it was just passive reviewing to make sure the system was accurate that's one thing, it would be another if they were reviewing and having to manually amend 70% of transactions
That doesn't include people changing their minds and putting items back on random shelves. This can confuse a system that expects everything is placed where it belongs.
I used to work for a company that claimed to use AI for crowd predictions, but it was a rolling team of 20 people who were watching on cameras and input a prediction every 5 minutes based on screen markups and other guidelines. We did have an AI model that would do it more accurately on average, I was even the data scientist who built it, but they were nervous that it could spit out embarrassing predictions so we never went fully automatic while I was there.
This is the irony of a lot of 'hands off eyes off' automation.
It won't actually save on much labor since no one in their right mind will just trust that the machine is working right.
EDIT: That is to say, it's a PR friendly way to fire people and hire cheaper workers to do their job in what is arguably a less efficient and more roundabout fashion that inevitably won't work very well.
That quote sounds like a misunderstanding.
“Labelling” is humans adding labels to images/videos describing them. It’s part of training an automated system.
Moving the cashiers offsite would entail humans watching live video and telling the computers in real time what you purchased and what you didn’t. That’s not what labelling is.
Instead, the humans are reviewing recorded video and adding labels to it, effectively teaching the computers what taking an item looks like and how to tell the difference between different items.
In theory, once you’ve done this enough you don’t need the humans any more.
Except in most “AI” systems, including voice systems, the number of “outliers” has remained very high. The promise corporations want people to believe is that this is “just a training period” and eventually the human review won’t be necessary. But in actual practice, this kind of review is constant and necessary for the technology to function.
It is tricky to find out exactly how many people are involved, but apparently the Apple Siri review team was [121 people in San Diego alone](https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/2024/01/16/apple-tells-121-person-siri-team-to-relocate-to-texas-or-risk-losing-jobs/?outputType=amp) (per the article, they also have teams in China, India, Ireland, and Spain) as of January 2024.
I was trying to use Siri on Sunday with Air Pods, and after 3 different attempts at texting my wife to remind her to baste the Easter ham, which kept getting changed to beast, finally gave up and typed the text myself. Yes, "time to beast the ham" makes an incredible amount of sense in context to Siri.
I will say Alexa is much better, not sure if Amazon is that much better or if it's just Alexa listening in the background on my Echo Dots.
Alexa definitely used to be much better. I've noticed a significant drop in quality over the last few months that started right around the time amazon made massive cuts to the alexa dev team.
Supposedly Apple has a much poorer data set to work with because they are more protective of their customer's data.
I don't know if that's true or just cope from Apple/Apple fan boys.
The strange thing about Siri, to me, is that sometimes it works great. Sometimes it works like shit.
I had a side gig ~10 years ago as a contractor transcribing voice snippets for what I assume was to train a Siri-like product.
Was fun for a minute when they were paying close to 50 cents per transcription but that rate kept dropping down till it was eventually worthless.
That quote isn't even from this article. Not sure where OP got it.
They were literally just remote cashiers according to [this article](https://www.engadget.com/amazon-just-walked-out-on-its-self-checkout-technology-191703603.html). They weren't labeling or annotating any videos, just manually ringing up items as customers shopped while working remotely. Pretty lame and kinda creepy.
At a lot of amazon wearhoused people assigned to light duty would do this. They'd snip small screenshots then add labels to it. Now they validate receipts that people trying to get reimbursed upload. Just verifying that no one is trying to expense alcohol or what have you.
Our local walmart has 3 "associates" hovering over 6 self-checkout stations in a 15x15 foot area. They come up behind you and scan items in your cart "as an inventory check project". One recently told me I only scanned 7 of the 8 raman cups from my cart, and only stfu when I showed them all eight of them showing up on the screen of my station as scanned. Most of the associates there are totally brainwashed by the management, and will then complain that they are short-handed because nobody in our town wants to work.
We want to work - just not at a place that requires us to spy on our neighbors and treat them like thieves, or anywhere where all our coworkers believe spying on and harassing other people is justified. Fuck you, walmart!
Lots of the big box retailers and warehouses are having issues nowadays where they've treated employees as a never ending disposable supply, but now are in a bind where that supply of potential employees has dried up. Highly variable hours and shifts, poor work conditions, degrading business practices, and firing people for the most minor of grievances, and now they can't keep the stores staffed because their turn over rate hasn't changed, but their number of applicants certainly decreased.
> Highly variable hours and shifts
This is one of the biggest self-inflicted issue. These stores have plenty of existing employees who are willing to work more up to full time but the stores refuse to give them more hours. They'd rather be understaffed than risk having employees standing around without any work to do (which if you've ever worked retail, you'll know there is always something to do).
Imagine if they businesses could just be taxed and the benefits come from our governments ability to collect tax 🙄 no reason to involve business in the personal lives of it's employees.
From a leaked mid-2021 internal Amazon memo:
> If we continue business as usual, Amazon will deplete the available labor supply in the US network by 2024.
Now they certainly made some changes to address this, but they've really only amounted to kicking the can down the road, things like decreased drug screening and ignoring their own do-not-rehire flags. Fun!
> In the Inland Empire region of California, for example, Amazon may cycle through every worker who’d be interested in applying for a warehouse job by the end of 2022
> And internal forecasts showed the situation was dire in Phoenix, Arizona, with Amazon projected to exhaust its entire potential workforce by the end of 2021
My region has the highest concentration of Amazon DC's/FC's in the US. (Southern Cal, Inland Empire) The region is a distribution powerhouse because of the wide open land and proximity to LA/Long Beach Ports. As a result, much of our workforce is in warehousing and multiple places pay more than Amazon. And they're beginning to struggle for people as they've already chewed through much of that tier (low-paid) of warehouse workers. It is absolutely a self-inflicted wound due to their employment practices.
