8 ms·

It's great that they faced essentially no consequences for this. A sure sign that we have a functional and sane market.

dyauspitr 8mo ago
It’s autonomous 80% of the time. That’s significant. Put another way, they only had to hire 1000 people instead of 5000.
- mrguyorama 8mo ago
  It only takes 1 employee to staff 20 self checkouts for comparison. For a full fat grocery store. With zero change or adjustment to the rest of the grocery store. And customers weirdly like self checkouts even when they are a dramatically worse outcome (compared to the highish bar of well trained cashiers)
  - dyauspitr 8mo ago
    What exactly is the point of a well trained cashier, what service do they provide. I guess I appreciate what the bagger does and the cashier knows the codes for the loose vegetables but those are minor benefits in my opinion.
  - octoberfranklin 8mo ago
    We like self-checkout because there's hardly ever a line. An idle self-checkout machine costs the store almost nothing. An idle cashier costs the store wages. So the stores will always skimp on cashiers, leading to lines, wasting my time.
colinplamondon 8mo ago
Why would they face consequences? Every store has video surveillance that can be reviewed. They trusted their tech enough to accept the false-positive rate, then worked to determine / validate their false positive rate with manual review, and iterate their models with the data. From a consumer perspective the point is that you can "just walk out". They delivered that.
- acdha 8mo ago
  If the stock price goes down, I won’t be surprised if there’s a shareholder lawsuit claiming that they misrepresented their level of AI achievement and that lead to this write-off by keeping operating costs and error rates high. The whole business model really assumed that they could undercut competitors by lower staffing.
- Cornbilly 8mo ago
  Their initial advertising claimed near full automation by their "AI" system when, in reality, they had people manually handling around 70% of the transactions. I get that this is a message board for YC, so lying about your company's tech is considered almost a virtue but that is an unreasonably big lie to tell without getting your hand-slapped by some regulatory body or investor backlash.
  - neilc 8mo ago
    I don’t remember Amazon claiming “near-full automation” by AI. They said that you can checkout automatically and that AI/computer vision is somehow involved.
    - EdiX 8mo ago
      If they didn't say it they heavily implied it to the point that journalists were fooled. For example you can read about it in this very quaint 2018 article that went with a woke "it's your fault I'm disfunctionally paranoid" angle: https://www.cnet.com/culture/amazon-go-avoid-discrimination-shopping-commentary/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/amazon-go-avoid-discrimination-.... No one cared what I was doing. Is this what it feels like to shop when you're not black? Turns out people did care what she was doing.
  - colinplamondon 8mo ago
    I think investors like Amazon taking shots like this? It was never a broad roll-out, 43 stores is micro-scale for Amazon. Still, would love to see a breakdown of why it didn't improve. Regardless of the accuracy at launch, I'd think that advances in AI would have been massively to their advantage. I wonder if security degradation hit them hard. The entire system depends on a level of social trust that doesn't exist in American cities today. Similarly, the "Dash Cart" seems like a cheaper and easier way to accomplish the same thing. At the end of the day, there's also a mismatch in the use case. If I'm going to a smaller format store, like they had, I'm not buying a ton of stuff. Self checkout is great, and minimal friction. I'd think that improving the UX of self-checkout gets 80% of the way there with way less fraud, way less theft, and way less technology. Still, I think it's wicked cool they took a big shot. I know someone that worked on the project in the early days. It was always incredibly difficult technology, they were always behind on their accuracy targets, and the solutions were increasingly kludgy as they layered more and more complex systems on top. An honorable failure. A lot of smart people really tried to make it work.
jandrese 8mo ago
What's the crime? If lying about AI capabilities is a crime we have some billionaires in big trouble.
- Cornbilly 8mo ago
  AI is not unique in this regard. We just saw the same thing with the crypto/blockchain nonsense. Regulation lags so far behind that you can get away with bad behavior long enough that, by the time regulation catches up, you can buy your way out of consequences.
- kube-system 8mo ago
  If it's a publicly traded company, everything is securities fraud.
  - jandrese 8mo ago
    Which hardly anybody ever gets prosecuted for.
    - kube-system 8mo ago
      Criminally, no. In a class action? every day.
      - rvnx 8mo ago
        It's common for companies to claim AI: Example: Tesla Cybercab with safety drivers, or Starship Technologies "autonomous" robots, which are remote controlled delivery robots.
        kube-system 8mo ago
        Tech companies are also the most sued for securities fraud. And in fact, Tesla was sued for securities violations by shareholders over the cybercab. https://kehoelawfirm.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Tesla-Class-Action-Complaint.pdf https://kehoelawfirm.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Tesla-Cl... Starship Technologies is a private company.
madeofpalk 8mo ago
Isn't the consequence that that they're shutting the stores down?
swiftcoder 8mo ago
It's also pretty par for the course from Amazon automation initiatives. Like Glacier being marketed as robotic tape drive loaders, where in reality it is mostly just regular old S3 running on the outdated server clusters.

