Current Events > Amazon Walkout was a lie. Was 1000 indians monitoring you. is going away

(+) Yeah! (+)

Amazon is phasing out its checkout-less grocery stores with Just Walk Out technology, first reported by The Information Tuesday. The companys senior vice president of grocery stores says theyre moving away from Just Walk Out, which relied on cameras and sensors to track what people were leaving the store with.

Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. 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.

On Wednesday, GeekWire reported that Amazon Web Services is cutting a few hundred jobs in its Physical Stores Technology team, according to internal emails. The layoffs will allegedly impact portions of Amazons identity and checkout teams.

Instead of Just Walk Out, Amazon is moving towards Dash Carts, a scanner and screen thats embedded in your shopping cart, allowing you to checkout as you shop. These offer a more reliable solution than Just Walk Out. Amazon Fresh stores will also feature self check out counters from now on, for people who arent Amazon members.

Were rolling out Amazon Dash Cart, our smart-shopping carts, said an Amazon spokesperson to Gizmodo. Amazon confirmed this feature is replacing its Just Walk Out technology in existing stores.
Just Walk Out was first introduced in 2016, presenting Amazons biggest and boldest innovation in grocery shopping. The technology seemed incredible, but there were some stumbles. It often took hours for customers to receive receipts after leaving the store, largely because offshore cashiers were rewatching videos and assigning items to different customers. The system of scanners and video cameras in each store is also incredibly expensive.

According to The Information, 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022. This widely missed Amazons internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales. Amazon called this characterization inaccurate, and disputes how many purchases require reviews.
The primary role of our Machine Learning data associates is to annotate video images, which is necessary for continuously improving the underlying machine learning model powering, said an Amazon spokesperson to Gizmodo. However, the spokesperson acknowledged these associates validate a small minority of shopping visits when AI cant determine a purchase.

Amazon Fresh, the e-commerce giants grocery store first launched in 2007, has just over 40 locations around the United States. The company also owns Whole Foods, and many of Amazon Freshs experiments are seen as precursors for the large chain.
The company is reportedly keeping Just Walk Out technology in a small number of Fresh stores in the United Kingdom, and some of its Amazon Go convenience stores. Amazon has also implemented Just Walk Out technology at several ballparks around the country. These locations will keep the technology going.

amazon dash cart is just gonna be midgets hiding under mirrors pulling out a scanner gun when you're going to open the fridge for that gallon of milk

so this mean they saw me doing that little shuffle to unstick my balls from my leg? :v God...

so this means they saw me doing that little shuffle to unstick my balls from my leg? :v God...

Wonder how many "new exciting tech" turns out to be something like this. Magic trick level misdirection.

AI? That's just a bunch of Indians too; drawing your weird pervert prompts and writing your resume for you.

TC you seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding about how a machine learning system would work

the people are there to train the algorithm

on a simple level the AI doesnt know what a banana is until someone has told it what a banana is

thats what the people watching the footage were doing. Tagging videos to train the system

TC you seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding about how a machine learning system would work

the people are there to train the algorithm

on a simple level the AI doesnt know what a banana is until someone has told it what a banana is

thats what the people watching the footage were doing. Tagging videos to train the system

so this means they saw me doing that little shuffle to unstick my balls from my leg? :v God...

LMAO! This is like creating a gundam, but inside its really powered by people moving it mechanically.

LMAO! This is like creating a gundam, but inside its really powered by people moving it mechanically.

Except that model training doesn't happen in real time in a store that has been open for half a decade. It's entirely possible Amazon has a building full of Indians sitting there doing data labeling for image recognition, but that's not at all what was happening here and even if it was this wouldn't be the time to do it.

"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 Outs machine learning model."

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.

The primary role of our Machine Learning data associates is to annotate video images, which is necessary for continuously improving the underlying machine learning model powering, said an Amazon spokesperson to Gizmodo.

it seems like the problem was they were still having people working on the training and it wasnt getting any better

They were doing a poor job (amazon) such that is was basically just 1000 Indians checking your receipt and they are now discontinuing it because very likely the model is literal garbage.

Fyi Walkout came in 2018

hmm this sounds familiar. where did I see this.

OH!

Youre oversimplifying a complex and interesting technical challenge just to dunk on amazon imo. It wasnt just 1000 Indians checking your receipt, it was 1000 Indians attempting to train an ai model (and ultimately failing)

i get that the idea of automating checkout cuts out cashier jobs, but this doesnt do it in a way that inconveniences everyone so its different from your typical self checkout

Lmao

Except that model training doesn't happen in real time in a store that has been open for half a decade. It's entirely possible Amazon has a building full of Indians sitting there doing data labeling for image recognition, but that's not at all what was happening here and even if it was this wouldn't be the time to do it.

Wasnt the store always a, for lack of a better term, a beta? These stores werent widespread. They were obviously there to develop and prove the concept and it unfortunately didnt work out

True. My frustration is more with how much tech blogs over-hyped the concept only to find out that, as usual, it was a lot of smoke and mirrors. Machine Learning is just such a hotbed of false goods.

But even so, there's something strangely dystopian about having a "beta" for something like... a grocery store.

Youre oversimplifying a complex and interesting technical challenge just to dunk on amazon imo. It wasnt just 1000 Indians checking your receipt, it was 1000 Indians attempting to train an ai model (and ultimately failing)

i get that the idea of automating checkout cuts out cashier jobs, but this doesnt do it in a way that inconveniences everyone so its different from your typical self checkout

Youre oversimplifying a complex and interesting technical challenge just to dunk on amazon imo. It wasnt just 1000 Indians checking your receipt, it was 1000 Indians attempting to train an ai model (and ultimately failing)

i get that the idea of automating checkout cuts out cashier jobs, but this doesnt do it in a way that inconveniences everyone so its different from your typical self checkout

But as s0nicfan pointed out, if you actually wanted to train an AI model this would be an ineffective way of doing it.

There's a reason when this store was announced that no one mentioned "Oh for now we're still training it and everything will involve human intervention".

Maybe it failed because they were doing it in an ineffective way