That’s basically what happens right now. Remember Amazon’s smart grocery store? It was just people in India watching cameras. Computer vision wasn’t capable of it.
Makes me wonder how much of Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” is just some dude playing GTA VR with you in the passenger seat.
Have you seen humans drive? Now imagine them driving with significant visual and steering input latency, distorted wide angle cameras, and the lack of steering and acceleration feedback. Unless they are used to sim racing, I bet most people would drive worse than Tesla’s FSD if done remotely.
Well, I think the self driving taxis across the us apparently need human interaction every 6 minutes on average… So are they self driving? I don’t know.
We can’t use our phones and drive, but someone can have a screen and drive 6 cars at the same time…
I’m pretty sure this story was blown out of proportion and exaggerated. These people were training and validating the automated systems not watching the cameras 24/7.
That’s how AI is trained, manual intervention. It wasn’t working as well as they hoped, but it wasn’t humans watching cameras in real time.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/17/24133029/amazon-just-walk-out-cashierless-ai-india
It sounds like the best way to bootstrap a machine learning system. You generate the data the system will be seeing in production along with the proper labels. Then in a later stage you can start doing reinforcement learning.
The problem is the lying about it.
I honestly don’t see an issue with it. These robots aren’t for sale, there’s no estimated sale date, nor are they likely in production in any meaningful sense. Yes, he gave a price range, but that’s obviously aspirational and not confirmed seeing as there’s no expected release date whatsoever.
From the video I watched, it seemed obvious the robots were limited to a handful of interactions, such as:
- hand gift bag to person - it certainly seemed to go through a certain routine each time, but the person seemed to be able to point at the one they want
- rock paper scissors
- fill and hand drink to someone (didn’t see it in the video)
- dance according to some choreography
There certainly seemed to be some AI happening (i.e. detect which bag, let go of gift, etc), but it seemed like a very on-rails experience.
And I got that from watching it live, not looking at someone dissect what was going on. Having a handler there to push the robot into one of a handful of pre-programmed routines seems absolutely reasonable.
That’s not true at all. I personally know a person who worked on that technology.
Human beings got involved only when necessary. Do you really think Amazon wants to pay humans to be cashiers?
Do you really think Amazon wants to pay humans to be cashiers?
No but if they spend a bunch of money and time designing it, spend a bunch of time and money retrofitting stores, and then a bunch of time and money marketing it and the technology doesn’t actually work when it’s ‘showtime,’ I can easily see a company with deep pockets like Amazon faking it all by hiring dirt cheap labor to make it seem like it works rather than the alternative.
But the technology does actually work.
You don’t come up with an idea, announce it to the world, and then start figuring out how to implement it.
