this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2025
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[–] Kusarihime@lemmy.blahaj.zone 236 points 3 days ago (3 children)

You mean to tell me this AI company was actually 700 Indian engineers in a trenchcoat?

[–] vodka@lemm.ee 116 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Actually Indians is the best type of AI

[–] taladar@sh.itjust.works 59 points 3 days ago (1 children)
[–] JPAKx4@lemmy.blahaj.zone 69 points 3 days ago (3 children)
[–] FourWaveforms@lemm.ee 10 points 3 days ago

When Tesler introduced their "AI" robots a few months ago in a meet-and-greet, someone said AI stood for "Another Indian."

They spoke like social media managers, and it seemed to me like they were being remotely operated, so there's a fair possibility that person was accidentally right.

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[–] meme_historian@lemmy.dbzer0.com 36 points 3 days ago

Used to be thousands of if-statements in a trench coat. But even that got offshored 😮‍💨

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[–] Empricorn@feddit.nl 192 points 3 days ago (4 children)

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

[–] CleoTheWizard@lemmy.world 104 points 3 days ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 15 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] SippyCup@feddit.nl 11 points 2 days ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] GenosseFlosse@feddit.org 120 points 3 days ago (6 children)

AI stands for "actually indians"?

Always Infosys

[–] Batman@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm waiting for "generalized" actually Indians

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[–] Lenny@lemmy.zip 98 points 3 days ago (4 children)

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

[–] als@lemmy.blahaj.zone 96 points 3 days ago (1 children)
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[–] Armand1@lemmy.world 94 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Gets "AI"

looks inside

Badly paid employees

[–] ohwhatfollyisman@lemmy.world 13 points 3 days ago

"Actually Indians".

[–] RaptorBenn@lemmy.world 64 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Crazy that 700 professionals in india is cheaper than a compute/data centre.

[–] milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee 68 points 3 days ago (6 children)

700 professionals in India probably make more coherent software than AI.

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[–] tartarin@lemm.ee 55 points 3 days ago (1 children)

First to push forward and invented AAI, Artificial Artificial Intelligence.

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[–] fritobugger2017@lemmy.world 51 points 3 days ago

in a trench coat

[–] SouthFresh@lemmy.world 48 points 3 days ago
[–] WolframViper@lemmy.org 43 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] normalexit@lemmy.world 42 points 3 days ago (2 children)

A lot of companies have been doing this for years. AWS literally sells this as a service: https://www.mturk.com/

[–] Lemminary@lemmy.world 29 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth

Who names this shit? I want to have a serious talk with their mother.

[–] Mia@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 3 days ago (5 children)

Amazon web services are incomprehensible. The names aren't good either

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[–] TempermentalAnomaly@lemmy.world 37 points 2 days ago (1 children)

"Welcome back to tonight's episode of "Is it AI or 700 Indian Engineers!!" 👏🏾👏🏾 👏🏾

[–] fyzzlefry@retrolemmy.com 13 points 2 days ago

I'm picturing a room of people with protractors ray tracing Doom.

[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 34 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I wonder if they produced better results than an AI would

[–] Tangent5280@lemmy.world 17 points 3 days ago

Probably. A startup flush with cash could probably afford to hire good talent.

[–] Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 32 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] CatsGoMOW@lemmy.world 40 points 3 days ago (2 children)
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[–] SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 26 points 2 days ago

On the internet no one knows you are 700 Indian engineers.

[–] 10001110101@lemm.ee 23 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] RacerX@lemm.ee 23 points 3 days ago

They should have had 701

[–] mxc@programming.dev 22 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Next do "self driving cars"

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 11 points 2 days ago

You mean the 40 horsepower is actually 40 Indians under the hood??

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[–] Chefdano3@lemm.ee 20 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (9 children)

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.

[–] sevan@lemmy.ca 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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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[–] Septimaeus@infosec.pub 18 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

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

[–] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Their Turks were actually Indians. They were deceiving their investors!

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[–] latenightnoir@lemmy.blahaj.zone 17 points 3 days ago

The post-modern version of "three kids in a trenchcoat."

[–] HeyJoe@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago (3 children)

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?

[–] Saleh@feddit.org 20 points 3 days ago

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.

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[–] Kaput@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago
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