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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

The 1000 Indians story was completely incorrect though. They has 1000 people in India tagging the videos after the fact for improvements to the machine learning algorithms. They weren't watching in real time.

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There are reports that 70% of the sales had to be manually reviewed by the team in India (https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actual...), so no, they weren't just training algorithms.

That article in particular was the one that was debunked. It was based on a false rumor.

Debunked where? The only response is from Amazon (in the same article), who are disputing the number but still admitting that the team did intervene when needed.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/17/24133029/amazon-just-walk...

And they did not give their own number, so even the dispute is very weak.

The 1000 Indians working to track all activities remotely was/is a false story.

See link below:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7186447...

Can you please produce any evidence that it was debunked? I can't find anything.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/17/24133029/amazon-just-walk...

Please provide evidence of your claim.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/17/24133029/amazon-just-walk...

From TFA: "While Amazon insists these reports are “erroneous,” it doesn’t deny that humans aren’t involved with the process at all. Instead, Amazon says its workers are tasked with annotating AI-generated and real shopping data to improve the Just Walk Out system — not run the whole thing. “This is no different than any other AI system that places a high value on accuracy, where human reviewers are common,” Dilip Kumar, the vice president of AWS Applications, writes in the post."

Don't see how this refutes any claim. If anything, Amazon is confirming they have human intelligence involved, they're just leaving the quantity/portion ambiguous, as behooves them. Do you have Amazon equity?

Nevermind, I see from your profile, you do have Amazon equity.

"I used to run reddit.com's servers, then I ran Site Reliability at Netflix, then I worked on making Alexa faster and smarter."

Real astroturf hours here. Please keep your Amazon apologia to yourself.

For what it’s worth, I purchased from one of these Amazon stores every day for over a year. After leaving the store, it would typically take 2+ hours before my purchases were registered in the Amazon app. I agree that there probably was a large degree of automation but based on how the store worked, there didn’t need to be an army of “real time” reviewers for humans to be involved in each individual purchase… it’s totally plausible based on what I experienced that Amazon did have an army of people involved in the standard purchase path.

I think it was from a video I watched a day or two ago, describing how with those uber and lyft and other order delivery services that consumers apparently are placing those orders wtih the services, picking up the items themselves and walking out, and then when the actual delivery person arrives, order is gone, reported as missing, the consumer also reports similarly, even though they picked up the orders themselves, that this is apparently happening more widespread commonly that still is vulnerable with business infrastructures to not prevent the exploit from taking place, I am curious how this may affect industry standards with regards to this concept because I never witnessed it but I wouldn't be surprised if it is not even that widely realized about the issue yet thereby enabling more theft and loss and damages and whatnot.

How many times can one's order be 'stolen' like this before a pattern emerges and the account is banned? This is also fraud and because it requires using the internet, it's going to lead to felony charges.

If memory serves me well, I think some guys in Florida found out how many times they could do it and got busted for fraud against the delivery companies.

System caught the anomaly, humans investigated, law enforcement made the arrests.

Wonder if you could some how arbitrage your own food delivery...

Same here.

My theory is that purchase tracking is done automatically via AI, while humans are on the loop to check the feed of people taking each item and verifying that the amounts are correct before charging.

It makes sense. Even if your entire AI system is 99.9% accurate, you want a human to detect and remove that one-in-a-thousand mistake.

I have a question: was the customer billed based on whatever the machine learning algorithm determined, or based on what humans decided after the fact? In other words, was the humans' job to just provide training data for future versions of the machine learning algorithm, or to manually fix the algorithm's errors and prevent over-billing?

IIRC, they could correct your bill after the fact.

I used to joke with others that shoplifted items should be retroactively free - as long as you self report after the fact. (Extra useful training data...)

From my experience you just weren’t actually billed until they were done, it could be many hours after you left the store.

Having not read the original story, this makes more sense.

"1000 Indians that were watching people shop at the Amazon Go stores" ...

Conjured up picture in my head of an Indian man inside an Amazon Go store sitting behind a registerless counter. What his purpose would be, I don't know.

Funny story. The amazon go stores do have a register at the counter now.

But as far as I can tell, they rotate positions. There's never really anyone standing at that counter. If you walk up to the counter someone will come from the sandwich counter or restocking the shelves or whatever.

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