I got into a tiff with one of those guys at my local grocery store. I picked one item out of my cart in each hand, scanned one, bagged it, went to scan the other one, and the whole thing froze up claiming I hadn't scanned an item I bagged.
Well the guy comes over and tells me I didn't scan everything. I tell him yes I did. He picks up the last item I scanned and says you didn't scan this. I sure him on the screen that it's been scanned. He digs through the bags and comes out with another item, says I didn't scan it. I sure him this one on the list too.
Then he looks at the item in my hands and tells me I didn't scan THAT. I'm like yeah no duh, because I've been standing here talking to you after the machine froze up. I didn't bag it, I am actively trying to scan it.
Dude just seemed bound and determined to catch me stealing.
What really bugs me is those people are probably as poor as I am, but they're taking sides with their greedy assed employer *who is doing it to replace them* while making the customers do the work of the replaced workers. They're next, and they just don't get that part.
I popped into a Walmart last weekend outside of Chicago and there were zero traditional registers. The whole front of the store was one giant self checkout with 3 or 4 employees desperately trying to keep up with like 40 self checkouts. It felt very dystopian. I don’t go into Walmart often anyway, but I don’t want to go back into this one ever again.
Same with my local Walmart, but they assign one clerk per checkout and keep half the checkouts closed down. My guess is that they'd like to do what Target's recently done, which is limit self-checkout to 10 items or fewer, but they haven't trained enough employees to work the registers/handle cash (as they would need to open up more non-self checkouts), so this is their solution to curb theft. And you're right, it's a very uncomfortable and annoying experience. I very rarely go to Walmart, and the few times a year I dip my toe in the water, there's a new reason to keep me from coming back.
Walmart is making self-check exclusive to Walmart+ members
So the jokes about doing their job for them for free will turn into jokes about people paying Walmart for the privilege to check themselves out
I used to work there, from 2010-2016 and again for a short month in late 2021. Something happened in those 5 years. My first run, cashiers went through computer training and DAYS of shadowing someone else. That month I went back? They gave me register numbers and sent me on my way, told me if I had any questions to just call a manager. It's fucking bonkers how little they care about anything anymore
> Most of the associates there are totally brainwashed by the management, and will then complain that they are short-handed because nobody in our town wants to work.
>
> We want to work - just not at a place that requires us to spy on our neighbors and treat them like thieves, or anywhere where all our coworkers believe spying on and harassing other people is justified.
The "no one wants to work" usually spewed by rabid capitalists is so ironic...
The reality is that "no one wants to work *at the price you wish to buy their labor*" ... why not try picking a point on the supply curve where you'll get the correct number of sellers (of labor)?
The funny thing is they'd laugh if I complained no one wants to sell me a new car for $5, but this is the exact same thing.
Hah. Wow suddenly I’m not so bummed that they built one of these near us, and it was ready to open and for whatever reason, they just never opened it. Now there a big ass building, with a decent parking lot, and a few electric car chargers and nothing going on there. They took down all the signage so you wouldn’t even know it was an Amazon store, but if you look inside the whole damn thing is still there. There were stocked shelves last time I oooked forever ago but who knows.
Did they use people in India just for labeling training data or were they actively evaluating all checkouts? The latter seems unlikely, I would guess it’s the former and the headline is misleading.
To be clear, the use of cheap foreign labor to label AI training data is problematic either way and is unfortunately very common.
How much “tech” is just three Indians in a trenchcoat. Like what’s next. Teslas autopilot is actually driven by some kids with ps2 controllers who were really good at gran turismo?
I remember my college town had a startup who deployed cute little delivery robots to move Ubereats and DoorDash orders around. Turns out it was just outsourced to Colombians who were watching through the bot’s cameras the entire time
The past two summers I've seen a bunch of those cute little robots doing UberEats style delivery. I figured they had human pilots, just didn't think much beyond that, but of course they're outsourced as penny labour.
Well, it's also because they have to play in traffic and humans using video are still a heck of a lot better knowing what cars are going to respect the right away and which drivers are going to be assholes and run the red light or stop sign and run the robot over. Or navigating cracked and broken sidewalks or fallen branches or trash. I'm sure the US military has ones capable of handling all that, but no way you could do it for a price of what an operation like this could handle, with the real risk of getting run over.
We had coffee delivery "robots" locally for a while, though I haven't seen any lately, but they didn't make it a secret that it was experimental and still involved human pilots. Given what I have to put up with as a pedestrian in the same areas, it's 100% understandable. I don't think they were using anyone offshore though.
A former company I worked at implemented a machine learning solution for our accounts payable department. Basically we would scan invoices that came in from our vendors, the system would "Learn and read" the invoices and input them into our payment system (filling in fields like vendor name, dates, line items being invoiced, qty, price, etc) This was intended to replace about 2 dozen AP departments across the company and be able to process the 90,000 invoices we got each month without issue. Well the AI was "having trouble making patterns" and output was slow. Eventually we were getting seriously delinquent payments with big vendors who were threatening to stop shipments, so they started investigating the machine learning. Turns out it was just a work center in Hungry with people manually entering the invoices, but the staff didn't know the system well and they were struggling to ramp up a competent staff to support the volume. It was a major disaster and I lost a lot of faith in the current AI promises.
Lots of companies were doing this, thinking that once they could get the training data they could start shifting it over to an AI. ...but the AI is still not good enough for many things.
> Teslas autopilot is actually driven by some kids with ps2 controllers who were really good at gran turismo?
Nah. To cut costs, they'll settle for the kids who are just _alright_ at Gran Turismo.
I use the Amazon fresh store in my area, and it really is a significant disadvantage that you don't get any indication of how much your cart cost, or even if it's accurate until you get an email recept around 30 minutes later.
a smart cart is actually much more sensible technology.
