I worked in the object recognition and computer vision industry for almost a decade. That stuff works. Really well, actually.
But this checkout thing from Amazon always struck me as odd. It’s the same issue as these “take a photo of your fridge and the system will tell you what you can cook”. It doesn’t work well because items can be hidden in the back.
The biggest challenge in computer vision is occlusion, followed by resolution (in the context of surveillance cameras, you’re lucky to get 200x200 for smaller objects). They would have had a really hard, if not impossible, time getting clear shots of everything.
My gut instinct tells me that they had intended to build a huge training set over time using this real-world setup and hope that the sheer amount of training data could help overcome at least some of the issues with occlusion.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 7 months ago
You’re completely missing the point.
It’s portrayed as all AI to get investors, but in reality most of the “human help” end up having to do like 90% of the work.
But the company runs around telling potential investors lies to get money
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 7 months ago
To be fair, the bulk of AI advancements aren’t visible to anyone but the people closest to the code who were doing machine learning / data analysis anyway.
All of the “magic” of it that’s somehow swindling billions out of venture capitalists because it’s going to replace so many people is made up hype garbage. Yeah, it can write the same paragraph on any subject you choose. Hooray. Also, that’s not really helpful unless not giving a shit is part of the communications process.
It’s replacing human scammers, I guess. There’s that.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 7 months ago
It’s not tho…
That’s why Amazon cancels their “just walk out to checkout” program.
They kept saying it was AI, but then eventually admitted they were paying overseas workers to do it via webcam because AI couldn’t do it.
They kept that program going for years before they gave up on it
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Not those scammers, the Nigerian Princes.