Amazon Fresh is moving away from a feature of its grocery stores where customers could skip checkout altogether.

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

  • Darkassassin07@lemmy.caEnglish
    1864·
    9 months ago

    According to The Information, 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022. This widely missed Amazon’s internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales.

    Lmao.

    • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
      83·
      9 months ago

      idk…

      According to The Information, 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022. This widely missed Amazon’s internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales. Amazon called this characterization inaccurate, and disputes how many purchases require reviews.

      if Amazon wasn’t the source of this number, where is it coming from?

      • schmidtster@lemmy.worldEnglish
        211·
        9 months ago

        Amazon was using people to train the model, so at the starts it would be 100%, but eventually the goal would be to get near zero, maybe the average was 70% but when the ended it was near 40%?

      • errer@lemmy.worldEnglish
        128·
        9 months ago

        If the numbers don’t match your narrative, just make them up! That’s the Gizmodo way.

      • Darkassassin07@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        9 months ago

        Probably the ‘1000 people in india’ reviewing that footage.

        The rest of the articles linked in the above one are pay walled and I don’t care enough to dig further.

      • Harbinger01173430@lemmy.worldEnglish
        91·
        9 months ago

        Meanwhile, my college machine learning model made to recognize three types of flower by sepal length: 92% success rate.

      • iAmTheTot@kbin.social
        1310·
        9 months ago

        I’m not an expert but uh, I don’t think this had anything to do with AI. It was just a scanner in a basket.

        • Darkassassin07@lemmy.caEnglish
          341·
          9 months ago

          Scanners in baskets/carts is what they are replacing this with.

          The ‘Just Walk Out’ system was as the name implies; grab product and leave. No scanners, no checkout, no cashiers; just cameras watching you shop, and a heavy implication that that video is primarily watched by AI to determine your purchases. AFAIK the only scanners were to read a qr code on entry to associate you with your amazon account; the rest is hands off. Or at least that’s what it’s supposed to be. Seems there’s a lot more labour under the hood than the advertising said. Shocker.

            • Ottomateeverything@lemmy.worldEnglish
              13·
              9 months ago

              Yes, because when you run systems like that, you use the AI, and you have the people as a fallback for when the AI fails.

              It was primarily watched by people in India because the AI was failing the vast majority of the time.

              So yeah, the state of the art AI is… Failing at its job 70% of the time. Instead of the hoped goal of 5%.

              • Harbinger01173430@lemmy.worldEnglish
                11·
                9 months ago

                Can’t they just…add sensors to the items and add them to your Amazon account cart anytime you add pick one, dunno, using some proximity stuff from the phone itself, then charge for the items once the phone leaves the store?

                • 0xD@infosec.pubEnglish
                  5·
                  9 months ago

                  Sure they can, it just isn’t as simple as “just” ;) How do you, for example, determine who picked which item if two people are standing next to each other? Or if something is put back?

                  Sure, a proof of concept will always work. Building it for the real world is a completely and utterly different beast.

        • Squizzy@lemmy.worldEnglish
          22·
          9 months ago

          It did have AI, the cameras adjusted based on location, proximity, lighting, etc. They tracked you through the store and gavenyou a unique ID were trained to manage you being blocked from view by other shoppers.

    • pedroapero@lemmy.mlEnglish
      29·
      9 months ago

      This feels so creepy to, being watched spending your money by slaves on the other side of the globe, and Amazon pretending it to be automated !

    • Brkdncr@lemmy.worldEnglish
      94·
      9 months ago

      I sat in front of one of these ideas at an airport. People are just dumb. They couldn’t figure out how to get into the store. They didn’t understand how to pay by just leaving.

      • DeathsEmbrace@lemmy.mlEnglish
        472·
        9 months ago

        Never blame people for an issue with a system. If you have to blame the people then just admit your system is shit. It’s called idiot proofing and when theirs a bigger idiot proof it some more.

        • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
          171·
          9 months ago

          I’ve said the same elsewhere, and the idiots here downvote to oblivion.

          It’s so weird. This is a basic rule of building anything that engages with the public. How can anyone assume that everyone will simply “get” how an interface works?

        • yiliu@informis.landEnglish
          6·
          9 months ago

          This is sort of implicitly true. You can’t get people’s money if they can’t figure out how to use your product/service.

          At the same time… People are pretty dumb.