AI company files for bankruptcy after being exposed as 700 Indian engineers - Dexerto
An ambitious company that claimed to make apps using AI has been exposed as hundreds of human workers based in India.
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.
Feels like it should be illegal to mislead people like that.
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.
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.
Amazon be smokin that meth again.
I worked as an associate for a public accounting firm that does not ever advertise itself, because we specialized serving ultra wealthy individuals and you could only engage us if you knew of us through such circles.
One day, our office got a call from the personal assistant to someone very wealthy who is known for abusing ketamine, asking for an engagement on a very unusual and complex tax situation. A call was set up to discuss the scope of the engagement, because the partners have always been very particular about what clients they will take on, because really wealthy individuals are often very unpleasant, stressful, & frustrating to work with.
Apparently during the call the assistant was patronizing, like we should feel flattered that we were chosen by m'lord, and demanded non-negotiable terms that we would conduct our work exactly as told with no questions asked. They had even sent their own engagement letter for us to sign with them ahead of the call, and it was completely absurd.
The partners patiently explained that is not possible, as that is not how this type of professional relationship works, and declined the engagement.
The assistant was losing their mind, shocked we would turn such an opportunity down. They offered even more money and even some compromise, but the way they initiated the interaction set the tone to expect throughout the professional relationship.
I was very impressed by the partners in the sense that I knew they were incredibly greedy people, but they are so fucking intelligent and had such a great instinct to avoid clients that were going to end up costing way more money than they brought in, because us associates would absolutely refuse to deal with bullshit because it was already a super stressful job, and we were way too talented and incredibly expensive to replace if we walked off.
The self restraint must have been legendary, and exactly the right call, because all the professionals that do end up accepting end up getting embroiled in costly lawsuits and getting thrown under the bus.
Anyway, I hated that job and I wish I that quit sooner than I did. I got such bad burnout, I developed PTSD and now I prefer just living like a hobo rather than go back out there.
PS: Fuck capitalism and fuck Amazon. I refuse to buy anything from them ever again. Cancelled my credit card and told them to go fuck themselves. Fascists.
Sometimes you have a run in with a customer that ain't worth having-- no matter how much money they pay.
And many delivery robots are helped along by a remote worker.
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.
a data center isnt cheap, probably cost billions, a year to operate or millions. plus all the side effects, like power requirement and water waste.
I can run a small model on my home pc, if i had access to those kinds of resources, i could run a AI data centre for profit, probably more rssource efficient than those 700 dudes as well.
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!
Oddly between 5pm and 6am Delhi time.
But all sharing the same keyboard? I need to understand the logistics behind that feat
They wouldn't be able to type fast enough if they weren't using the same keyboard.
Hurry! We need a photoshop of what a Col Sanders action figure would look like.
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.
Let's see them compete with natural stupidity
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/
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.
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.
Next do "self driving cars"
You mean the 40 horsepower is actually 40 Indians under the hood??
Check the trunk for an Indian guy with a street map.
They should have had 701
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.
Plot twist, the future envisioned in the matrix basically does come to pass, except it's not machines turning humans into power, it's the ultra rich turning humans into processing power.
So essentially, wouldn’t that be similar to the Matrix movie? Except without the sea of pillars of bodies lined up and down in a cocoon sludge of goop. Connected by wires to feed off of our energy as a source of elixir. But a basement somewhere where we are jacked into a reality to where we can’t distinguish it between reality and virtual reality. I can definitely see that. The future is crazy for sure and how far we have reached with AI is bloody scary and horrific. Like not itself but in the progression aspect of it.
repair station in enterprise, where the AI maliciously kidnapps humanoid aliens and uses thier brains to power ever increasing cpu
thats the repair station on enterprise, the AI was using kidnapped humanoids brains to power its processing capabilities.
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!
Right that’s what I meant! The Mechanical Turk was a classic/early instance of fake automation.
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.
AI is way older than the public release of ChatGPT. GPT-1, OpenAI's first version of what would become ChatGPT, was released in 2018, for example, and OpenAI itself was founded in 2015, DeepMind was founded 2010, and IBM Watson competed on Jeopardy! in 2011. Furthermore, Alan Turing wrote about a lot of the ideas that are now being used in AI research in the 1940s, fuzzy logic and natural language processing were developed in the 1960s, and so on. This stuff didn't come out of nowhere, you just didn't know about it before ChatGPT.
People have been scamming AI for way longer than 8 years. Eight years ago I had a colleague who used to work for an AI start-up that he said was actually a room full of old ladies.
How they found out https://youtu.be/9EJrwLOH1RE
Indians all the way down
Wearing turtle costumes.
"Sachin! Quick, look up the best way to impress a first date who is vegetarian!"
Goodbye! Onto the next one
Real life Computron!
I don't even know what to say. How can you make jokes when reality already is making them for you? Have we finally entered The Onion Timeline?
RI startup.
So it's just BPO after all.
reminds me of the time when something with Amazon was Indian employees
700 Awesom-os
Anyone remember Cha-Cha?
Charming!
