Amazon ADMITS AI Grocery Store Was Totally Fake 

AI = Anonymous Indians

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain 😅

I love that we’re putting all our eggs in three AI basket and it turns out AI was just a call center India and a glorified text to speech bot.

"fake it till you make it"

As a publically held company, was Amazon committing a crime by misleading the public and its investors in this manner?

I don’t even know who this appeals to. The entire thing sounds dystopian

That snl sketch about people not trusting this system really aged well it seems

So is Alexa really some Indian call center always listening for the wake word "Alexa"?

This isn't a new thing. I remember about 10 years back, an Israeli company put out a camera that used "AI" to provide a printout describing the object you took a picture of. Turns out, it was just sending the picture to a person in India who would write the description. As someone who has worked for multiple big tech companies, I can tell you that a high percentage of "AI" is just people in India.

AI is actually not as advanced as they said. Its a scam to boost stock price.

Go to NYC, Chicago, or LA/San Fran. People are already "just walking out" without Amazon lmaoo

The AI turned out to be RI - Remote Indians 🤭

I'm trying to imagine what the pitch meeting was like. "Okay, we will outsource the checkout to callcenters in India, but we will call it Ai" Did noone think to step in? Ever?

Big tech outsourcing to not as developed countries for cheap labor 🤦

Yes, of course. Also, Alexa...powered by a 1000 tech workers..Alexa isn't turning on your lights..someone in India is doing that.

*HERE IS BULGARIA WE HAVE BUSY HIGH STREETS* you know why...? NO AMAZON They regard local shops as an important social good here and they legislate to keep them

I work in tech. Some of these Natural Language Processing NLPs can be good for some tasks, they can look up information and give you results you want faster than doing a google search in a lot of cases, they can do math and other things, maybe. But there's a lot of things they just aren't good at and are really just being overhyped. One more thing while I'm on a rant: Taking this idea further, I read story after news story about how AI is going to take all these jobs. I would urge news outlets to be a little skeptical of this-- I'm also reading stories about "AI washing" which means that companies are claiming that they are using AI and it's causing layoffs when really the truth is we're in a recession and the company wants to look good when it announces layoffs. "AI washing" can refer to pretty much any way a company is lying about AI

What if gpt was just a bunch of indians typing REALLY quickly?

I used to shop at one of these that closed down and I have to say it was the most bizarre experience ever. It was like a shoplifting simulator. It's the most bizarre thing to just go in a store and basically pick things up and then walk out the door. The only interaction beyond grabbing things from the shelf that you do is you present your phone as you enter but after that you have no interaction whatsoever with anybody or any machine. Even after doing it a few times it still felt strange to just walk out like that. As you know even self check-in you have to go through all the motions it's just with a computer screen instead of a person. Here there's no motion except walking

I always suspected there was something fishy going on with that "tech" ever since Linus Sebastien did a video about it over 6 years ago. It felt way too advanced for what the state of our current tech is, let alone for what it was then.

This is why speeding cameras dont work either.. same concept.

Some stores in Japan do have this technology. But you dump your goods in a container and it reads all the RFIDs. You pay and you leave.

Reminds me of that Seinfeld episode when Kramer was the voice of Moviephone.

I live in Chicago and they built a brand new building and were supposedly going to be putting the Amazon grocery store there. It’s been empty for months and months. Wonder what will happen.

This all feels like we're slowly reinventing the automat, a concept that has been around since the 1890s.

There's been stores like this in Japan, but i wonder if those are more unmanned than the amazon ones

Robot chefs here we come!!!

Ten years ago the drive through at a major burger company was taking orders from Texas while the restaurant was in Los Angeles.

This was obvious years ago. Amazon leased, built, refused to open, and now probably won’t pay for or open alot of locations, including in Philadelphia. It now makes sense that the location next to my gym is still empty with no signage for at least two years. One of the richest companies in the world will stiff everyone. Except the government they pay for.

I remember watching one of their videos with no context. I thought I was watching 20 minutes of shoplifting footage.

I don’t want EVERYTHING technologically convenient.

I think the tech does basically work, but the problem is you need such high confidence like 99.999% accurancy or something. Consumers might let some mistakes slide and still use the stores, but if you got charged /double charged erroneously once out of every 100 items you touched or something like that, it would become noticeable almkst every trip to the store. Or if the store didnt charge you for x% of items you took because the AI wasnt sure, they could end up taking a loss. Its kind if like self driving cars, the real world and human behavior is so unpredictable, its a huge problem space for AI to get good at.

I had a mocha made by a robot in Seattle... Was delicious

I sometimes wonder if that what other platforms were doing

how do they handle returns? do they have to bring the expired milk to a kohl's?

I have an amazon fresh near me. So many people were charged for things they put back.

Most customer service call centers are in India, Philippines or some country like this. I've called AT&T, Microsoft, Comcast and others. They all have their customer service outsourced to one of those countries.

I seriously thought this was an Onion article.

The power of outsourcing.

Wild how it’s legal to hire below market wages through a digital workforce.

RFIDs: *exist RFIDs: "AM I A JOKE TO YOU!?!"

It doesn’t appear to be working in America either. The Rochester Michigan store is closed. The Sterling Heights store never opened. And they claim the Clinton Township store is waiting on the Saint Clair Shores store to open. I give up…and my Indian doctor yells at me enough. I don’t need my shopping cart doing it too.

Self checkout is used to eliminate those expensive and overpriced checkout cashiers...of course as the customers are walking away with the merchandise and now the cost of tech makes companies wonder if the cashiers were actually cheaper

I mean, they could have digital carts that scan the product as it goes in. Seems a hell of a lot simpler than this.

Every other day I'm repeatedly reminded that new, innovative business in general is just a scam, the real question is 'who are the ones getting ripped off?'

