Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores

gizmodo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 769 posts

Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores

#111

Post by noodlesUK »

underyx wrote: post #12
noodlesUK wrote: post #6

I think that the scan-as-you-shop style systems are definitely the next realistic step for grocery stores. I really like using them, as they allow me to put stuff directly into my bags as I go. I think a further improvement on a system like that would be to use the cheap RFID tech (UHF EPC) so that when you walk through the anti-theft barriers, the system knows exactly what you got, and then there's no need to scan a…

See also the RFID tags Uniqlo and Decathlon use for self-checkout. You just place your shopping bag in a bin and it reads all the items within in a second.

My guess is that right now this isn't viable for lower margin food products. Uniqlo and decathlon probably don't sell that much for less than £10. It's going to be a while before you can reasonably do that for a pint of milk.

Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores

#112

Post by rrr_oh_man »

rchaud wrote: post #58
vultour wrote: post #29

Wait what? When did they reveal it's offloaded to workers in India? I remember this being touted as fully automated when it was announced, surely being watched by strangers from creepy angles would discourage a large portion of customers.

ChatGPT is also trained by the efforts of thousands of people in low income countries getting paid a pittance. We don't hear about it much because it's easier to credit a few suits at the top as harbingers of the future.

Yep https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores

#114

Post by Animats »

randmeerkat wrote: post #92
kbos87 wrote: post #73

> Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. I know this is ripe to use as a way to dunk on Amazon, but I sincerely doubt that it was as inane as it sounds. They likely had this workforce to train a system that they hoped would eventually operate autonomously. That being said, it sounds like it never panned…

> They likely had this workforce to train a system that they hoped would eventually operate autonomously. That being said, it sounds like it never panned out. And this is why I think current “AI” technologies are a dead end. Once the rest of the market realizes that maybe we’ll finally get past this “AI” hype bubble.

That's an interesting point. Amazon tried an AI application where errors were a cost to Amazon, rather than to the consumer. They failed to make it work well enough to use.

What AI applications are in use where the error cost is imposed on the company using them, not the consumer? Reading paper checks and mail envelopes come to mind. Those are automated and work well. Waymo's automatic driving, but not Tesla's. What else?

This is a useful metric for gauging real progress.

Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores

#115

Post by graemep »

weinzierl wrote: post #55
beardyw wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, same in the UK. Most stores have scan as you shop, but most people do self checkout. I get the impression scan as you shop is seen as being a bit prissy.

As a German it is always a culture shock to see how popular self checkout is in the UK, even though I see it used more often recently in Germany too. I think Germany is about a decade behind...

I hate self-checkout. As far as I am concerned you are a decade behind us in a decline!

Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores

#117

Post by philipkglass »

RankingMember wrote: post #95
jonnycat wrote: post #89

Can we start a list of technological magic that is actually "1000 people in India watching and labeling videos" (or functional equivalent)?

sort of surprised it wasn't just using their Mechanical Turk site

Mechanical Turk suffers from coordinated fraud by people who want to be paid for doing a task without actually doing it [1]. The company I work for had to spend more engineering effort on building an internal reviewing-the-reviewers system to make it useful than we spent on the original Mechanical Turk integration. I'm not surprised that Amazon would avoid Mechanical Turk for higher consequence applications.

[1] e.g. https://timryan.web.unc.edu/2020/12/22/fraudulent-responses-...

Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores

#118

Post by nicklecompte »

jonnycat wrote: post #89

Can we start a list of technological magic that is actually "1000 people in India watching and labeling videos" (or functional equivalent)?

I wonder if GPT-4's performance has degraded in recent months because there are less human data contractors on standby to answer questions GPT flags as low-confidence. GPT might be "refusing to answer questions" because it's not able to escalate tough queries to a human.

Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores

#119

Post by rrr_oh_man »

Cheer2171 wrote: post #53
freedomben wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a huge privacy advocate and don't think stores should track what you buy at all, so don't confuse what I say next with the is/ought fallacy. They already have perfect resolution and data retention of everything you buy at checkout time when it's scanned, plus they can verify your identity rather than have to rely on facial recognition or other things. I don't think this is any creepier than what they already do s…

The scandal where Target data scientists bragged to reporters about knowing when teenage girls are pregnant before their fathers broke in 2012, and they said they were doing it since 2002. It was based entirely on data mining purchase histories with rewards cards at the register. No fancy AI or facial recognition needed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits....

Imho more like an anecdote than a sourced story, but a good one nonetheless.

Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores

#120

Post by jcrawfordor »

timr wrote: post #86
throw1230 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, they were using camera technology and QR codes

It always seemed so needlessly complex, relative to well-established RFID tech -- Uniqlo can count the number and type of garments in a pile in a big bucket, and compute an invoice from that. Even if you couldn't do this at the exit, seems like it would have been a far easier lift to incorporate the same idea into shopping carts or baskets all along.

The cost-per-unit on RFID product tags (EPCs) has tended to limit them to products with a relatively high margin and a relatively high theft potential---clothing being the most obvious example and the most common application of EPCs, with retailers all the way down to WalMart using them for apparel.

You'll note that WalMart doesn't even use the EPCs at POS, which is telling: for most retailers, the main advantage of EPCs is far more actionable alarms at the exit. So they're limited to items where loss rates make the added cost worth it.

The problem is that the grocery industry has notoriously low margins, and the unit price of EPC tags can be the entire margin on a lot of products. On the one hand, Amazon may have been trying to work around the need for higher-cost tags to roll out this kind of automation. On the other hand, I have heard anecdotally that Amazon Fresh pricing was relatively high, so maybe EPCs would have been a wiser use of their extra revenue.

Post reply on HN