Last month, Amazon announced it was removing its no-checkout technology, called Just Walk Out, from Amazon Fresh grocery stores.
An Amazon Go store in Whittier, Calif., featuring “Just Walk Out” technology.
An Amazon Go store in Whittier, Calif., featuring “Just Walk Out” technology.
Like Waymo, Amazon was bullish about its technology in 2018. That year, Bloomberg reported that Amazon was planning to open 3,000 Amazon Go convenience stores based on Just Walk Out technology.
But that never happened, and reporting from The Information’s Theo Wayt helps to explain why. Wayt reported last year that Amazon’s technology—like Waymo’s—wasn’t fully automated. Amazon had more than 1,000 workers in India manually verifying customer selections. Wayt says that in mid-2022, “Just Walk Out required about 700 human reviews per 1,000 sales.”
Amazon aimed to reduce this figure to 20 to 50 human reviews per 1,000 items, but the company “repeatedly missed” its performance targets.
Could Waymo have a similar problem? I don’t know, and unsurprisingly, Waymo declined to comment about the frequency of remote interventions.
My best guess is that this will not be a serious issue for Waymo. During the rides I took in March, Waymo’s vehicles drove smoothly and confidently. If they were constantly seeking remote guidance, I would have expected more hesitation and erratic driving.
Waymo also—finally—seems to be expanding fairly rapidly. Earlier this month, the company announced it was serving 50,000 trips a week, up from 10,000 weekly trips nine months earlier. It seems unlikely that Waymo would grow that quickly unless management was confident they had a clear path to profitability.
Regardless, I don’t think Tesla has discovered a better way to approach the problem. Large, complex neural networks tend to be good at some things but not as good at others. Yet the AI system that controls a two-ton vehicle needs to be very reliable all the time. For the next few years, at least, that will only be possible with human backup.
Tim Lee was on staff at Ars from 2017 to 2021. Last year, he launched a new newsletter, Understanding AI, that explores how AI works and how it’s changing our world. You can subscribe here.
