Amazon’s Grab-and-Go “AI”: What happens when you look behind the curtain of artificial intelligence?
It’s not often that a news article can make me laugh out loud. At best lately, news can be “funny bad” not “funny haha.” But the story that broke about Amazon shutting down its “just walk out” AI shopping technology made me absolutely crack up.
Not a lot of official news sites are talking about this, but my social media algorithms must think this story is as entertaining as I do.
Some brief context: Amazon had “developed” (the quotes will make sense later) AI technology that enables you to shop in Amazon Fresh stores without having to check out yourself. The idea is that cameras and AI technology watch what you pick up, what you put down, and what you walk out of the store with, and you’ll get charged accordingly.
I saw one video where a couple was able to shop in a remote store in Alaska where there were no employees. They got a charge for their bags of chips about an hour after they left.
Equal parts efficient and dystopian, it’s an interesting way to run a store. Would customers like it? I think that depends on the answer to another question: would customers trust it? Is this technology advanced enough to charge you for what you bought and nothing more?
And the answer to that question turns out to be “kinda.”
The overall system worked well, but the technology behind it… not so much. Which is the reason that Amazon is shutting down this concept.
The duct tape holding it all together was over 1,000 employees in a call-center-like environment in India manually reviewing the footage of customers shopping and inputting what they should be charged for. This was in effort to “train” AI models, but it doesn’t appear that the models made much progress.
This is, honestly, hilarious to me. This shiny new piece of technology, meant to wow investors, rattle the competition, and entice customers, is… people watching you shop and logging what you bought.
But, my smile slowly fades when the next logical question comes up: what else is held together by duct tape? And what are the implications of that?
I don’t know that I can really tackle the implications this has for the economy — who knows how much “value” of the S&P 500 is investors being tricked by smoke and mirrors.
But I can start to tackle the implications this has for the companies themselves. What does it mean for Amazon to showcase a new technology without truly building out its technological backing?
It reminds me of a movie set for an old Western movie. Why build the inside of a building when you just need it for a shot on the outside?
But the problem there is, what if you decide the story does need a shot of the inside of a bank or a general store? Now, you’re completely unprepared, and it’ll take even more effort than if you just built the building “right” the first time.
You either limit yourself or make life way more difficult for yourself down the road.
If Amazon thought of more use cases for this technology, they’d be completely out of luck. They built out a temporary patch, not something that could be scaled or implemented sustainably.
If another company wanted to utilize this technology, Amazon would have no sustainable way to provide it for them, limiting their earning potential.
And, in the event the worst case scenario happens, they have to shut down the whole project and reveal that they weren’t able to provide what they had promised.
This is why it’s so important to peek behind the curtain of the technology we use. Is the software we use held together by a solid infrastructure or duct tape and zip ties?
When technology is built with the future in mind, advancements are so much easier to make. Features become a lot faster to build. Customer service is a lot easier to provide.
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