In grocery they have to have someone setting the prices and stocking the shelves. Produce prices fluctuate more than anything. If the prices were set properly in the machine each week all the food has to have on them is a name ID number. Although once people learn how things are chipped, they can be switched out for cheaper item microchips or blocked from scanning with metal. So a security person would have to be at the door. Looking at the automatic receipts to see if you actually got 12 packs of gum or there are 12 steaks in the cart being charged as gum. Or you have a tin foil covered mound with an apple on top & the receipt says you’re just buying an apple.

This is not true. They said only a very small minority was reviewed by humans.

I think this is misleading... They definitely used sensors and cameras etc. if the computer wasn't sure, it would fall back on a human. The receipt time had a built in buffer in case it had to go to a human

Self checkout means I steal about $10 to $15 worth of goods, every time.

I went through one of these stores at the Las Vegas Airport…it was so creepy and uncomfortable, I HATED IT! Also, good luck if your kids want some candy after school…lil jimmy better have a credit card.

I was wondering why my shopping cart kept telling me that my tikka masala recipe was wrong

As a non American I never have used Amazon never will

This story made me laugh more than anything I've seen on RU-vid in quite a while. Thanks for the comic relief.

This sort of tactic is not new. Uber did the same thing to test demand before it launched.

I’m sure those 1,000 Indians were intended to “train the AI” but that never worked so they ended up being the AI themselves, lmao

I should have anticipated that telework would lead to this.

Olive oil ain't cheap, that's a hell of a deal.

Check your grocery receipt. Every time I used a clerk in the past year, there was an error or errors upwards of 10 bucks. The average error is 10% of the total. Pricing, double scanning a single item inputting the wrong identifying code ...the list is as long as the errors. On 150 worth of groceries, it's substantial. And why does the error ALWAYS amount to more? Statistically, that should be impossible... At self checkout they can fix any error I made without standing at customer service. Why would I EVER believe AI could accurately handle this.

Amazon partnered with quik trip which is a gas station chain and they built a store in downtown Tulsa which has this. It’s funny to think that it’s just a bunch of Indians watching me the whole time

I feel the same way about my GF's , I can find a cheaper one over seas. 😂😂😂

I thought the idea behind the amazon store was to field and test AI tech, test and tech that would be the basis for all future AI tech. What does this mean for current civ and mil AI tech?

So how is this more efficient then just having a cashier?

This was how OCR text recognition worked back in the day. Probably still does.

thanks jeff but we'd rather steal from the self checkout lane..

Exactly why we need people like Nicole Shanahan in high places

A bit like scammers hacking into your webcam..

Was wondering why the Amazon store was asking me NOT TO REEDEEM

It would have been so easy to just walk in and steal stuff.

I live above an Amazon fresh for 3 years and can tell you that nobody ever used those carts

Krystal gets creamy whenever a private company fails, especially a large company like Amazon, because the government is so much better. I implore anyone to visit the DMV of any state or the SSI. You will call the SSI just to get a phone appointment and wait 4 hours just to do that. They call you back 2 weeks later only to do over the phone what you could have done on the Internet, essentially talking to a person filling out a form you could have done yourself 2 weeks ago.

How can you not love Rao's sauce?! Best shelf sauce you can buy.

1 AI = 1k Indians

CALLED IT!!!! I knew that tech wasn't full proof... I didn't think it was this bad

And they want to put autonomous cars on the road

We already have just walk out payment, it's called California.

There will be lots of theft. Why not just walk out with merchandise.

the job description: Remote AI Engineer - must be good with details - 22 years experience - Great Compensation (we scale based on location ;) lol

I don’t believe any great wealth has been made honestly, ethically and morally.

Amazon really did it. They put a fella inside a vending machine. Couldn't get to the moon but this is the next best thing.

What they are killing is Amazon GO, the model that worked without the cart, where you just walked in, grabbed something off the shelf and left. The cart, where you scan stuff into the cart and it shows you what you scanned on the screen and then the cart checks you out on your way out, that still works, and thats what they are moving everything to. All the reporting on this is weak and sensationalized and BP didn't do any better.

So this is how self driving cars work

Inventory was so bad, easy to mess up I was a lead at Amazon Fresh JWO

It’s not just call centers that are being offshored. It’s other remote white collar jobs as well. AI was always overblown but offshoring has been the bain of the American economy for decades.

Wonder if this will show up in California now with $20 minimum fast food wage

If businesses start having remote store workers- I’m going to destroy the camera and TV.

How is that even legal?

This is like that Russian robot that was actually just a guy in a suit

You have sales people developing strategy for tech instead of programmers and engineers. Which is why we are seeing these concepts that might seem cool but are impractical or impossible with our current level of technology.

Why am I not surprised.😮.

I thought it was a self serve food bank. Oops.

Outsourcing jobs.

I have a theory that whenever you ask ChatGPT to tell you a joke, it’s routed to a boiler room full of dads.

technosignalling is the term to use here.

This is in tandem with Walmart and Kroger halting production of new self-serve checkouts in favor of human workers because it was easier for people to steal and/or mistakenly enter the wrong products. It's really funny watching the captains of industry faceplant this hard. They all wanna be Tony Stark, but end up being just Daniel Clamp from Gremlins 2.

1,000 Indians getting paid weekly what one American making the federal minimum wage would make in an hour.

Definitely artificially unintelligent then.

AI is just plagiarism

The Netflix Series Silicon Valley Attempted to Tell us.

Saagar, you’ve never had Rao’s? Get on it, well priced at Costco on a 2-pack. Serve with Banza chic pea noodles (best priced from Walmart) and you’ve got a tasty high protein meal man!

A day late and a dollar short. Slow news day.