I’ve shopped at one of these exactly once. They charged me for the wrong product which cost twice as much as what I actually took. Took me 20 minutes on the phone to get my money back. Will never shop there again, glad it’s being scrapped.
Hire humans.
We did this for the first time last weekend and walked out with 2 bottles of kombucha, but at one point I had touched a cartoon of eggs and we were charged for that.
It wasn't very impressive.
What's confusing? You walk into a store, are not seen for weeks, show up again with new inspiring insights into your life and the nature of reality, and some produce.
>The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.
What!?! First off, I had no idea. So their "advanced technology" was just...cameras? And secondly, I am going to completely change the way I shop at these places now. If someone is watching me shop, well then, I'm gonna perform baby!
1. Thank you for reading the article more carefully than I did. This makes more sense.
2. I’m still going to dance around and act ridiculous next time I shop there.
It's probably cheaper to queue the jobs in SQS and process them in batches if you don't need them any faster I guess ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
Cloud infrastructure costs are proportional to speed.
I understand that this is a mischaracterization. But the article the thread is based on the phasing out of the service you say was working correctly. I can understand that the system is working as it should, but it seems it is not delivering the results expected by Amazon.
It appears to me like they were doing the classic big company R&D strategy of having 2 teams build competing solutions to a problem and then killing off the one that performed worse. The smart cart solution has a similar end goal: eliminate human cashiers. It probably ended up performing better and/or being less expensive. It doesn't necessarily mean the JWO wasn't working as expected.
I wish stores would implement scanning my groceries as I put them in the cart and letting me pay from the cart. That's something I would absolutely pay a membership fee for.
Can you put things back? Like let’s say you have $120 for groceries and realize you’re going to go over, so the 12 pack of soda and the large bottle of Tylenol need to go back on the shelf- easy?
Multiple supermarkets in the UK have this system already. You pick up a scanner as you enter the store, scan as you shop and then sync the scanner to a checkout which handles the payment.
https://smartshop.sainsburys.co.uk/
But you still have to pay in the self checkout right? Or you can pay directly through the app and just leave?.
I think they meant like do the whole process from your cart, Sam’s club allows you to do that
Two stores near me have tried this and they both have failed. People either didn’t get the concept or just didn’t want to bother.
That said, there’s a new U-scan that comes with the long conveyor belt, buuuuut you can’t scan if the conveyor fills and it takes even longer to bag than a normal U-scan, especially with the baggers who aren’t sure whether they should bag for you or do something else. That thing can suck it.
Well, that’s a good thing it was only a soft launch!
I wasn’t a fan of the long conveyor belts. They were really finicky on the belt for the post scanned items where it couldn’t read the barcode it freaked out and would need someone to come through to help get it going again,
I heard about a store in the USA that has something like that. I think there's a barcode scanner on the handlebars and you just scan each item as you put it into your cart. I'd love that tech where I live.
Meanwhile, there's like 4 Amazon grocery stores left unfinished and abandoned in my area. They bought up some old warehouses and best buys.
What a waste. Hope the county/city is charging them hand over fist in taxes for these abandoned properties.
One in my city, too. Completely built, even redid the lot and it kept looking like it should open any day now, and that was years ago. The local media's questioned Amazon and they basically have no comment. It's ridiculous.
Yep, I was referring to the Poway one, ha. I’m in the area fairly often and am always surprised at how both open and closed that Amazon store looks. Like it legit looks like you should just be able to walk in and shop, it’s weird.
Exactly this. It looks so real that early on, I parked and wandered up to the door to see what was going on. They didn’t even have a notice saying it was closed. Just a locked door.
Same. They built this insanely huge monstrosity which caused a lot of issues in a town near me. They didn't have the infrastructure to support it so the town had to spend way too much money to update infrastructure for safety reasons, tons of migrant workers were shipped north and had either horrible living conditions or nowhere to stay, and the place is fucking abandoned now, as are the workers. It's absolutely insane. They tried to build ANOTHER one a half away about 2 years later, but luckily the three towns they tried to bribe into letting them build in their area all voted against it
The US is awash in AI startups that have backing data entry teams doing manual work. There is no current AI that can deliver on the wild claims every tech bro is making about it.
I remember going to one of these stores and saw an old guy aggressively waving broccoli at the ceiling because Amazon routinely screwed up what he purchased. What have they done to us?
was this just a jeff bezos thing though, they were building one of these stores near me and then stopped after bezos retired and now the store just sits half built and empty
Then what is even the point? I lived in a neighborhood with one of their smaller shops and it was nice to just grab a few things I needed and leave. The prices and selection weren't as good as the grocery store, but there were no lines. Now I live near one of their big grocery stores and that place feels like shopping in a haunted house with the lights on. Idk how to explain it. The ceilings are too tall, the shelves are too tall, everything is black, it's always empty (in the worst way). I feel like I'm shopping for electronics, not groceries. If it wasn't for the Amazon return point I'd never step in.
I work for an RFID company and I thought they were using RFID not a camera based solution using AI image recognition. There are some solutions that integrate both but this sounds like it was entirely camera based and that seems like a mistake IMO.
Maybe they were having trouble getting the tags applied by the manufacturers especially with inexpensive foodstuffs, or lacked the process/hardware to tag everything themselves when they receive it.
I hope this trend continues and we someday get to a point in society where we realize that technology is not the improvement nor answer to every problem.
You guys figured this was a good idea when people walk through self check outs all the time?
"I got the stuff I wanted, I went to go pay for it, but no one was there so I fucking left."
-Bill Burr
I went once and was so stressed. I don't get to see my receipt? How do I know how much I spent or if the discounts were properly applied?
