This is the funniest dang story in the tech world all year.
Amazon is getting rid of its cashier-less tech less than 8 years after launch, and as it turns out, the "artificial intelligence" running the shops was mostly 1,000 contractors in some room in India that were watching you grab things off the shelves.
No joke!
From Ars Technica:
When the technology was announced in 2016, Amazon's sales pitch asked, "What if we could weave the most advanced machine learning, computer vision, and AI into the very fabric of a store so you never had to wait in line?" The store was filled with 100-plus cameras and rigid item locations, all designed to try to make AI-powered computer vision checkout possible.
A May 2023 report from The Information revealed the myriad tech problems Amazon was still having with the idea six years after the initial announcement. The report said that "Amazon had more than 1,000 people in India working on Just Walk Out as of mid-2022 whose jobs included manually reviewing transactions and labeling images from videos to train Just Walk Out's machine learning model."
How often were these outsourced Indian contractors used?
70% of the time after years of trying to teach AI to do it!
Training is part of any AI project, but it sounds like Amazon wasn't making much progress, even after years of working on the project. "As of mid-2022, Just Walk Out required about 700 human reviews per 1,000 sales, far above an internal target of reducing the number of reviews to between 20 and 50 per 1,000 sales," the report said.
That's just embarrassing!
This tech was used at 20 Amazon Go convenience stores, 40 Amazon Fresh grocery stores, two Whole Foods stores, 30 shops in US sports stadiums, 12 airports, and a university in Arlington, Virginia.
Here's what it looked like:
Amazon convinced us this was the future of shopping, but Vijay and Gupta were actually watching us shop the whole time!
Amazon is now scrapping the tech entirely.
Amazon will be switching to a more reasonable cashier-less format: shopping carts with built-in checkout screens and scanners. Customers can leisurely scan items as they throw them in the "Amazon Dash Cart," and the screen will let them instantly see a running total of their purchases.
A few reactions:
What a time to be alive!
P.S. Now check out our latest video 👇
