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by davidst 141 days ago
The first iteration of the tech reached the accuracy needed to support just-walk-out for a small-format store. It did achieve that goal. I left the project before it went further.

I imagined, at the time, future goals would be to scale store size and product variety while reducing the cost of the technology, but I have no insight into how that progressed. I am sorry to learn it's been shut down.
1 comments
BoredPositron 141 days ago
But they started to have more clerks at the stores 2-3 weeks after launch and they were still present when I last visited one.
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burningChrome 141 days ago
This was one of the issues that killed it. They continually missed goals of reducing human involvement.

Training is part of any AI project, but it sounds like Amazon wasn’t making much progress, even after years of working on the project. “As of mid-2022, Just Walk Out required about 700 human reviews per 1,000 sales, far above an internal target of reducing the number of reviews to between 20 and 50 per 1,000 sales,” the report said.

The report said Amazon’s team “repeatedly missed goals” to cut down on human reviews, and “the reliance on backup humans explains in part why it can take hours for customers to receive receipts.”

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/amazon-ends-ai-power...

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davidst 141 days ago
Scaling from a small-format store with limited item selection (where the tech worked well) to a large grocery format would come with many challenges. A previous comment touches on a couple of them:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46793253

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davidst 141 days ago
I don't know how the store clerk staffing changed over time but they were not directly involved with the underlying tech (that is, clerks did not annotate data.) Stores had to comply with state laws for certain kinds of items (e.g., a live person must verify ID and age for alcohol) so the store automation had the ability to summon a clerk when needed. And there were the usual things all stores must do: restocking, cleaning, safety, and customer relations. I expected customer relations to decrease over time as people became accustomed to the just-walk-out shopping experience.
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