Yeah except with there being only 27 stores in the US that use this tech if you have 1000 people reviewing the purchases is it really a machine learning system or are you just outsourcing the process to people in another country.
You still have to keep training the Model. These stores were in large busy markets, and having people watch and critique the AI is how they continually train the model. It took Apple over 8 years to 'announce' they're doing on device voice recognition(they probably aren't), and that was just voice recognition and LLM training vs image recognition which is hard on its own. Let alone tracking a person THROUGH a store, recognizing that someone picked something up and took it vs put it back or left it on another row.
The real reason this probably happened is because those 1000 people training the model reported metrics of failures on top of the stores showing losses due to error. The margin of error was probably greater than they wanted. Or add in the biometric data they had integrated into it adding more layers of cost and privacy protection...it probably just doesn't return the money they wanted and they'll try again in a few years probably utilizing more RFID on top of the image recognition and people tracking.
Its not about automation; its about making labor fungible, kinda like the garmet industry-local workers rights happen, call center instantly relocates.
This is the globalization you get while jacking off with the monkey paw.
They've surely started working on it already. Current "AI" (LLMs) aren't perfect. They require constant human adjustments.
I'm an auditor for a "machine learning" algorithm's work, and it develops new incorrect processes faster than it corrects them. This is because corrections require intervention, which involves a whole chain of humans, whereas learning new mistakes can happen seemingly spontaneously. The premise of machine learning is that it changes over time, but it has no idea which changes were good until it gets feedback.
So, to answer your question, I'm sure they're throwing a ton of money at that. But when will it be viable, if ever?
I watched this sketch comedy show in Iceland as a kid, where every week they had a section called "the men behind the curtains". It was just people hidden away inside ATMs, vending machines etc. pretending it was a machine doing the work.
I remember trying MTurk out back in the day to try and make money on the side. It's such a mind numbing activity. Doesn't surprise me that this is still the model for smart "automated" systems like this.
