this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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Is the future just having a human slave in a third world country strap into VR and carry your groceries for you?
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.
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:
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.