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Comment by alsodumb | Hacker News Reader

It's just a tech-illiterate journalist who can't seem to understand the difference between "annotators watching and labeling videos to validate the model" vs "people watching the videos live to remotely decide the cost of every user's purchase".

Or maybe they do know the difference, but wanted to bait audience.

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Or it's a tech-literate journalist who knows that usually it's the latter and they have vague plans to transition to the former later.

always mturk all the way down

I thought so too, but the article says this:

> 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022.

If you required a high accuracy like 99.9% to charge a customer, you could have a system that was mostly automatic but still needed human review when the model isn’t confident enough. It’s hard to know exactly what this means without a lot more details, which Amazon is unlikely to provide.

Wonder if that 30% include the cases where someone walks in, strolls around, and walks out without buying something? Which I see people do all the time, interested in the concept.

> 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022.

Or not ...

If it was just a matter of building up a large enough training set and corresponding model do you really think Amazon would be abandoning a technology they spent so much time, money and resources on, in a somewhat embarassing manner?

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