What’s Behind Headlines About Amazon’s 'Just Walk Out' Feature

We’re at the point in the artificial intelligence hype cycle where online pundits are looking to tear down what they’ve spent much of the past 18 months building up. Exhibit A is the spread this week of a nugget of a story The Information wrote nearly a year ago about the role of human reviewers in India in powering Just Walk Out, Amazon’s grab-and-go checkout technology. How this story has gone viral now is also a telling example of online media’s role in spreading and distorting information.

When we wrote the story last May, generative AI was still relatively new, and the newly released chatbots were still amazing people. Tech companies were happy to play into the AI hype, as in this September 2023 press release where an Amazon executive compared the technology behind Just Walk Out, which includes AI, to “magic.” So when we reported that as of mid-2022, Amazon had more than 1,000 people in India whose jobs included training the Just Walk Out model by labeling images and videos—a common practice in AI—as well as double-checking some transactions, the news mostly got ignored, perhaps reflecting a lack of skepticism regarding any AI-flavored technology at the time. (Amazon disputed the exact number of staffers in India but acknowledged that they do label footage and validate some transactions.)