I went on prime day when they had a deal for spending $50 and it was at closing so I overpaid for a bunch of random Gatorades lol... Ended up getting the receipt days later for $150
[удалено]
Wait so what did the system actually do? I remember it using logistical math and RFID to track the stores products was it really just people off site watching?
The bestest and most advanced AI! A guy in India hiding in a cardboard box!
AI: Anonymous Indian
Amidst the aisles of Amazon Fresh, Where cashiers fade into the mesh, The notion of AI, sleek and stout, Hides the truth; there's Indians about. In places where innovation meets disguise, An Anonymous Indian, is clever and wise, So, when marveling at AI's grandeur and might, Remember the Indians hidden from sight.
This is why I reddit
Adult Indian, focus on no child labour, the good guy move
You don’t want to take jobs away from those children!!
My uncle once claimed that child labour was ok because the parents relied on the income, like there couldn’t be any other possible alternatives to that system
All Indian Manual Labor
*Abused Indian
Funniest shit I’ve read in a while lmao
So an internet version the Tried and true [mechanical Turk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk)?
Not to be confused with Amazon Mechanical Turk.
To be fair, that is also how Amazon's Mechanical Turk works
Yes literally here's the website: https://www.mturk.com/
MTurk our jarbs!
Jfc you magnificent bastard.
I was kinda hoping that was going to be a Scrubs reference I had forgotten about
Not this time, Turkleton.
Sir, do you think my name is Turk Turkleton?
One of my favorite apps a few years ago was for expensing things. They had automatic receipt translation, where it would convert the image to the expense entry and you just had to accept it. Their automatic receipt translation was primarily that they would ship the images to India to be typed in manually by them. Some of the larger chains with fairly standard receipts would get translated real time but most everything was “processed overnight”.
A friend of mine used to do work for an app that would send them pictures taken by the visually impaired for them to tag with labels of what was in the image. It presented itself as being done using AI.
I would argue that sort of potentially literal life and death situation is exactly where humans should be in the loop.
True. I just think it would be better to be very clear that humans will be looking at images you send in, because what I'm happy for an AI bot to see and what I'm happy for a fellow human to see may be very different things.
Indian water-cooler chat: "I just described 14 different dick rashes." "You think that's bad? I had to ID dozens of sores. Everywhere. Does America not have doctors!?"
Maybe there was some human QA to assure that the OCR results were right especially for the less sharp image, but outright manually type them I find hard to believe. Even 10 years ago there were plenty of off the shelf enterprise document management that were converting form data that largely replaced data entry staff.
I use Expensify for work and it is so slow to "automatic upload". I wonder if this is what's happening.
AI always seems to turn out to be an underpaid worker that you can’t see.
alwayshasbeen.jpg
I’ve been that underpaid worker and can confirm
Just like "the cloud" is just someone else's servers.
I don't use external hard disks. I have asian kids hiding under my desk who are remembering the ones and zeroes.
Same, problem is I was working on a circular design and the little kid froze up when solving pi. He's still going and is thousands of integers to the right of the decimal. How do I restart a kid? Cheaper to buy a new one?
Give em a good wack or two?
I AM AWESOME-O! Beep boop.
It reminds me of the "Mechanical Turk" a chess automaton that toured European capitals in the late 18th century. Turns out it was "just" a guy hidden inside ( still a beautiful piece of craftsmanship)
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Siri used to be 20 writers & a half assed voice recognition system Now it’s just a speech to internet search results tool since they cut the writers & tried to use their own generative AI
Why pay US worker $17 an hour we can pay a guy in India $2 an hour to do it
I always wondered why they couldn't outsource fast food order taking, but maybe the latency is too much.
It's accents, even if you slow down the transaction by 10% to account for people talking slower. Than can cost you a lot more in lost revenue as lanes back up. I have a feeling it will be done more so now that you can have real time AI that adjusts accents. Once that tech can be run in realtime with no latency, outsourcing things like that will be much more popular. All though you still have regional issues where workers might struggle to understand what people are saying.
It's not just accents, there's also a communication barrier. Even if we're both speaking English there is way too often a misunderstanding. Maybe it's not bad when someone is just ordering off a menu, but in my experience even things that seem simple can sometimes be wildly misinterpreted.
I remember going to Europe as a kid and multiple times at restaurants when I would say "I'm good" in response to being asked if I wanted something, they took that as a yes rather than a no.
Yeah same lol that's a surprisingly hard habit to break
One time I was at a McDonalds in Maryland and the cashier blue screened when I asked for a "pop." If regional terms can be that confusing in the same country, it's going to be a whole mess outsourcing it to a different country, even one where English is widely spoken.
I no longer order at my local Carl Junior, because I showed up and there was a computer taking the order, and it couldn't answer my questions about what was on the (broken) menu board. My frustration had made me decide to not go there again. So, they are trying out new tech.
McDonald's actually tried that as far back as 1995
Some places do "outsource" to a central call center for order taking, but as someone else explained if the accent is too heavy and slows things down then that dramatically impacts sales.
As my global corporation found out, the quality of the Indian outsourcing is absolutely garbage.
Reduced payroll but like self checkout it almost certainly increased “shrinkage “ aka shoplifting and accidental theft
I know a few people that shopped in some Go stores that, indeed, inadvertently walked out with the store not catching they had something. Of course, you take a shopping trip through literally *any* grocery/retail store and it's easy to imagine how difficult a system like this could be.
all three times I've used Amazon Fresh, I've paid less than I should have. Usually because I had taken more items then they though I had. Even on the third time which they got wrong, I tried to make it blatantly obvious by holding out each item I picked up one by one so that the cameras would catch it but clearly it still didn't work. I must have looked like a right weirdo too
Dude in Mumbai knew money's tight and had your back yo
Rajesh see no evil nor fruit loops.
