Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like this article isn't being completely honest with us.

The article is phrasing in a way as if Amazon has given up on the technology altogether, but then the article talks about how they are moving directions to be still based off the camera model just using a closer up cart style camera instead of a camera everywhere Style

These smart carts are equipped with scales and sensors to track spending in real time and, of course, allow consumers to skip the checkout.

This sounds less of a walking out on the technology as a whole as the title implies, and more geared towards we have a better technology available. I think this is either disingenuous reporting or are trying to gear it in a way that makes it look like Amazon is being pro privacy when in reality the same exact system is going to be in place, it's just the camera is going to be part of the cart instead of cross the entire store, which has proven to be a large bottleneck for them and getting other retailers adopting it due to the high ceiling requirement

This of course is ignoring what other commenters have stated about the fact that this is literally how training models work, you tell it what to look for and then eventually you have a large enough training set to be able to have it do it on its own. It's not as if those 1,000 people are ringing out the groceries, they are more so assisting the technology by marking what is a product versus what is not a product, a process which that they have already downsized a few times from their initial Staffing requirements