Amazon stated that the notion of human reviewers watching live shoppers was "completely not true," and that workers in India watch some videos "after the fact" to teach machines, with "way less than 1,000" people helping in "a small percentage of cases".
Curated from axios.com · 17 April 2024 →
Just Walk Out let a shopper take things off a shelf and leave, with the bill arriving later. In April 2024 The Information reported that more than a thousand people, largely in India, were reviewing transactions, and that in 2022 around 700 of every 1,000 sales went through human review. Amazon disputes the framing, and its response is quoted here rather than the report, because on this case the dispute is the substance: nobody argues that people were involved, the argument is about how many and whether they were labelling recordings to train the system or completing the transaction. Amazon removed Just Walk Out from its Fresh grocery stores the same month, replacing it with smart trolleys, while continuing to sell it to third parties. Filed alongside Builder.ai because the shape recurs: what a demonstration shows and what the running system costs are different questions, and only one of them is usually published.