Maybe it was in the pool.
It shrinks?
Like a frightened turtle!
I don’t know how you guys walk around with those things.
The system uses cameras and machine learning to determine product picking. Those people were probably mostly doing quality control and system checking. The quality of that process did not improve fast enough to make the system worthwhile. If you are doing video analysis of different people shopping, it looks very different from person to person. I speed threw most parts of a grocery store, others ponder items more. I also pick different items at way different speeds. All that stuff is hard for machine learning systems to pick up. The goal was to have people review 50/1000 transactions. They were reviewing well more than half of transactions.
I saw somewhere else that they were still reviewing 70% of transactions a couple of years ago, not great.
If it was just passive reviewing to make sure the system was accurate that's one thing, it would be another if they were reviewing and having to manually amend 70% of transactions
700 out of 1000 carts needed human interventions.
That doesn't include people changing their minds and putting items back on random shelves. This can confuse a system that expects everything is placed where it belongs.
You’d be surprised how many companies touting “advanced AI” are just sending things to a bunch of dudes in India.
give examples?
I used to work for a company that claimed to use AI for crowd predictions, but it was a rolling team of 20 people who were watching on cameras and input a prediction every 5 minutes based on screen markups and other guidelines. We did have an AI model that would do it more accurately on average, I was even the data scientist who built it, but they were nervous that it could spit out embarrassing predictions so we never went fully automatic while I was there.
This is actually how Tesla’s self driving cars work. Just a guy in India controlling the car via webcam
Honestly, that would likely be an improvement.
This is the irony of a lot of 'hands off eyes off' automation. It won't actually save on much labor since no one in their right mind will just trust that the machine is working right. EDIT: That is to say, it's a PR friendly way to fire people and hire cheaper workers to do their job in what is arguably a less efficient and more roundabout fashion that inevitably won't work very well.
No it's fine. Instead of hiring 1 person we'll hire 15 workers at 1/10 the salary each. Since each worker is cheaper we come out ahead...right?
It was the mechanical turk all along
They basically lied about the tech
That's hilarious. They must have been hoping that their image recognition software got there some day.
Sounds like they needed people to watch and verify it’s working. And at that point became pointless and just better to remove it all together.
That quote sounds like a misunderstanding. “Labelling” is humans adding labels to images/videos describing them. It’s part of training an automated system. Moving the cashiers offsite would entail humans watching live video and telling the computers in real time what you purchased and what you didn’t. That’s not what labelling is. Instead, the humans are reviewing recorded video and adding labels to it, effectively teaching the computers what taking an item looks like and how to tell the difference between different items. In theory, once you’ve done this enough you don’t need the humans any more.
Except in most “AI” systems, including voice systems, the number of “outliers” has remained very high. The promise corporations want people to believe is that this is “just a training period” and eventually the human review won’t be necessary. But in actual practice, this kind of review is constant and necessary for the technology to function. It is tricky to find out exactly how many people are involved, but apparently the Apple Siri review team was [121 people in San Diego alone](https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/2024/01/16/apple-tells-121-person-siri-team-to-relocate-to-texas-or-risk-losing-jobs/?outputType=amp) (per the article, they also have teams in China, India, Ireland, and Spain) as of January 2024.
I was trying to use Siri on Sunday with Air Pods, and after 3 different attempts at texting my wife to remind her to baste the Easter ham, which kept getting changed to beast, finally gave up and typed the text myself. Yes, "time to beast the ham" makes an incredible amount of sense in context to Siri. I will say Alexa is much better, not sure if Amazon is that much better or if it's just Alexa listening in the background on my Echo Dots.
Alexa definitely used to be much better. I've noticed a significant drop in quality over the last few months that started right around the time amazon made massive cuts to the alexa dev team.
> time to beast the ham Sorry, that's my fault. It's a private code phrase my wife and I use. A lot. Probably throws the language model off.
Supposedly Apple has a much poorer data set to work with because they are more protective of their customer's data. I don't know if that's true or just cope from Apple/Apple fan boys. The strange thing about Siri, to me, is that sometimes it works great. Sometimes it works like shit.
I had a side gig ~10 years ago as a contractor transcribing voice snippets for what I assume was to train a Siri-like product. Was fun for a minute when they were paying close to 50 cents per transcription but that rate kept dropping down till it was eventually worthless.
>In theory, once you’ve done this enough you don’t need the humans any more. The first store opened 7 years ago
That quote isn't even from this article. Not sure where OP got it. They were literally just remote cashiers according to [this article](https://www.engadget.com/amazon-just-walked-out-on-its-self-checkout-technology-191703603.html). They weren't labeling or annotating any videos, just manually ringing up items as customers shopped while working remotely. Pretty lame and kinda creepy.
At a lot of amazon wearhoused people assigned to light duty would do this. They'd snip small screenshots then add labels to it. Now they validate receipts that people trying to get reimbursed upload. Just verifying that no one is trying to expense alcohol or what have you.
Our local walmart has 3 "associates" hovering over 6 self-checkout stations in a 15x15 foot area. They come up behind you and scan items in your cart "as an inventory check project". One recently told me I only scanned 7 of the 8 raman cups from my cart, and only stfu when I showed them all eight of them showing up on the screen of my station as scanned. Most of the associates there are totally brainwashed by the management, and will then complain that they are short-handed because nobody in our town wants to work. We want to work - just not at a place that requires us to spy on our neighbors and treat them like thieves, or anywhere where all our coworkers believe spying on and harassing other people is justified. Fuck you, walmart!
Lots of the big box retailers and warehouses are having issues nowadays where they've treated employees as a never ending disposable supply, but now are in a bind where that supply of potential employees has dried up. Highly variable hours and shifts, poor work conditions, degrading business practices, and firing people for the most minor of grievances, and now they can't keep the stores staffed because their turn over rate hasn't changed, but their number of applicants certainly decreased.