It’s autonomous 80% of the time. That’s significant. Put another way, they only had to hire 1000 people instead of 5000.

mrguyorama 8mo ago
It only takes 1 employee to staff 20 self checkouts for comparison. For a full fat grocery store. With zero change or adjustment to the rest of the grocery store. And customers weirdly like self checkouts even when they are a dramatically worse outcome (compared to the highish bar of well trained cashiers)
- dyauspitr 8mo ago
  What exactly is the point of a well trained cashier, what service do they provide. I guess I appreciate what the bagger does and the cashier knows the codes for the loose vegetables but those are minor benefits in my opinion.
- octoberfranklin 8mo ago
  We like self-checkout because there's hardly ever a line. An idle self-checkout machine costs the store almost nothing. An idle cashier costs the store wages. So the stores will always skimp on cashiers, leading to lines, wasting my time.

colinplamondon 8mo ago

Why would they face consequences? Every store has video surveillance that can be reviewed. They trusted their tech enough to accept the false-positive rate, then worked to determine / validate their false positive rate with manual review, and iterate their models with the data. From a consumer perspective the point is that you can "just walk out". They delivered that.

acdha 8mo ago
If the stock price goes down, I won’t be surprised if there’s a shareholder lawsuit claiming that they misrepresented their level of AI achievement and that lead to this write-off by keeping operating costs and error rates high. The whole business model really assumed that they could undercut competitors by lower staffing.
Cornbilly 8mo ago
Their initial advertising claimed near full automation by their "AI" system when, in reality, they had people manually handling around 70% of the transactions. I get that this is a message board for YC, so lying about your company's tech is considered almost a virtue but that is an unreasonably big lie to tell without getting your hand-slapped by some regulatory body or investor backlash.
- neilc 8mo ago
  I don’t remember Amazon claiming “near-full automation” by AI. They said that you can checkout automatically and that AI/computer vision is somehow involved.
  - EdiX 8mo ago
    If they didn't say it they heavily implied it to the point that journalists were fooled. For example you can read about it in this very quaint 2018 article that went with a woke "it's your fault I'm disfunctionally paranoid" angle: https://www.cnet.com/culture/amazon-go-avoid-discrimination-shopping-commentary/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/amazon-go-avoid-discrimination-.... No one cared what I was doing. Is this what it feels like to shop when you're not black? Turns out people did care what she was doing.
- colinplamondon 8mo ago
  I think investors like Amazon taking shots like this? It was never a broad roll-out, 43 stores is micro-scale for Amazon. Still, would love to see a breakdown of why it didn't improve. Regardless of the accuracy at launch, I'd think that advances in AI would have been massively to their advantage. I wonder if security degradation hit them hard. The entire system depends on a level of social trust that doesn't exist in American cities today. Similarly, the "Dash Cart" seems like a cheaper and easier way to accomplish the same thing. At the end of the day, there's also a mismatch in the use case. If I'm going to a smaller format store, like they had, I'm not buying a ton of stuff. Self checkout is great, and minimal friction. I'd think that improving the UX of self-checkout gets 80% of the way there with way less fraud, way less theft, and way less technology. Still, I think it's wicked cool they took a big shot. I know someone that worked on the project in the early days. It was always incredibly difficult technology, they were always behind on their accuracy targets, and the solutions were increasingly kludgy as they layered more and more complex systems on top. An honorable failure. A lot of smart people really tried to make it work.

jandrese 8mo ago

What's the crime? If lying about AI capabilities is a crime we have some billionaires in big trouble.

Cornbilly 8mo ago
AI is not unique in this regard. We just saw the same thing with the crypto/blockchain nonsense. Regulation lags so far behind that you can get away with bad behavior long enough that, by the time regulation catches up, you can buy your way out of consequences.
kube-system 8mo ago
If it's a publicly traded company, everything is securities fraud.
- jandrese 8mo ago
  Which hardly anybody ever gets prosecuted for.
  - kube-system 8mo ago
    Criminally, no. In a class action? every day.
    - rvnx 8mo ago
      It's common for companies to claim AI: Example: Tesla Cybercab with safety drivers, or Starship Technologies "autonomous" robots, which are remote controlled delivery robots.
      - kube-system 8mo ago
        Tech companies are also the most sued for securities fraud. And in fact, Tesla was sued for securities violations by shareholders over the cybercab. https://kehoelawfirm.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Tesla-Class-Action-Complaint.pdf https://kehoelawfirm.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Tesla-Cl... Starship Technologies is a private company.

madeofpalk 8mo ago

Isn't the consequence that that they're shutting the stores down?

swiftcoder 8mo ago

It's also pretty par for the course from Amazon automation initiatives. Like Glacier being marketed as robotic tape drive loaders, where in reality it is mostly just regular old S3 running on the outdated server clusters.