[Cornbilly]

It's great that they faced essentially no consequences for this. A sure sign that we have a functional and sane market.

[colinplamondon]

Why would they face consequences? Every store has video surveillance that can be reviewed.

They trusted their tech enough to accept the false-positive rate, then worked to determine / validate their false positive rate with manual review, and iterate their models with the data.

From a consumer perspective the point is that you can "just walk out". They delivered that.

[acdha]

If the stock price goes down, I won’t be surprised if there’s a shareholder lawsuit claiming that they misrepresented their level of AI achievement and that lead to this write-off by keeping operating costs and error rates high. The whole business model really assumed that they could undercut competitors by lower staffing.

[Cornbilly]

Their initial advertising claimed near full automation by their "AI" system when, in reality, they had people manually handling around 70% of the transactions.

I get that this is a message board for YC, so lying about your company's tech is considered almost a virtue but that is an unreasonably big lie to tell without getting your hand-slapped by some regulatory body or investor backlash.

[swiftcoder]

It's also pretty par for the course from Amazon automation initiatives. Like Glacier being marketed as robotic tape drive loaders, where in reality it is mostly just regular old S3 running on the outdated server clusters.

[madeofpalk]

Isn't the consequence that that they're shutting the stores down?

[dyauspitr]

It’s autonomous 80% of the time. That’s significant. Put another way, they only had to hire 1000 people instead of 5000.

[mrguyorama]

It only takes 1 employee to staff 20 self checkouts for comparison.

For a full fat grocery store. With zero change or adjustment to the rest of the grocery store. And customers weirdly like self checkouts even when they are a dramatically worse outcome (compared to the highish bar of well trained cashiers)

[jandrese]

What's the crime? If lying about AI capabilities is a crime we have some billionaires in big trouble.

[kube-system]

If it's a publicly traded company, everything is securities fraud.

[Cornbilly]

AI is not unique in this regard. We just saw the same thing with the crypto/blockchain nonsense.

Regulation lags so far behind that you can get away with bad behavior long enough that, by the time regulation catches up, you can buy your way out of consequences.