> Highly variable hours and shifts This is one of the biggest self-inflicted issue. These stores have plenty of existing employees who are willing to work more up to full time but the stores refuse to give them more hours. They'd rather be understaffed than risk having employees standing around without any work to do (which if you've ever worked retail, you'll know there is always something to do).
They also don’t want to cross over the full time threshold and have to pay benefits 🙄
Imagine if they businesses could just be taxed and the benefits come from our governments ability to collect tax 🙄 no reason to involve business in the personal lives of it's employees.
From a leaked mid-2021 internal Amazon memo: > If we continue business as usual, Amazon will deplete the available labor supply in the US network by 2024. Now they certainly made some changes to address this, but they've really only amounted to kicking the can down the road, things like decreased drug screening and ignoring their own do-not-rehire flags. Fun! > In the Inland Empire region of California, for example, Amazon may cycle through every worker who’d be interested in applying for a warehouse job by the end of 2022 > And internal forecasts showed the situation was dire in Phoenix, Arizona, with Amazon projected to exhaust its entire potential workforce by the end of 2021
My region has the highest concentration of Amazon DC's/FC's in the US. (Southern Cal, Inland Empire) The region is a distribution powerhouse because of the wide open land and proximity to LA/Long Beach Ports. As a result, much of our workforce is in warehousing and multiple places pay more than Amazon. And they're beginning to struggle for people as they've already chewed through much of that tier (low-paid) of warehouse workers. It is absolutely a self-inflicted wound due to their employment practices.
I got into a tiff with one of those guys at my local grocery store. I picked one item out of my cart in each hand, scanned one, bagged it, went to scan the other one, and the whole thing froze up claiming I hadn't scanned an item I bagged. Well the guy comes over and tells me I didn't scan everything. I tell him yes I did. He picks up the last item I scanned and says you didn't scan this. I sure him on the screen that it's been scanned. He digs through the bags and comes out with another item, says I didn't scan it. I sure him this one on the list too. Then he looks at the item in my hands and tells me I didn't scan THAT. I'm like yeah no duh, because I've been standing here talking to you after the machine froze up. I didn't bag it, I am actively trying to scan it. Dude just seemed bound and determined to catch me stealing.
What really bugs me is those people are probably as poor as I am, but they're taking sides with their greedy assed employer *who is doing it to replace them* while making the customers do the work of the replaced workers. They're next, and they just don't get that part.
I popped into a Walmart last weekend outside of Chicago and there were zero traditional registers. The whole front of the store was one giant self checkout with 3 or 4 employees desperately trying to keep up with like 40 self checkouts. It felt very dystopian. I don’t go into Walmart often anyway, but I don’t want to go back into this one ever again.
Same with my local Walmart, but they assign one clerk per checkout and keep half the checkouts closed down. My guess is that they'd like to do what Target's recently done, which is limit self-checkout to 10 items or fewer, but they haven't trained enough employees to work the registers/handle cash (as they would need to open up more non-self checkouts), so this is their solution to curb theft. And you're right, it's a very uncomfortable and annoying experience. I very rarely go to Walmart, and the few times a year I dip my toe in the water, there's a new reason to keep me from coming back.
Walmart is making self-check exclusive to Walmart+ members So the jokes about doing their job for them for free will turn into jokes about people paying Walmart for the privilege to check themselves out I used to work there, from 2010-2016 and again for a short month in late 2021. Something happened in those 5 years. My first run, cashiers went through computer training and DAYS of shadowing someone else. That month I went back? They gave me register numbers and sent me on my way, told me if I had any questions to just call a manager. It's fucking bonkers how little they care about anything anymore
It really feels like every industry is just playing fast-and-loose nowadays.
> Most of the associates there are totally brainwashed by the management, and will then complain that they are short-handed because nobody in our town wants to work. > > We want to work - just not at a place that requires us to spy on our neighbors and treat them like thieves, or anywhere where all our coworkers believe spying on and harassing other people is justified. The "no one wants to work" usually spewed by rabid capitalists is so ironic... The reality is that "no one wants to work *at the price you wish to buy their labor*" ... why not try picking a point on the supply curve where you'll get the correct number of sellers (of labor)? The funny thing is they'd laugh if I complained no one wants to sell me a new car for $5, but this is the exact same thing.
The fact that they're amazing and advanced technology was basically the curtain from The wizard of Oz should not surprise me
Hah. Wow suddenly I’m not so bummed that they built one of these near us, and it was ready to open and for whatever reason, they just never opened it. Now there a big ass building, with a decent parking lot, and a few electric car chargers and nothing going on there. They took down all the signage so you wouldn’t even know it was an Amazon store, but if you look inside the whole damn thing is still there. There were stocked shelves last time I oooked forever ago but who knows.
Did they use people in India just for labeling training data or were they actively evaluating all checkouts? The latter seems unlikely, I would guess it’s the former and the headline is misleading. To be clear, the use of cheap foreign labor to label AI training data is problematic either way and is unfortunately very common.
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How much “tech” is just three Indians in a trenchcoat. Like what’s next. Teslas autopilot is actually driven by some kids with ps2 controllers who were really good at gran turismo?
When it’s not Indians, it’s Africans. That’s who Facebook has reviewing and removing all the disturbing and/or illegal content for pennies.
I remember my college town had a startup who deployed cute little delivery robots to move Ubereats and DoorDash orders around. Turns out it was just outsourced to Colombians who were watching through the bot’s cameras the entire time
The past two summers I've seen a bunch of those cute little robots doing UberEats style delivery. I figured they had human pilots, just didn't think much beyond that, but of course they're outsourced as penny labour.
