This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
reminds me of the time when something with Amazon was Indian employees
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 😮💨
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.
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.
I built some of the components that went in to the test locations. Amazon had absurdly tight tolerances for the parts they were buying. They effectively wanted a shelf that was also a scale, and the tolerances they demanded weren't really necessary. So it was an insane expense but they paid it and wouldn't hear otherwise.
My company also made most of the lockers they're using in places like Whole Foods, and Amazon insisted on controlling the entire design process themselves. They sent us prints, we made parts. They made it very clear that that was the relationship they wanted, so we complied. No test runs, THAT would be too expensive. Let's just make ten thousand parts and put them together.
I would like to be very clear that in an industrial setting, this is unusual. You need something specific, you call a company that makes things like it and see if they can make what you need. You have a conversation about what you need it for and how many you want. The relationship is personal, you get to know the people around the region that you need stuff from.
Amazon swooping in with a heavy purse and a list of demands is weird, when someone kicks in your door with a stack of prints and enough money to keep the entire plant in overtime all year, it's hard to say no to that.
So the first batch of prints they send is wrong. Parts do not line up right and the doors don't even fit. We didn't discover this until 70% of the components had already been painted.
Second batch they assure us addresses the problem, we need to start over.
My friends, it did not address the problem. Half the changes they needed to make they didn't. The doors still did not fit.
3rd try, we lied and said we needed some extra time because a different client had elbowed in with a large order while they were redesigning. We had an intern recreate every print in CAD and test fit it, we ran a single batch of test pieces to assemble one row of lockers and as we were doing that they sent a revision.
They finally got their lockers, and asked for basically book dividers but insisted again on insanely tight tolerances.
After the dividers went out we stopped taking their calls.
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
Ahh yes, the mechanical indian
The Indian Turk or short IT-worker.
Crazy that 700 professionals in india is cheaper than a compute/data centre.
700 professionals in India probably make more coherent software than AI.
Next I'm going to find out ChatGPT is 700 thousand Indians typing really fast.
It would save electricity
That would explain why it sometimes gets sluggish!
What do you mean the new llm I invested in is just 700 Indians in a trench coat?!
First to push forward and invented AAI, Artificial Artificial Intelligence.
in a trench coat
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.
I wonder if they produced better results than an AI would
Probably. A startup flush with cash could probably afford to hire good talent.
"Welcome back to tonight's episode of "Is it AI or 700 Indian Engineers!!" 👏🏾👏🏾 👏🏾
I'm picturing a room of people with protractors ray tracing Doom.
On the internet no one knows you are 700 Indian engineers.
They should have had 701
Next do "self driving cars"
You mean the 40 horsepower is actually 40 Indians under the hood??
but it turns out all that cash was going toward a workforce of over 700 Indian engineers, rather than an AI.
I doubt much of that cash was going to their workforce. Should have though.
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.
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
The post-modern version of "three kids in a trenchcoat."
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.
