Comment by mjr00

The go tech is amazing in 2 places: airport and stadium beverage tunnels. There's a premium price and high volume in those areas. The go tech has basically revolutionized the speed of getting a beer and a dog at the stadium here in Seattle. I can be back in my seat in 4 minutes including the bathroom now which for NFL means I can literally be back in a commercial break sometimes.

no idea how much they make on it, but it's a game changer in that small area.

What’s still not clear to me about this story is if there was ever live human monitoring of shoppers. Did the low confidence resolution occur in real time, at some point between the customer grabbing the item and getting their bill?

I get being proud of the work done but if they scrapped the project after 10 years because of feasibility I don't think the tech rolled out at the start was "working" as intended.

Could it be improved by requiring the customers to use a "smart" shopping basket that can read RFC codes from the product packaging? In combination with vision tech it should give a relatively higher accuracy.

If so, is the reason why it is not used related to cost?

Obligatory /disclaimer/disclosure/. (Don't worry, most HNrs get this wrong for some reason. I will be downvoted for pointing this out, but whatever. It's a meaningful difference to those that understand.)

As soon as you get to ~99% accuracy, you probably don't need to go further.

If the customer is accidentally billed for an orange instead of a tangerine 1% of the time, the consumer probably won't notice or care, and as long as the errors aren't biased in favour of the shop, regulators and the taxman probably won't care either.

With that in mind, I suspect Amazon Go wasn't profitable due to poor execution not an inherently bad idea.

Why would they face consequences? Every store has video surveillance that can be reviewed.

They trusted their tech enough to accept the false-positive rate, then worked to determine / validate their false positive rate with manual review, and iterate their models with the data.

From a consumer perspective the point is that you can "just walk out". They delivered that.

It's also pretty par for the course from Amazon automation initiatives. Like Glacier being marketed as robotic tape drive loaders, where in reality it is mostly just regular old S3 running on the outdated server clusters.

Isn't the consequence that that they're shutting the stores down?

It’s autonomous 80% of the time. That’s significant. Put another way, they only had to hire 1000 people instead of 5000.

What's the crime? If lying about AI capabilities is a crime we have some billionaires in big trouble.

20% seems like a "significant portion" to me

20% is an incredibly high number though, if a store has 400 people/hour that means you're manually reviewing 80 transactions per hour, over one transaction per minute. That's multiple human employees.

Proven "false." I've noticed that if one admits the truth with a dismissive or offended tone, you can just continue to claim the lie and through sheer force of will people will still go with it.

I think people just think that they must be misunderstanding something; that nobody could claim one thing while offering evidence of its opposite. 1/5 of purchases lose their significance.

Nothing has been "proven". The original story was The Information (paywalled article) reshared by Business Insider [1] and claimed that 70% of the transactions were reviewed by an indian. The source was an anonymous source.

Business Insider also reached out to Amazon at the time and a spokesperson denied that actually reviewed any transactions.

This "proven false" thing is just another anonymous source claiming that actually it was only 20%.

So you actually have no proof of anything, you just have three persons claiming three different things (0%, 20% and 70%).

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actual...

Transactions or grabs? Cuz I grab >5 things every time..so it stands to reason Indians always reviewed me.

I went to Lidl UKs first walk out shop a few weeks ago. You get the bill and receipts about 40 minutes after you've left.

It certainly felt like it could have been sent off to a lower paid country for a human to tot up.

Also consider you're in the store for what, 10 mins - that's a lot of video processing presumably using state of the art CV models. It's quite possibly cheaper to pay a human than rent the H100 to do it.

Essentially the thinking went. If everyone is remote, why not hire remote workers from countries that are a lot cheaper. Suddenly you had a hard time finding contractors and FTEs from those countries because everyone was hiring them. At the same time it got really hard for entry level developers in the USA to find work.

The supply/demand curve shifted and now those workers are becoming more expensive while domestic workers are becoming cheaper.

India specifically is in the middle of a massive years-long labor movement that is changing the terms of work there and I believe shifting the degree of alignment with western corporate outsourcing though I'm not very informed about the details.

Scale is beyond comprehension though, there were 250 million people on strike one day last summer. This is not ever really covered in western media or mentioned on HN for reasons that are surely not interesting or worth pondering at all.

Great question. I'm not an economist so I have no idea why. The outsourcing rates I've all seen have gotten way higher in the past ~10 years though.

Maybe. I'd really want to know what percent of items (not transactions) needed review. 1,000 people to oversee how much revenue?

Theoretically if it was 99% computer and 1% human, that's enough to mess up the economics but it's not a bait and switch like some companies have done.

I remember this case the one who put "Actually Indians" in my mind. What other instances do you know?

(Not to refute your point, of course, I am just curious)