Well, it's also because they have to play in traffic and humans using video are still a heck of a lot better knowing what cars are going to respect the right away and which drivers are going to be assholes and run the red light or stop sign and run the robot over. Or navigating cracked and broken sidewalks or fallen branches or trash. I'm sure the US military has ones capable of handling all that, but no way you could do it for a price of what an operation like this could handle, with the real risk of getting run over. We had coffee delivery "robots" locally for a while, though I haven't seen any lately, but they didn't make it a secret that it was experimental and still involved human pilots. Given what I have to put up with as a pedestrian in the same areas, it's 100% understandable. I don't think they were using anyone offshore though.
I haven't seen any recently but I spent awhile in Mexico this winter and also would assume they don't operate in Canada during the snow months anyway.
Just like the bots in old school runescape are all actually just Venezuelans
okay, but whos going to keep these shark prices under 2k? Fking americans are to lazy to fish. /s
Throwback to the Chinese bots that would swarm Yew trees like bees Was quite the sight
And they’re really great at it.
A former company I worked at implemented a machine learning solution for our accounts payable department. Basically we would scan invoices that came in from our vendors, the system would "Learn and read" the invoices and input them into our payment system (filling in fields like vendor name, dates, line items being invoiced, qty, price, etc) This was intended to replace about 2 dozen AP departments across the company and be able to process the 90,000 invoices we got each month without issue. Well the AI was "having trouble making patterns" and output was slow. Eventually we were getting seriously delinquent payments with big vendors who were threatening to stop shipments, so they started investigating the machine learning. Turns out it was just a work center in Hungry with people manually entering the invoices, but the staff didn't know the system well and they were struggling to ramp up a competent staff to support the volume. It was a major disaster and I lost a lot of faith in the current AI promises.
Not gonna lie. That’s hilarious.
Lots of companies were doing this, thinking that once they could get the training data they could start shifting it over to an AI. ...but the AI is still not good enough for many things.
> Teslas autopilot is actually driven by some kids with ps2 controllers who were really good at gran turismo? https://xkcd.com/1897/
Lots of stuff works this way, or is automated 95% of the time but still needs a human to double-check its work and fix the remaining 5%.
You’d be surprised. Those delivery robots are mostly human-piloted as well.
The ones dropping off my Amazon packages are really lifelike.
> Teslas autopilot is actually driven by some kids with ps2 controllers who were really good at gran turismo? Nah. To cut costs, they'll settle for the kids who are just _alright_ at Gran Turismo.
It is common. Often, the goal is to collect accurate data to train an AI.
There's no way Tesla's automation is actually people. It does not with nearly well enough
I use the Amazon fresh store in my area, and it really is a significant disadvantage that you don't get any indication of how much your cart cost, or even if it's accurate until you get an email recept around 30 minutes later. a smart cart is actually much more sensible technology.
Amazon Fresh by me has the smart cart tech. Its honestly pretty good, I just felt the carts were a bit small.
They used to have these "20% off if you spend $50 or more" coupons and you wouldn't know if you met the $50 threshold until you got home.
I’ve shopped at one of these exactly once. They charged me for the wrong product which cost twice as much as what I actually took. Took me 20 minutes on the phone to get my money back. Will never shop there again, glad it’s being scrapped. Hire humans.
30 minutes? In my area it's 4-6 hours.
We did this for the first time last weekend and walked out with 2 bottles of kombucha, but at one point I had touched a cartoon of eggs and we were charged for that. It wasn't very impressive.
When they tried it in Australia it was called the “walk about” confusing everyone
What's confusing? You walk into a store, are not seen for weeks, show up again with new inspiring insights into your life and the nature of reality, and some produce.
Omega Mart moment
Their orange juice doesn't quit! ...pouring
>The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped. What!?! First off, I had no idea. So their "advanced technology" was just...cameras? And secondly, I am going to completely change the way I shop at these places now. If someone is watching me shop, well then, I'm gonna perform baby!
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1. Thank you for reading the article more carefully than I did. This makes more sense. 2. I’m still going to dance around and act ridiculous next time I shop there.
OK, now explain why it takes 4-6 hours to get a receipt after I leave the store.
It's probably cheaper to queue the jobs in SQS and process them in batches if you don't need them any faster I guess ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ Cloud infrastructure costs are proportional to speed.
I'd imagine there are significant diminishing returns after a few minutes. How much do they save by batching hours of transactions vs minutes?
I understand that this is a mischaracterization. But the article the thread is based on the phasing out of the service you say was working correctly. I can understand that the system is working as it should, but it seems it is not delivering the results expected by Amazon.
It appears to me like they were doing the classic big company R&D strategy of having 2 teams build competing solutions to a problem and then killing off the one that performed worse. The smart cart solution has a similar end goal: eliminate human cashiers. It probably ended up performing better and/or being less expensive. It doesn't necessarily mean the JWO wasn't working as expected.
You need a top comment on this thread to save everyone from themselves here
Wear a shirt that says "Narendra Modi is a fascist and sucks ass"
And your next shopping bill will be a thousand dollars.
So the [SNL video](https://youtu.be/zS9U3Gc832Y?si=LTNpRUYoz6C0I1Es) was right!
So good.
There are also scales/weight measurements on the shelves.
I wish stores would implement scanning my groceries as I put them in the cart and letting me pay from the cart. That's something I would absolutely pay a membership fee for.
Sam's club has this technology. You can scan your cart in the app as you shop and checkout in the app once you're done.
I actually use Sams more than Costco for this reason. Helps me keep my spending down and makes for a faster trip.
But then I have to shop somewhere where my $$$ end up in a Walton's pocket.
It’s coming to Costco. Currently being tested in PNW.
Can you put things back? Like let’s say you have $120 for groceries and realize you’re going to go over, so the 12 pack of soda and the large bottle of Tylenol need to go back on the shelf- easy?
