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Amazon Abandons Grocery Stores Where You Just Walk Out With Stuff After It Turns Out Its "AI" Was Powered by 1,000 Human Contractors (futurism.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 72 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Sounds like the Mechanical Turk which was run by chess players moving the "automaton."

So much of the wow factor of new technologies is just marketing hyperbole.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 7 months ago (2 children)

That's because the writer is trying to make it sound that way to get people to click the headline.

In reality, the 1,000 people were mostly just tagging the videos to help train future iterations of the model. It would have taken way more than only 1,000 people to actually run the technology as a mechanical turk.

Its just poor quality sensationalist journalism.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago

Agree completely, this is how every machine learning system is built! Maybe this one was taking too long, but that's exactly what beta's are meant to prove.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

Source for this claim?

[–] [email protected] 31 points 7 months ago

To be fair, this is a classical strategi in startups called "wizard of Oz prototyping" - it is used to test if there is a market for something before the tech is ready. But the tech is supposed to be created soon after and actually work...

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

The article states they're replacing the original overhead camera concept with cameras embedded in the shopping carts, so the idea is not going away.