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You mean to tell me this AI company was actually 700 Indian engineers in a trenchcoat?
Actually Indians is the best type of AI
Used to be thousands of if-statements in a trench coat. But even that got offshored 😮💨
They were doing a business.
Isn't this exactly what was exposed at the Amazon "Just Walk Out" stores? Turns out all the cameras and sensors weren't good enough, so they paid thousands of people in India to watch videos and correct checkouts. They basically just outsourced the position of cashier, while pretending it was all done automatically!
https://gizmodo.com/amazon-reportedly-ditches-just-walk-out-grocery-stores-1851381116
Peoole aren’t appreciating just how bad these things are because they’re misinterpreting it. The goal of what they are doing here and with Amazon was never to just fake the technology right. The goal was to fake that the technology existed by using humans to do an automated thing and then to leverage that into making it actually automated.
But essentially what that means is theyre inventing technology that hasn’t been invented yet and selling it to you and the reason for doing so is to replace you with technology before it can even technically happen.
It’s essentially like someone building a new automated factory and telling workers at their other locations that they can’t be hired there since it’s automated but then someone goes inside and finds out they’re just using child laborers until the robots are ready and also robots haven’t been invented yet.
They’re using blood to grease wheels that don’t even exist to turn yet.
On the other hand, the only way to get good training data is to generate data indistinguishable from the real-world scenario and then have humans mark it up the way you want the system to do it. You might as well have the data actually be from the real world and recoup some of the costs with sales.
Sure, but you still shouldn't be selling the technology as actually working, instead of developing.
Amazon bought whole foods a while back. What would have stopped them from just collecting the data in their own stores, and then developed the tech?
Hint: shareholder value.
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Yes, it's the exact same practice.
The main difference, though, is that Amazon as a company doesn't rely on this "just walk out" business in a capacity that is relevant to the overall financial situation of the company. So Amazon churns along, while that one insignificant business unit gets quietly shut down.
For this company in this post, though, they don't have a trillion dollar business subsidizing the losses from this AI scheme.
JWO hasn't shut down. The system got polished enough for them to sell it to other companies, so they don't need their own test-platform locations anymore.
JWO and similar systems do not reduce labor. The people working cashier become customer service attendants. These systems are valuable when the issue is throughput and sales are being lost at peak times. Airport convenience stores and stadium concession stands, for example, can get significantly higher revenue for the same footprint.
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Gets "AI"
looks inside
Badly paid employees
"Actually Indians".
What’s next? Am I going to find out my AI girlfriend is actually a real woman? Smh my head, can’t trust anything these days
No, it is a teenage boy from Mombasa.
I....nvm
Ahh yes, the mechanical indian
The Indian Turk or short IT-worker.
First to push forward and invented AAI, Artificial Artificial Intelligence.
Let's see them compete with natural stupidity
Next I'm going to find out ChatGPT is 700 thousand Indians typing really fast.
That would explain why it sometimes gets sluggish!
It would save electricity
Oddly between 5pm and 6am Delhi time.
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AI: always Indian
Actually Indian
All Indian
Another Indian
I wonder if they produced better results than an AI would
Probably. A startup flush with cash could probably afford to hire good talent.
The post-modern version of "three kids in a trenchcoat."
I'm being increasingly convinced that when we do develop true AI, it'll actually be just a massive array of interconnected human brains in a secret facility somewhere.
Someday, that's what we'll be sold as "The Singularity". Some company like Apple or Google will offer us ascendance into the cloud, but we'll actually just become digital slave labor.
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in a trench coat
They should have had 701
I hope this isn't part of a larger trend of human labor being devalued because companies pretend it's just machine labor. I hope that's literally impossible.
A lot of companies have been doing this for years. AWS literally sells this as a service: https://www.mturk.com/
Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth
Who names this shit? I want to have a serious talk with their mother.
Weird headline. I know they mean “exposed as another mechanical turk ‘AI’ company” but headline appears to imply simply having Indian engineers was the problem.
Edit: added explanatory link to the technical term to clarify
Their Turks were actually Indians. They were deceiving their investors!
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It says it's been doing this for 8 years. So, since AI hasn't even been around that long, does that mean they were always like this and just lied that they switched over to AI? I wonder if they just encouraged the current employees to field the response and then they would run it through another AI to provide answers. Either way there had to be some delay which I feel would have been the dead giveaway?
Using machine learning including neuronal networks, generative AI based off of neuronal networks and so on exist well longer than since the past few years.
"DeepDream" was released as a software ten years ago. Research into LLMs exists since at least the 90s.
"AI" also has been a hype term in many industries since a decade, just that it reached the general public with the ChatGPT hype.
Crazy that 700 professionals in india is cheaper than a compute/data centre.
700 professionals in India probably make more coherent software than AI.
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this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2025
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