Comment by shmatt

2 years ago

Recode has learned that Amazon has staff on call behind the scenes to assist the computer vision system that is supposed to detect which items a shopper pulls off a shelf and carries out of the store.

An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the setup and said that Amazon staff is asked to help out when the system used in the new Amazon Go store can’t make a determination

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2017/1/6/14189880/amazon-go...

I work in the industry and the 100% success rate touted by these companies just doesn’t exist in live in person real time inferencing. We will get there one day, but in many cases “magical” computer vision AI has humans verifying and changing AI outputs

Imagine Amazon was flexing the stores being fully automated before “Track Everything Everywhere All At Once” was written

6 comments

shmatt

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pradn  2 years ago

This seems fine though? The postal office has workers who decipher the vanishingly small percent of mail automated systems can’t figure out.

  • grandmczeb  2 years ago

    It would be an issue if they were lying about how often humans were needed, but as far as I can tell they’ve never claimed anything like the “100% success rate” stated in the OP’s post.

    • pradn  2 years ago

      I do wonder why people automatically assume "AI" is "100% AI"?

      Maybe we need to acclimatize. We all know when a company claims their soda is the tastiest or that their cars will make you cool, it's marketing fluff. Or that packaged food has to have some amount of preservatives. We should just assume that "AI" means "AI system", one that involves humans for software maintenance, taking care of edge-cases, and providing training inputs.

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