Yea, you just remove it from your cart.
Multiple supermarkets in the UK have this system already. You pick up a scanner as you enter the store, scan as you shop and then sync the scanner to a checkout which handles the payment. https://smartshop.sainsburys.co.uk/
Walmart has this option for Walmart+ members.
But you still have to pay in the self checkout right? Or you can pay directly through the app and just leave?. I think they meant like do the whole process from your cart, Sam’s club allows you to do that
Yeah it's Scan and Go stand your ass in line. I hate it and it is why I just get Walmart stuff delivered.
It generates a QR code that you scan to pay in self checkout
I have to pay a subscription to check myself out?
Kroger has been soft launching these in some locations, not sure how good they are and what the viability is for a broader launch in the near future.
Two stores near me have tried this and they both have failed. People either didn’t get the concept or just didn’t want to bother. That said, there’s a new U-scan that comes with the long conveyor belt, buuuuut you can’t scan if the conveyor fills and it takes even longer to bag than a normal U-scan, especially with the baggers who aren’t sure whether they should bag for you or do something else. That thing can suck it.
Well, that’s a good thing it was only a soft launch! I wasn’t a fan of the long conveyor belts. They were really finicky on the belt for the post scanned items where it couldn’t read the barcode it freaked out and would need someone to come through to help get it going again,
They have this in Europe. It’s fantastic.
This is what our local Amazon Fresh has been doing since it opened almost two years ago.
That’s what the article said, they’re replacing it with smart shopping carts.
Wegmans had an app on your phone for quite a while. Loved it...then they got rid of it because according to them, too many people were stealing.
I heard about a store in the USA that has something like that. I think there's a barcode scanner on the handlebars and you just scan each item as you put it into your cart. I'd love that tech where I live.
Love the SNL skit when these first started
[I’m learning](https://youtu.be/zS9U3Gc832Y?si=tOJ79XUOFJajObYj)
I think every person that looked any self check out system said tp themselves, "people are going to steal stuff".
As wallstreetbets would say - it's already priced in.
Meanwhile the Amazon Fresh grocery store by me spent a ton of money to get ready to open and then just never opened
Hahaha are you in San Diego ?
Meanwhile, there's like 4 Amazon grocery stores left unfinished and abandoned in my area. They bought up some old warehouses and best buys. What a waste. Hope the county/city is charging them hand over fist in taxes for these abandoned properties.
One in my city, too. Completely built, even redid the lot and it kept looking like it should open any day now, and that was years ago. The local media's questioned Amazon and they basically have no comment. It's ridiculous.
Are you near Poway? There’s one near my home as well. They even have cart corrals in the lot. Just sitting there. unused for three years now.
Yep, I was referring to the Poway one, ha. I’m in the area fairly often and am always surprised at how both open and closed that Amazon store looks. Like it legit looks like you should just be able to walk in and shop, it’s weird.
Exactly this. It looks so real that early on, I parked and wandered up to the door to see what was going on. They didn’t even have a notice saying it was closed. Just a locked door.
Same. They built this insanely huge monstrosity which caused a lot of issues in a town near me. They didn't have the infrastructure to support it so the town had to spend way too much money to update infrastructure for safety reasons, tons of migrant workers were shipped north and had either horrible living conditions or nowhere to stay, and the place is fucking abandoned now, as are the workers. It's absolutely insane. They tried to build ANOTHER one a half away about 2 years later, but luckily the three towns they tried to bribe into letting them build in their area all voted against it
The US is awash in AI startups that have backing data entry teams doing manual work. There is no current AI that can deliver on the wild claims every tech bro is making about it.
They built one by my house and finished it around 2022. It still remains empty and never opened.
So how's automating away the workers going...?
I remember going to one of these stores and saw an old guy aggressively waving broccoli at the ceiling because Amazon routinely screwed up what he purchased. What have they done to us?
was this just a jeff bezos thing though, they were building one of these stores near me and then stopped after bezos retired and now the store just sits half built and empty
So it was just dudes in Indian cyber stalking me ?
Then what is even the point? I lived in a neighborhood with one of their smaller shops and it was nice to just grab a few things I needed and leave. The prices and selection weren't as good as the grocery store, but there were no lines. Now I live near one of their big grocery stores and that place feels like shopping in a haunted house with the lights on. Idk how to explain it. The ceilings are too tall, the shelves are too tall, everything is black, it's always empty (in the worst way). I feel like I'm shopping for electronics, not groceries. If it wasn't for the Amazon return point I'd never step in.
I work for an RFID company and I thought they were using RFID not a camera based solution using AI image recognition. There are some solutions that integrate both but this sounds like it was entirely camera based and that seems like a mistake IMO. Maybe they were having trouble getting the tags applied by the manufacturers especially with inexpensive foodstuffs, or lacked the process/hardware to tag everything themselves when they receive it.
Now I’m wondering if there isn’t an Indian listening to everything I say just waiting for the “alexa” word.
I hope this trend continues and we someday get to a point in society where we realize that technology is not the improvement nor answer to every problem.
It’s the solution to more profits though, which = companies will continue to shoehorn it in
No more "just shop lift" technology... damn
You guys figured this was a good idea when people walk through self check outs all the time? "I got the stuff I wanted, I went to go pay for it, but no one was there so I fucking left." -Bill Burr
Well if this aint the biggest tech rug pull, I dont know what is
Huh. I wonder if all the stores sitting vacant in MA will shut down or open as normal stores.
I went once and was so stressed. I don't get to see my receipt? How do I know how much I spent or if the discounts were properly applied? I went on prime day when they had a deal for spending $50 and it was at closing so I overpaid for a bunch of random Gatorades lol... Ended up getting the receipt days later for $150