It's great that they faced essentially no consequences for this. A sure sign that we have a functional and sane market.
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.
I get that this is a message board for YC, so lying about your company's tech is considered almost a virtue but that is an unreasonably big lie to tell without getting your hand-slapped by some regulatory body or investor backlash.
No one cared what I was doing. Is this what it feels like to shop when you're not black?
Still, would love to see a breakdown of why it didn't improve. Regardless of the accuracy at launch, I'd think that advances in AI would have been massively to their advantage. I wonder if security degradation hit them hard.
The entire system depends on a level of social trust that doesn't exist in American cities today. Similarly, the "Dash Cart" seems like a cheaper and easier way to accomplish the same thing.
At the end of the day, there's also a mismatch in the use case. If I'm going to a smaller format store, like they had, I'm not buying a ton of stuff. Self checkout is great, and minimal friction.
I'd think that improving the UX of self-checkout gets 80% of the way there with way less fraud, way less theft, and way less technology.
Still, I think it's wicked cool they took a big shot.
I know someone that worked on the project in the early days. It was always incredibly difficult technology, they were always behind on their accuracy targets, and the solutions were increasingly kludgy as they layered more and more complex systems on top. An honorable failure.
A lot of smart people really tried to make it work.
But this is tech and you just lie because hardly anyone in the investor class knows enough to call you out on it or they are just going with the lie to make a buck off of other rubes.
Privacy concerns aside, I thought it was a cool project. I agree that “convenience store” was probably not the best target but I think it was an effective enough proof of concept (creating a decent sized chain of them probably wasn’t the best idea) . I’ve seen the system used more effectively in smaller situations like stadium concessions, where the duration of the transactions needs to be very short to facilitate throughout.
Indians, AI, whatever, meh.
It would be a shame if this shared experience was taken over by third worlders.
Meanwhile the distinction between the US and the so-called "third world" seems to become less apparent and less relevant every day. Indian teenagers need jobs too, don't they? More power to them.
For a full fat grocery store. With zero change or adjustment to the rest of the grocery store. And customers weirdly like self checkouts even when they are a dramatically worse outcome (compared to the highish bar of well trained cashiers)
An idle self-checkout machine costs the store almost nothing. An idle cashier costs the store wages. So the stores will always skimp on cashiers, leading to lines, wasting my time.
Regulation lags so far behind that you can get away with bad behavior long enough that, by the time regulation catches up, you can buy your way out of consequences.
Example: Tesla Cybercab with safety drivers, or Starship Technologies "autonomous" robots, which are remote controlled delivery robots.
And in fact, Tesla was sued for securities violations by shareholders over the cybercab.
https://kehoelawfirm.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Tesla-Cl...
Starship Technologies is a private company.